The Conviction & Subsequent Life of Savior Neck [Paperback]

Christian TeBordo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2005

Answers for the final time the following age-old questions : 1. why do small town cops bungle a murder investigation with evidence in abundance? 2. what is the relation of the author to the protagonist and why must we even ask this silly question? 3. what are the names and associations of the river that flows through the center of small town america with such polluted grace?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Death is a long series of disappointments," reflects the protagonist in this airless meta-noir debut. The first disappointment is that death smells like "withered flowers doused in gasoline" and the second is that death may not be real. Someone seems to be dead, though, and it's probably Savior Neck. In the crumbling mill town of Discord, N.Y., the dead (or not dead) Neck is arrested, keeps getting knocked out or poisoned and apparently changes size from time to time. He encounters a host of punnishly named characters like Fred Herring, Grace X. Machina and Harold Esquire, Esq., all of whom are wrapped up in a warped noir thriller. The novel walks an unsteady line between fantasy and reality, while also veering erratically in perspective from first to second to third person. Like Carter Scholz or George Saunders, TeBordo mines absurdist territory, but murky writing ("an overcast sky rested atop the building") and metaliterary babble ("Savior Neck was dreaming a little dream of me. Well, I was there. But then, so was everyone else, everyone else who was in on it") exhaust the reader's patience, and possibly that of the characters as well. As the narrator puts it, "I'm so tired of this that I can hardly manage the poetry; I can hardly bring myself to pretend to care while pretending not to care."
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About the Author

Christian TeBordo was born in Cohoes, New York. He earned a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Syracuse University where he was a fellow in creative writing. His fiction has appeared in 3RD BED, Reinventing the World, and 9th Letter. He and his wife Kathryn, a choreographer, live in Philadelphia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (June 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972066284
• ISBN-13: 978-0972066280
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,519,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Absurdist Morality Play, August 10, 2006

By 

TylerBaber - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Conviction & Subsequent Life of Savior Neck (Paperback)

The start of this first novel from Albany native and Philadelphia resident reads like a creative writing experiment: deliberate, subversive, and self-contained. "A boy awakes to the smell of death, and for a moment it is his own." After the prologue casts its hook the reader is jerked into the murky, polluted water of the city of Discord and its allegorical, punnishingly named characters like Richie Repetition, Grace X. Machina, and the titular protagonist Savior Neck. Neck stumbles through an absurd philosophical noir from point a to point b and back, getting drunk high or lost along the way. Meanwhile the narrator jumps from a casually lucid, self-referencing third person to a heavily involved character of disreputable origin. Tebordo's sardonic fable about the temporality of life, and the ease with which one can stop living while remaining alive, is never subtle and more than occasionally caustic. The narrator denies the existence of fate while characters are moved, without their volition or even without motivation, like Chinese checkers: they spill throughout the story, jumping around each other and the plot until everything is fit together at the opposite of where it started. In the end we have an existentialist morality play that aspires to, and occasionally brushes against, self-effacing greatness but leaves the reader wondering, "what does it all mean?"