Customer Reviews

Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!

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Waiting for each new book by James Chapman is as difficult as it must have been for readers of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce to wait for new books from those greats. And I'm not throwing those names out lightly. Chapman is on par with them, with the works of greats such as Arno Schmidt and Italo Calvino, with the best of Brautigan and Vonnegut, with the finest Nouveau Roman publications. After reading In Candyland It's Cool to Feed on Your Friends, I couldn't have imagined where Chapman could go next or that he could equal that amazing achievement, but here he has. We are seeing a master reaching full stride. This wonderful work (and the sense of Wonder here is the strongest I have seen in any serious work since the novels of Kenneth Patchen) concerns itself with the life and innerworld of a disconnected, beautiful, almost messianic female named Frieda. Chapman traces her from conception to afterlife in a captivating, sometimes dizzying combination of concrete imagist and abstract expressionist prose. Bravo! Bravo! Dare I hope for yet another encore?

James Chapman is probably the greatest living novelist in the American language. He is most certainly the greatest unknown. This book is his best. If literary posterity has a future, Chapman's all over it.