Customer Reviews

Gigantic

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I review books for the LA Times, the SF Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, and many other venues. I usually don't write these Amazon reviews. However, I was looking up information on Nesbitt's "Gigantic" and saw that a silly person had taken the time to post a misguided nasty-gram about Nesbitt's masterful first collection. Nesbitt is precisely the kind of antidote we need to displace so very many poseurs like Cunningham, Chabon, Moody, and the rest of the soulless, gutless authors getting all the ink. Thankfully Cheever can no longer write, since he's dead. Updike will cease and desist soon, too. Nesbitt, along with Richard Lange, Larry Fondation, Kevin McIlvoy, and a few others will replace the sorry old guard, much as McCarthy has deposed gasbags like Pynchon and Coover.

Read Nesbitt, folks, and be grateful. I look forward to his new book, and hope that this time around he gets the attention he deserves.

The stories in _Gigantic_ are both hyperkinetic and hyperbolic, often taking an absurdist premise and teasing out the implications. Nesbitt has a keen ear for dialogue and a killer instinct for using metaphors. The opening story, "The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning" is a perfect example--it has a visceral final image that crystallizes in a few sentences explicitly everything that was implicit in the story beforehand. It's one of those moments where you put the book down and let everything sink in for a few minutes.

I really can't recommend these stories enough--in the end, they are incredibly moving _because_ of the way Nesbitt plays fast and loose with the countours of reality, not despite it. In the last 10 years there has been an oatmealy sea of sameness in literary fiction--but unconventional, authentic writers like Nesbitt give hope for the future. A _lot_ of hope.

What Sherman Alexie did for the res Indians in "Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heavan," Nesbitt does for his disaffected mullato ekeing out a marginalized existence in the Great White North...Nesbitt with prose that reads like a shttered mirror..one thousand shards of truth scattered on the hard boiled floor of a junkyard, strip club, playground world...Nesbitt is part poet, part badass Chester Himes, part howling Invisble Man...ie..the real deal...he reads like Evader Holyfield fights, a brawling style that sucks you in...While some think that his stories lack plot I would say that the highspeed existence of the modern age is a blur and Nesbitt captures it in rare fragments, diamond like moments...it is fiction for a new century...

Nesbitt writes sentences so original and beautiful you'll swear he's reinventing the language. That, and the compassion he has for his hardluck characters, make this book a stunner.

For those who like paintings done by primates throwing ink on canvas or a-tonal music with no harmonic center, this may tantalize. Certainly there is a clever use of diction and syntax to cover up what is not there - and there is nothing to cover up - no clear plotting, no rising or falling action, weak or at best flat characterization. This is a Wall Street junk bond - worthless.