Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen [Paperback]

Michael McIrvin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001

Zeke Reilly, the protagonist of Deja Vu and the Phone sex Queen, sometimes has visions of future events but he cannot do anything to stop them nor can he make things happen just by envisioning them. The visions merely add another question mark to his life, which seems to careen out of control from one serendipitous event to another: he commits an atrocious act for which he can find no justification and, stranger still, feels no remorse. He goes into hiding, finds himself caught in a hold-up, during which he meets the phone-sex queen. They hide in her apartment for a time, whereupon they fall in love. Zeke's life gets no simpler from that point on, however. Through another series of bizarre events, Zeke has to flee again and is drawn farther and farther south into the ancient lands of the Aztec, Mayan and Toltec Indians-where at last he learns the meaning of his visions. Despite the strangeness of the story, Michael McIrvin's Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen is not merely irony or surrealism, but is presented as plausibility in a world which itself often seems absurd: violence without reason, the subsumption of cultures into mass culture, the commercialization of even tragic experience-a milieu in which we, like the protagonist, hope against hope to find purpose and meaning.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael McIrvin has worked as a telephone installer, liquor store clerk, bouncer, archaeologist, and ranch hand, among many other erstwhile occupations. He taught literature and writing for eight years at the University of Wyoming. He holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Wyoming. Michael believes the best 2 novels written in the last half of the 20th c. were McCarthy's Blood Meridian and DeLillo's Underworld. He reads lots of poetry, especially Neruda, Garcia Lorca, Vallejo, and Rilke. He enjoys cross-country skiing, hunting, fishing, camping, and gardening. He now lives in Wyoming with his wife, Sharon, and his sons, Jesse and Eli. His essay collection, "Whither American Poetry," was published in 1999, and his fifth poetry collection, "Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New," will be published in January 2002. He does editing and is presently at work on a novel about the CIA

Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: J-Press Pub (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930922000
• ISBN-13: 978-1930922006
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,257,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zeke on the Run, January 30, 2002

By 

William Doreski (Peterborough, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen (Paperback)

Zeke Reilly's picaresque adventures are like nothing else in recent fiction. McIrvin's witty absurdities shape a critique of American culture and society that is unforgettable for its wit and biting irony. Zeke himself is an amazing character, like someone escaped from a Dickens novel to America, where he has gone terribly wrong. The conclusion of the novel is a magnificent set-piece of transcendent insight and beatitude, a coda of unexpected beauty. An exceptional book by a highly individual writer.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McIrvin's Demons, December 3, 2001

By 

Simon Perchik (East Hampton, NY 11937 (USA)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen (Paperback)

Having read McIrvin's epic poem named Dog I looked forward to reading his novel Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen. McIrvin work is steeped in Native American myths, and so it was natural that the story under review should itself be a myth; the long journey of the guilty narrator (there is murder early on) in search of an answer to why, he, the narrator, suffers no remorse. Along the way we meet the lost souls that travel every roadway. The reader will be enriched, as I have been, by McIrvin's narrative; told beautifully, with the tension and grace necessary in all art. Simon Perchik.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Mythic Traverse, March 27, 2002

By 

Douglas W. Reitinger (Bulgaria, Europe) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen (Paperback)

Reading McIrvin's latest book is like having a conversation with Nietzche after gobbling a handful of Mexican psilocybin; the reader most likely won't be able to look at the world in the same way again. An astute and wry analyst of culture, McIrvin illuminates the discontents of our civilization during the last shadowy days of the 20th century. McIrvin's protagonist, a regular guy with not so regular psychic abilities named Zeke Reilly, finds himself on a fugitive journey through the southwest and Mexico, a mythic traverse into what Garcia Lorca once described as "the dark root of the scream." In the biographical notes to the novel, in addition to identifying Garcia Lorca as a poet he admires, McIrvin also mentions Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. They are felt in the novel as well, though McIrvin is no mere mimic. The language of the prose is knife-like, clean, and fresh, and the sense of irony rich (the corporate merger of Disneyland and McDonalds into the mega-conglomerate "Mc-Dis" in the novel's closing pages comes to mind immediately). McIrvin's got what used to be called "voice" in college writing classes, and his is plenty big and plenty strong.