Customer Reviews

Loop's End (The Loop Trilogy: Book 3)

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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.