Fishboy [Paperback]

Mark Richard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1994

In the brilliant idiom of a modern Melville or Conrad, an odyssey of discovery by a bold and outrageous talent--the PEN/Hemingway Award--winning author of The Ice At The Bottom Of The World.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Seafaring lore finds a macabre new context in this debut novel, a surreal tale of shipboard grotesques in mortal struggle. Protagonist Fishboy, an abandoned child with fish-like eyes and a whistling lisp, shucks mollusks in a squalid cannery where the fishing boats unload their catch. Believing he has killed another worker, he flees to the open sea on a trawler manned by a murderous, deranged crew of outcasts and oddities. As he tries to survive and find a niche among these extreme personalities, Fishboy contemplates his crime and his brief, sorrowful history. Richard, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his short story collection, The Ice at the Bottom of the World , renders a vivid, febrile vision wherein the omnipresent sea is both primordial broth and agent of ultimate decay. Steeped in blood, offal and viscera, his characters are scabrous but compelling. His skillful manipulation of prose rhythms and images heightens the immediacy of this odd juxtaposition of nautical legend and mordant, post-nuclear nihilism. Achieving a graceful balance of insight and parody, clarity and hallucination, Richard fashions an imaginative, impressive novel.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a fish story, and although Richard has the credentials (a PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for The Ice at the Bottom of the World , LJ 4/1//89; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1990), this isn't much of a catch. Fishboy is about an abandoned child who lives in the swamps of Louisiana in a "carbonated box," eating fishhead stew "seasoned with pieces of pork gristle Miss Big Magine and her ugly sister had spit from their sandwiches into the weeds." It is full of horrific images, language meant to be lyric and intense and instead simply graphic, obscure, and surreal. It's definitely hard going, and this reviewer suspects that only your most venturesome patrons will want to read past the first page.
- Linda Rome, Middlefield P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (May 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385425686
• ISBN-13: 978-0385425681
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #731,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Stir the soup -- don't let it burn", May 18, 2002

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fishboy (Paperback)

The above advice is given to our humble narrator, Fishboy, from the mouth of a 'rumored cook' on board a ship at sea. Fishboy has seen the cook's predecessor cleaved in two with an axe by a sailor who was angry about the food he and his shipmates had been served. Fishboy decides that he most likely doesn't want to become a cook.

Author Mark Richard has definitely stirred the literary soup in FISHBOY, his debut novel. There's a quote on the back cover from a review in ESQUIRE: "An eloquent fever dream, a tale told headlong in the language of incantation" -- and that 'fever dream' description fits this work to a 't'.

As I read my way through this ghost story, a fable replete with inner fables, I felt like I had been dunked into a boiling pot of Herman Melville and William S. Burroughs, illustrated by S. Clay Wilson (those of you who remember his 'perverted pirates' underground comix of the 60s will cringe at this reference), with the film directed by David Lynch. Richard's story bubbles and seethes -- he evidently relishes giving the reader the feeling of being unstuck in both time and place, for there are characters and images in this novel that are plucked from sundry eras and locations, stirred up into an intelligent, interesting, albeit not always appetizing stew. This is a world turned topsy-turvy, reflecting 'reality' like a cracked mirror.

Richard's metaphors are sometimes staggeringly beautiful and captivating -- the sea turned to shorebound landscape with mountains of waves, the land turned to ocean by the rolling tide of subterranean upheavals. Consider this short sample from p.163: 'A loose timber from the sun's sunken wreckage floated up and was dawn on the water. In its cool red light you could see how the waters around us were disturbed from beneath. Globes of old air rose to the surface and shattered, spritzing blooms of kicked-up mud. Mobs of waves rushed crowded swells, slapping faces and knocking caps off to the wind.' Whew.

The narrator of the story -- we know him only as Fishboy -- starts his tale by telling us (from p.1): 'I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy who fled to sea, a boy with a whistling lisp and the silken-tipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head, knocked by a hammering fist; the smell of cigar and show leather and the weighted burlap bag, thrown from a car into a side-road swamp.' The odyssey he undertakes is a fantastic, circular one -- and he views it with an extremely limited perspective, realting the events that occur with both sheltered naivitee and blinding insight.

The novel is sub-titled 'a ghost story' -- and that it is, although it is unlike any ghost story you are likely to have come across. Richard has imbued this work with a 'graspable' surreality -- and I'm not sure if it's the reader or the story who is doing the grasping. This is an unusual, highly unsettling read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you like Neil Gaiman, if you liked Riddley Walker ..., March 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Fishboy (Paperback)

This book catches you from the first sentence/ paragraph and doesn't let go. All rules are off in this book from grammar to linear plot. This is not at all irritating. It's refreshing that Richard assumes that the reader is clever enough to keep up. This is easily one of the best books I've read in years. It has been 3-4 years since I last read it, but I still have lucid memories of passages. Too bad Richard doesn't publish more.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A trip worth taking, February 2, 2002

By 

Mark Tailleur (San Bernardino, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fishboy (Paperback)

This book serves as a parable and fable. It is a strange world which Fishboy lives in, and the beautiful way the book is written will no doubt lead to strange dreams, as it did with me.