Customer Reviews

Chum

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You will want to take a shower after reading Chum, and you might even need a support group. Roughly based on a play by Celine, author of Death on the Installment Plan, Chum drags us laughing through the lust, murder, and rape that the inhabitants of a small fishing village in the Bering Sea call recreation. Spitzer is a shockingly good student of human nature, and maybe that's why he can make us laugh at this stuff. Not haw haw academic "how clever" laughter. I mean really laugh as he spins his tale in the language of nasty porno and exploitation movies. Spitzer writes in American. Be afraid.

Mark Spitzer is genius. Chum's message is deep and hidden under a steaming pile of bile and goo; and he forces you to dig through it to find it. This is the most skillful writing of any author living. Kudos Mr. Spitzer, my chum, my chummy chummy chum.

The reviews and comments I had read about Mark Spitzer's novel CHUM intrigued me -- so I thought I would check it out. I was sorely disappointed in this book. The only character for whom I felt even mild, brief sympathetic feelings was the nun who appeared on one or two pages. Everyone else in this story is completely dispicable. The 'warning' on the inner jacket flap about the story being 'sex-obsessed, scatological, deeply offensive, violent...(&c)' is pretty accurate. The overall effect was like reading the toilet-seat fantasies of some adolescent...

I thought Spitzer's writing was skillful -- it just amazes me that he chose to focus his talents on such drivel. The quotes on the back comparing the novel to Melville (calling CHUM 'the Moby Dick of the millenium') and the work of Tom Robbins, and offering poshumous (always a safe gift) approval from the likes of Kafka, Kierkegaard and Ingmar Bergman were ludicrous at best.

The violence and degradation of women depicted in this book reminds me of nothing less than some of the more depraved 'underground' comics of the 1960s. What humor I found within its pages was not enough to redeem it. Sorry to be so negative, but that's how I feel.

For a vibrant, imaginative -- and by no means 'tame' -- story in a similar vein, check out Mark Richard's marvelous novel FISHBOY. It burns with the surreal qualities that I think Spitzer was shooting for (perhaps an unfortunate choice of words) in this book, and it's not nearly so morally reprehensible.