Customer Reviews

Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen

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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.

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.

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.

Michael McIrvin's Deja Vu And The Phone Sex Queen is a complicated and multilayered novel of the first order. Its protagonist Zeke Reilly is beset by incomprehensible visions - he commits a terrible crime and cannot understand why; fleeing, he encounters the phone-sex queen and the two fall in love. Their journey at right angles to the world leads them to the lands of the Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec Indians, wherein lies the secret of the bizarre visions. Ironic, laced with a tongue-in-cheek world view, and a critical gauge of how mass culture tends to overwhelm and subsume all without so much as a by-your-leave, Deja Vu And The Phone Sex Queen is a singularly unique, unforgettable, highly recommended work.

"Déjà vu" is the story of a man trapped in modern civilization and his escape from it. Zeke O Reilly has "the sight," which in his case consists of nightmare visions of the future: foreknowledge of deathly encounters without the power to prevent them.
After murdering his wife and her aldulterous companion, Zeke becomes a fugitive, and with the help of Cindy Sweet (phone sex queen) and others flees further and further South into the primitive surroundings of the Tubare and Tarahumara Indians. Only when he is alone in the wilderness does Zeke find meaning and purpose.
In spite of the porn suggestions in the title, McIrvin's novel is rich with meaningful insights about the conflicts between ancient and modern, primitive and civilized cultures. Above all, McIrvin dramatizes the burden and the anguish of living in a modern civilization.