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Looking For Mo [Paperback]

Daniel Duane (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)


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Book Description

June 1, 1999
A "fresh, funny first novel" "(San Francisco Chronicle)," "Looking For Mo" has garnered rave reviews from critics and readers alike, echoing the success of Daniel Duane's previous book, "Caught Inside." This time Duane combines the thrill of adventure writing "a la" Jon Krakauer with a sly satire of pop culture comparable to Douglas Coupland's "Generation X," and folds them into a wry and memorable story of one man's search for truth on the sheer rock face of Yosemite's El Capitan.

Raymond Connelly, a San Francisco would-be writer, is still living uneasily with his failure to climb "The Captain" with his childhood friend and alter ego, Mo Lehrman. As he circumnavigates his way through life on the edges of West Coast counterculture, trying to live like Mo's stories, which are more real than life itself, Ray lifts the best of those tales for his own book. But when he is accused of plagiarism, Ray suffers an attack of conscience, and sets off in search of Mo -- to explain, and to make good by finishing their shared climb.

From the San Francisco performance-art world to a psychedelic vision at a Grateful Dead show, Ray's quest for self-discovery is both hilarious and emotionally fraught, climaxing in two men's true-to-life climb up the sheer slope of "The Captain." "Looking For Mo" is a moving, resonant exploration of the tenuous foundations of friendship and an investigation of the explosive power of storytelling.


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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

After charting his travels up High Sierran peaks and through the pipelines of Santa Cruz surf culture, Daniel Duane embarks on an adventurous new course with the novel Looking for Mo. This charming update of The Dharma Bums (minus the idealism) brings together an assortment of shaggy, recognizable characters who play out a late-20th-century California pastoral involving friendship, love, betrayal, and the redemptive qualities of the great outdoors. The action moves from San Francisco to the mountains, from "cedar-paneled sushi bars" to psilocybin-fueled Dead shows--with Yosemite continually beckoning in the background. Protagonist Ray Connelly, barely self-sufficient and scrounging around the Bay Area, is on the verge of serious romance when his old doppelganger Mo pops up, a drifter-climber who happens to have an enviable knack for storytelling. Enviable to Ray, that is. Since their last adventures, Ray has been borrowing generously from his friend's oral history and shopping around a collection of stories. When Mo discovers the theft, there's trouble. What better way to hash out their differences than getting back on El Capitan, the climber's mecca that foiled them in the past?

Once on the piton-scarred face of El Cap, Ray must come to grips with himself as much as with Mo, a task as daunting as the monolithic rock itself. "This was it--the inevitable moment between us, when Mo was willing to risk everything and when a voice inside me insisted that nothing was worth death. I absolutely ached to let go, to be as confident and careless as Mo, but I couldn't. I didn't want to tempt fate that way--I wanted the risks to be no more than the ones I'd signed up for." Though some readers might be put off by the dude-itude of the characters and their exploits, fans of outdoorsy literature (not to mention observers of California Nation) will thoroughly enjoy this scenic rappel into an American subculture. --Langdon Cook --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Duane returns to the heights of his nonfiction Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains, in a shaggy first novel that will do much to justify the ways of crunchy young Bay Area Californians to their indoorsy contemporaries back East. Amateur rock-climber Ray Connelly is hanging out in San Francisco cafes, avoiding rejection slips for his first novel, scoping fellow slacker Fiona (an artist who works in the local supermarket) and missing his adored best friend, Mo Lehrman, who, with typical knight-of-faith gusto, has set out for Baja with a surfboard strapped to his bicycle. Then, all at once, Ray gets together with Fiona, Mo comes back to San Francisco?and Mo's father (a veteran climber with California publishing connections) blasts Ray for stealing his son's stories. The upshot: Ray follows his buddy to Yosemite National Park, where he tries to win back Mo's respect and trust by scaling the dreaded rock face known as El Capitan. Although the subplots never come within shouting distance of each other, the details carry us along like so much climbing tackle: Ray's fondness for Mo overshadows his attraction to Fiona, but the friendship between the two women is romantic enough in its own right. The virtuoso rock-climbing passages never pull their thematic weight but will be dizzying to acrophobic readers; the characters don't show much imagination but do seem unmistakably true to life. If the whole doesn't quite add up to a gripping novel, it does give us an entertaining glimpse at an intelligently Epicurean way of life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Washington Square Press (June 1, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0671034839
  • ISBN-13: 978-0671034832
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,727,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars What did I miss?, May 29, 2000
By 
John Prairie (Orlando, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Looking for Mo (Hardcover)
A favorable review had me looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, the self absorbed narrator's fuzzy saga of a mixed-up friendship never seemed remotely real to me. Throw in plot devices to include a poorly explained antipathy from the father of the "best friend" plus an unconvincing infatuation with a new girlfriend and it all spells a novel in need of an editor or a rewrite. Luckily the late chapter climb sequence on El Cap redeems some of the early awkwardness. Still, I have to believe that Duane's next work will be more coherent and better overall.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Japhy & Ray do el cap?, November 2, 1999
By 
George Durkee (Twain Harte, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Looking For Mo (Paperback)
More than Dharma Bums revisited--kind of Queequeg & Ishmael climb El Cap as written by Kerouac. After reading Duane's book, I went back and tried to re-read Dharma Bums--couldn't do it. Eastern mystical stuff too hard to wade through. The characters here are real--I know some of them (worse, I may even be one...). And, unlike a lot of Kerouac, this is fun.

As with both of Duane's other books, this is more than a good book, it's a true book.

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Incoherent and trite, March 2, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Looking For Mo (Paperback)
I had high hopes after reading Duane's writing about the surfing world, but was greatly disappointed by the shallowness of this novel.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
When Fiona first smiled at me, in the register line of a local café, I was too lost in thought about Mo Lehrman and the mountain we'd never climbed to make much of a move. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Big Stone, San Francisco, Camp Four, Hollow Flake, Central Valley, Earl Grey, Half Dome, Todos Santos, Yosemite Valley, Chinese Camp, Hare Krishnas, High Sierra, Ragged Mountain, Sloth Ridge Press
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