Customer Reviews

Crybaby of the Western world: A novel of Petit Guignol in Long Beach, California

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Before he made his career seeking glimmers of pearl in the oyster goos and ganglia of American mid-cult, slipping even to conquer TV and stooping, at times, to politics, the critic John Leonard was some kind of genius, the greatest prose musician, philosophical gymnast, bicultural Snow man and hierophant of science and art who ever wrote a masterpiece about the city of Long Beach, California, or any other oily American conurbation. It was called Crybaby of the Western World (its only dull phrase was the title), so noone read it but me, as far as I know, and I was too flabbergasted by its incandescence to review it. But it introduced me to a panoply of optical effects and Fourier transformations, including the laser and the synecdoche, in 1967 or something, and I try to do penance by buying a second hand copy every year or so to give to writers who need an image of the summits of literary craft and are willing to risk a permanent ban from their sport in order to gain the unfair advantage of its Nabokovian amphetamines.

I found this in the library when I was 13 or 14. Everything the other reviewer says is pretty much true. A lot of fun!

Before he made his career seeking glimmers of pearl in the oyster goos and ganglia of American mid-cult, slipping even to conquer TV and stooping, at times, to politics, the critic John Leonard was some kind of genius, the greatest prose musician, philosophical gymnast, bicultural Snow man and hierophant of science and art who ever wrote a masterpiece about the city of Long Beach, California, or any other oily American conurbation. It was called Crybaby of the Western World (its only dull phrase was the title), so noone read it but me, as far as I know, and I was too flabbergasted by its incandescence to review it. But it introduced me to a panoply of optical effects and Fourier transformations, including the laser and the synecdoche, in 1967 or something, and I try to do penance by buying a second hand copy every year or so to give to writers who need an image of the summits of literary craft and are willing to risk a permanent ban from their sport in order to gain the unfair advantage of its Nabokovian amphetamines.