Loop's End (The Loop Trilogy: Book 3) [Paperback]

Chuck Rosenthal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2007 | Series: The Loop Trilogy

Newly restored to the author's original version and for the first time in softcover, Loop's End complete's Chuck Rosenthal's magnificent Loop Trilogy. Here is the final book in the hilarious and often moving saga of the slightly bent working-classs American family, the Loops.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Garbage collector Jarvis Loop of Erie, Pa., who philosophized about life in the Loop's Progress and Experiments with Life and Deaf , is back in this uneven mix of folksy naturalism, absurdist black comedy, family drama and magical realism. Set in the late '60s, this novel, like its predecessors, presents a gallery of irascible eccentrics. Grandpa Funster, who spouts mystical gibberish, shoots a cop named Liverwurst in the back; young Funly Funster, stuck inside a tuba, becomes a supermarket attraction; Visitor, Jarvis's son, calls everyone Dad, including their dog, Polly Doggerel; Neta, Jarvis's 300-pound genius sister, delivers pseudoprofundities as banal as his own. Two elements in this string of misadventures are deeply touching. One involves Loop's dead wife, Kara, who appears intermittently as a ghost. The other is the uneasy relationship between Loop's parents--Red, his German Lutheran father, a laid-back brick salesman, and Helen, his pious Polish Catholic mother, a college administrator who hoards religious statuary. Rosenthal expresses his zany imagination in a vernacular prose style, a combination that can be grating at times. But the book also has its moments of lyricism, in which Rosenthal touchingly affirms love as our bulwark against death.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

As its title implies, this novel concludes Rosenthal's trilogy about Jarvis Loop and his outrageously dysfunctional family. (Earlier works in the series include Loop's Progress , LJ 11/1/87, and Experiments with Life and Death , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.) The present volume begins with the murder of a policeman and ends with a miraculous recovery from brain cancer. In between, Rosenthal blends acute philosophical speculation, absurdly comic dialog, and surreal events. A prominent concern throughout is the ominous power of death. This book contains much incidental zaniness but less coherent plot. Diffuse and thickly populated with marginal characters, it will have limited appeal, especially for those who have not read the earlier volumes.
- Albert Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1992 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: 364 pages
• Publisher: Hollyridge Press (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977229890
• ISBN-13: 978-0977229895
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,023,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Loop between Life and Death, September 21, 2005

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OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loop's End (Hardcover)

It took me over a dozen years to track this book down, but it was worth it. I had thoroughly "gotten into" the first two volumes of this trilogy, _Loop's Progress_ and _Experiments with Life and Deaf_, at a point in my life where I identified with the characters- especially with the main character, Jarvis Loop. You see, Jarvis is a garbage man and an intellectual. That isn't unusual though, for the entire world that Jarvis moves through is one of working class bohemians, intellectuals, and mystics. That is what gives it its surrealistic tone, for everyone here is far more than you would ever assume to be living in a working class neighborhood in Erie, Pennsylvania in the 60's- and for me that was refreshing. When I was a kid I wanted to believe that the average people around me were living rich intellectual and artistic lives behind closed doors- that there must be more to them than normally met the eye and ear...

This is a place where street gangs of philosophers debate the nature of the universe for years on end while playing cards in attics, where the dead have a disturbing habit of casually crossing the veil between the worlds, where spaceships and submarines are built in basements, where religious statuary routinely moves of its own accord, and even Jarvis' borderline psychotic father takes a year to read and comprehend 200 great books- just to prove that he can. There is a story sandwiched into one of the chapters about a City of Light and a City of Dark that reads like a gnostic creation myth. But there is also so much more going on here in this metaphorical, existentialist, nihilistic, surrealistic stew. At the very least, this trilogy is so unlike almost everything else that you've read that at least you will not be bored. There is just so much here- all of it playing off of each other until the result is a gestalt greater than the sum of the parts alone.