Moving to San Diego to settle down, part-time college student Jasper John becomes involved with the employees and regulars at the local diner, where he is tempted by former pimp and troublemaker Henry Hank. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Amid unmistakable signs of physical, spiritual and social decay, an oddly hopeful sense of community endures among the motley cast of eccentric misfits captured in Brenna's (The Book of Mamie) enthralling second novel. Set around Fat Stanley's Diner in East San Diego, this alternately sad, funny, grotesque and sexy yarn centers on Jasper John, a 23-year-old busboy and part-time college student who left Colorado on an unreliable Harley to start a new life in California. Good-hearted Fat Stanley, a frustrated tenor who occasionally sings arias for his customers while cooking lunch, tends to hire waitresses with serious health problems?Helga is receiving chemotherapy; Mary Quick pops nitroglycerin for her heart. Among the customers, Godot, a rundown religion professor under attack by fundamentalists, and Henry Hand, Mary's charismatic, troublemaking ex-pimp husband, become strong influences on the searching Jasper. Vivid characters, rich dialogue and spellbinding narrative make this odd mix of tragedy, myth and ribaldry memorable and often moving. If the lingering denouement is a bit unsatisfying, the journey there is sheer delight.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As a busboy at a San Diego diner and a part-time student, young Jasper John must navigate among a motley group of co-workers and friends. His religion professor turns Romeo and Juliet into a porno movie script and attempts "dephallicizing" himself to protest academic politics. Jasper's boss seeks love in bizarre personal advertisements and sings opera while tending to the grill. A waitress mourns her dead son and searches for signs in the letters of a Scrabble game and a potato shaped "like Christ's cracking heart." In his erratic passage to maturity, Jasper escapes the sexual wiles of confessional poet Didi Godunov and the criminal schemes of Henry Hank. Amid raunchy schemes of copulation and grim glimpses of death, Jasper acquires limited but valuable insights. In his second novel (following The Book of Mamie, Univ. of Iowa, 1989) Brenna's characters are vibrant and engaging but his plot is episodic and occasionally tedious. For larger fiction collections.?Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memorable,
This review is from: The Holy Book of the Beard (Hardcover)
I read this book years ago. Just happened to pick it up. The very fact that I still think of it and it's eccentric mix of characters to me says that it was a better read then most things I stumble across. One of the few I'd like to go back and read again.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Re-release of a cult classic,
By Oronte Churm (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holy Book of the Beard (Paperback)
This book is a rollicking farce, a picaresque that stays put, a slander on American culture, and a meditation on purpose.
This book is a Rabelaisian vulgarity, an apostasy, a double-stacked Ferris wheel in a carnival midway at midnight. Yet it dares to offer genuine emotion by portraying tenderness, compassion, and the contents of the dark closets of love as clearly as it does an armed robbery in an alleyway. I mean, this book is a death-by-chocolate-cake with coxcomb filling, frosted with buttercream and gunpowder.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A holy riot,
By Lauren B. Davis (Princeton, New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holy Book of the Beard (Paperback)
If Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, Damon Runyon, John Kennedy Toole and Samuel Beckett were all rolled into one literary package, the result would be Duff Brenna's THE HOLY BOOK OF THE BEARD. It's a picturesque novel (that sort of satirical work which depicts, in realistic and humorous detail, a rascally, low-class hero living by his wits in a corrupt society). This may not be the book for everyone - if you're easily offended, or if you prefer Elizabeth Gilbert, say, to the above mentioned authors, this probably isn't for you. But if you're no prude, and you like your characters raw, read on..
Jasper Johns, 22 years old, looking for inspiration and love (well, possibly more sex than love) lands in a busted-out San Diego dinner filled with characters from a Vincent Gallo film - Fat Stanley, the owner, who obsesses over the personal ads; Helga and Mary, the middle-aged waitresses, one cancer-stricken, the other eaten up by her past; beautiful Didi Godunov, aspiring poet; Godot, religion professor and faded beatnik philosopher; and Henry Hank, tatterdemalion trickster and holy fool. They are all carefully chosen names. In some ways, this is not only a picturesque novel, but a bildungsroman for a slightly delayed adolescence. I know young men like Jasper Johns - striving to be writers, restless and a little arrogant, looking for inspiration in squalor, their heroes all slightly depraved and ranting. While the novel is clearly and intentionally over-the-top, it's only just slightly so. There is much talk (ribald talk more often than not) of writing and friendship and love and sex. Deftly balancing on the thin line between parody and cliché, Brenna's raggedy characters pontificate and flounder, rail against fate and society, and get themselves into a good deal of trouble. By the end of the book - and what an uproarious ride it is -- Jasper learns a number of unexpected and spiritual lessons about morality and life. Brenna's wit and intelligence are undeniable, his dialogue rich and his prose muscular. This is the sort of book we don't see often any longer - unabashedly masculine, unashamedly bawdy and brazenly intelligent.
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