Customer Reviews

Celebration: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a fan of Harry Crews since first reading "The Gypsy's Curse" about 25 years ago. His novels are populated by grotesques; and his story lines are often comic, sometimes bizarre. However, he writes with gritty realism. His characters are intensely credible, human and sympathetic. Some are even appealing. This is what I've come to appreciate about his writing.
"Celebration" is different. I don't mean that it's bad. It's just not what I'm looking for when I pick up a Harry Crews book. A beautiful young woman moves into a trailer park full of old people who have little else to do but wait to die. She works, rather obscurely and mystically, to open up these people to what she calls "the chance of ultimate possibility". (I must say, however, that some of her methods are entertaining.) Many of the characters and their conduct are rather surreal. I had a hard time understanding them, let alone relating to them. This novel, particulary its "surprise" ending, owes more to the horror-fantasy writing of Clive Barker than to the hardcore southern grit tradition that Crews usually represents so well.

While not the best Crews book i have read, and not the book i would recommend to a first time Crews reader, this still is a winner. You can just tell that Crews is feeling his age getting to him, which makes this seem more heart-felt. Yes, it is slightly more ridiculous than usual, but it is more of the same pained bizarre cruelty that stabs at the heart of human nature. So far, Crews is the person who has been able to capture that better than anyone else.

As someone else noted, this probably isn't the best introduction to Crews' work for the uninitiated and the faint of heart. But for hardcore Crews readers and others who can look the human beast in the face without flinching, this is some of his best work, and indeed some of the best work being done in contemporary fiction.

If you need the status quo definition of Justice and Beauty to get to sleep at night, don't read this book. But if you can't turn away from the dark spectacle of the raw human heart, this is for you.

Along with Feast of Snakes, Celebration is why I love Harry Crews. It's powerful, mythic and rings true to modern Southern characters from bad backgrounds. Celebrations turns a trailerpark into the most fascinating novel setting I've encountered in years.

I've savored and passed around every Crews novel in print, but I had to force myself to finish this one. If you've never read a Harry Crews novel, don't start with Celebration. Skip it and pick up Scar Lover, Feast of Snakes or Knockout Artist and see the strange genius of Crews at its finest. His brilliance is in the way he touches deeply into the lives of disturbed outcasts and makes you laugh out loud and fall in love with all of them.

Celebration has the cast of outrageous characters that I love about Crews's novels, but here they just seem ridiculous and silly with none of Crews's previous characters' charm and wit.

The jacket art, depicting the gorgeous 18 year old Too Much, is the best thing about this book. Too bad Crews can't convince us that such a creature exists, even in Forever and Forever, a Florida trailer park for eccentrics at the end of their miserable lives.

Too Much shares a trailer and a giant bath tub with Stump, the elderly owner of the park whose missing hand and resulting nub is the main reason she's with him. "Had it been possible, she would have taken him inside her all the way to the shoulder." If you think the names of these characters are hard to swallow, you have an idea of how much disbelief you will have to suspend to get this one down. It's as if Crews had his students write this one as a class project.

This tortured soul has been one of my favorite writers since I first read him twenty-five years ago. And I must admit that CELEBRATION contains some of the fascinating elements that drew me to his other works. The biggest problem here is that the story is too far over the top. Furthermore, the characters tend to be fantastic rather than fiercely real, as we've come to expect from this writer. Nevertheless, the book is filled with shimmering passages of prose that are reminiscent of earlier work and is a far cry better than the disastrous MULCHING OF AMERICA.

I deeply appreciated one of Crews' other books, The Knockout Artist. I have continued reading Crews' books, hoping that he's written other masterpieces. So far, I haven't found one. I wouldn't recommend A Feast of Snakes: A Novel, and, while "Celebration" was a bit better, it still let me down.

In general, I have a problem with what one reviewer calls Crews' "gritty realism." Even in Crews' book "A Knockout Artist," I often found the storyline too crass, rude, barbaric, and gritty for my taste. Still, so much of that book was great, and it wouldn't have been as good if the world it described hadn't been as twisted and intense. In "Celebration," there aren't nearly as many great moments, and I was left feeling put off by its grittiness. In particular, the way Crews deals with sex in "Celebration" is disturbing, twisted, and sometimes disgusting. Again, this wouldn't bother me so much if the rest of the book were better.

Now, that said, there are some great moments and themes in this book. I love the interplay between feeling old and feeling young, and the plotline - a young woman introducing celebration to the elderly at a trailer park - is ripe for some powerful stuff. And, in contrast to some other reviews I've read, I loved how ridiculous/surreal the story and characters sometimes were. The world described by the book needs to be larger than life for the book to work as well as it does.

I also love that this book could give me nightmares! I had a rather vicious dream about the Old Ones with their chomping mouths! (You'll see what I mean if you read this book).

So I'll keep reading Crews, and I'll probably continue to gripe about the grit, until I find another of his books as good as "The Knockout Artist."

We chose this for our book club. It was universally disliked, which was a record for us. Really poor work from this normally good author.

Don't pay any attention to the other reviewers, this is a Gawd-Almighty masterpiece, the book Crews was born to write. Besides that, Too Much is real, I know a woman just like her, and I do live in Florida.
If you like your Florida literature serious and literary, yet hilarious, or if you'd ever wondered what would happen if Flannery O'Connor dropped acid, read Celebration!

As the author of an outrageously funny satire entitled "The Misadventures of Sister Mary Olga Fortitude," I especially appreciated this zany satire. Harry Crews is a gifted author with a bent for dark as well as outrageous humor. His characters are outlandish as are mine. I loved every minute of this book.

This is a story of a group of human souls who are trapped in a trailer park. They are basically waiting to die. Then along comes a beautiful and delightfully vibrant spirit named Too Much who wakes them up to the fact that they can indeed enjoy life.

If you want to take a walk on the wild side of life and get a healthy dose of laughs along the way, this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You will too.

Davis Aujourd'hui, author of "The Misadventures of Sister Mary Olga Fortitude"