Godlike (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: New York, Second Avenue, John Schwartz (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poet and punk pioneer Hell's lyrically melancholy second novel (after Go Now), set primarily in the East Village circa 1972, honors decadence and dissolution and celebrates art and angst in a compelling if unsettling story of 27-year-old married poet Paul Vaughn's ("I'm not really a faggot. I just have a queer streak") transcendent affair with a 16-year-old. Would-be poet Randall Terence Wode ("T") is "a rampaging adolescent" whose "bony boy's buttocks" become, for a brief time, the center of Vaughn's physical desire, and whose brash spirit is, for 30 years, the core of Vaughn's emotional universe. The novel's wrenching account of a memorable love, peppered with poems (some original, others by James Schuyler, Ron Padgett and others), skips between the months of the older poet's affair with the cocky young Kentucky runaway and, decades later, the month of Vaughn's most recent institutionalization for psychiatric observation. But Hell's prose, alternately explosive and tender but always charged with rewarding humanity, ably propels the story. By no means a mainstream effort, this gritty novel will find readers in the demimonde of poets and people who read them, and among those who appreciate how artistry and sexuality can fuel each other. (July)
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Review

"Vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." -- William Gibson, on Hell's fiction

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Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Akashic Books (July 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888451777
• ISBN-13: 978-1888451771
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,729 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Brooding, Often Beautiful ..., October 4, 2005

By	Robert Clifford (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Richard Hell's second novel is essentially a re-telling of the Verlaine-Rimbaud story, set in New York in the early nineteen seventies. It is not however a rehash by a writer obsessed with some romantic notion of poetry past, but hard sober look at the amazing outcasts who are the ones who create poetry at any time in history. Dark, brooding, and often beautiful, this book truly manages to convey the struggle and madness that afflict all artists who literally give themselves to their craft. While not a perfect book (Hell from time to time overreaches with his prose), GODLIKE is a fascinating volume that deserves to be in the library of anyone truly interested in what it means to be an artist in our times. If you think that mainstream American literature is garbage but are also tired of the post-Bukowskian rehash that is most underground writing these days, GODLIKE might just be what you're looking for ...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars era respiration-byte!, January 27, 2006

By	Kenji Siratori (Japan) - See all my reviews

"Hell is guerrilla=sex mutant by the era respiration-byte of a chemical=anthropoid." - Kenji Siratori, author Blood Electric

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Verlaine & Rimbaud on the Lower East Side., May 13, 2007

By	TT - See all my reviews

GODLIKE is a deeply intense experimental novel, retelling the ill-starred romance of poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (basis for the lame DiCaprio film Total Eclipse) as a story of New York City in the early 70's. Hell draws on his Pre-Punk memories of the poetry scene around st marks church to recreate a lost world, and his current survivors perspective comes through in the books framing device, as the older poet remembers his youthful affair from the bed of a psychiatric ward, some 30 years later. The Rimbaud character, R.T. Wode, is both hilariously obnoxious and hauntingly visionary.

The raw pan-sexuality of the book is pretty shocking. As shocking is the acuity of Hell's poetic sensibility. He is able to re-frame Rimbaud's famous words in the specific style of poetry now known as The New York School (Ashberry, Berrigan, Koch, Padgett, ect.), in a way that is both amusing and lyrically potent. With it's time traveling structure and deeply subjective style, Godlike is a challenging read but a deeply rewarding one.