Customer Reviews

Burning Babies

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We keep hearing that people don't read. Certainly the average person doesn't read literary fiction. What if it turned out that this was the fault of literary fiction? Because when certain rare writers come along, suddenly LOTS of people want to read.

Kerouac, Bukowski, and in fact Hemingway before them, were writers who spoke clearly, with unpretentious vocabularies and with no interest in mannerism or fog. And they created readerships that vastly transcend the group of five thousand, or however many it is, who still read good books as a hobby. These writers also continue to change lives and perceptions on a mass basis.

Noah Cicero, with this book and with his previous novel "The Human War," is speaking in the language of poor people, the people who "don't read," people in crummy towns sitting in strip clubs and laundromats, people who deliver pizzas for a living, people who aren't cool, don't remotely think of being cool, and don't read books in order to become cool. Potentially almost anybody could read and understand these books. And yet this isn't because his prose is simplified, but because he describes the world as it actually is, without using the language of concealment. We recognize what he's talking about. And we also notice that nobody else writes like this.

He is actually more ambitious than most literary writers, because he seems to want to revolutionize the way people perceive the world. He does this by just telling the truth. This is rare, as it turns out. His brutally funny, direct descriptions of how life is really lived in Youngstown, Ohio constitute a kind of benchmark for the reader, and for other writers. Are literary writers accustomed to telling the truth, or are they more interested in impressing people? Noah Cicero talks about the details and contradictions of American life here, and if not for the fact that it's funny as hell, it would be almost too painful to take. After reading him, other writing seems flowery, indirect, and inadequate to the job of describing how life really works.

I've read interviews with this author in which he says that the downfall of literature is that it's getting pushed out by movies and television. I agree and I think the reason is that it takes too damn long to read a book. This one is different though. Like a movie, it takes about two hours to finish. Similarly, you'll want to make sure you have the full two hours at your disposal, because once you start it, you'll not want to quit until it stops. The undie press site calls it a novel I think, but it really isn't one. It's more a collection of random scenes, ranging from darkly funny to moderately disturbing to outright grotesque. Like a well-made film, though, it somehow manages to be always entertaining. Don't think that it's going to read like a script just because I'm comparing it to film; the comparison is solely based on the amount of time it takes to enjoy. It reads like it was ranted into a mini-tape recorder at 4 in the morning. Because it is written in such a fast voice, a raving panic attack, you feel like you need to read it that fast The sentences are short, and there's usually only one per paragraph so the book looks almost like poetry--poetry that's been gutted and hung out to dry--or maybe it's the guts that were cut out, I don't know. But it kicks ass.