Mosaic Man [Paperback]

Ronald Sukenick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1999

Fiction. In MOSAIC MAN, Ronald Sukenick turns his innovative style to the roots of Jewish and Western tradition. Using the form of the Old Testament as a contemporary Jewish epic, Sukenick reinvents the Jewish novel in the context of Pop culture, and repositions it on the cutting edge of millennial America. The book is a mosaic of stories making the case that in our new electronic universe the parts are the whole. The experience of a kid in Brooklyn, of an old writer in Venice, of a mystical tourist in Israel, all become part of a patchwork identity in quest of a moral culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like a classic rock band's 10th comeback album, Sukenick's latest avant-garde fiction invokes predictable precursors, leans heavily on outdated machismo and seems designed to show readers how hip, and how persecuted, Sukenick thinks he (still) is. Mosaic Man reads much like an addendum to Sukenick's memoir, Down and In, which traced the demise of Village bohemia in the '60s and '70s. Most of the new work tracks "Ron"'s search for his Jewish roots; section titles allude to those in the Hebrew Bible, where the Five Books of Moses (here, "Genes," "Ex/Ode," "Umbilicus," "Numbers," "Autonomy") are followed by "Prophets" (here, predictably, "Profits") and "Writings" ("Hand Writing on the Wall"). "Ex/Ode" alternates a Robert Crumb-like fantasy about Captain Midnight with pages of rather sweet transcribed and taped conversations among "Ron" and his mother and relatives. The later chapters brood on anti-Semitism and Jewish identity. "Numbers" evokes the residual bigotry Sukenick encountered when he lived as a student in Paris, and throws in some repellent, misogynist anecdotes. "Autonomy" brings Sukenick through modern Poland, where he meditates on the Holocaust, and then (in the book's high point) to modern Israel, where a spooked Sukenick cluelessly wanders about seeking the Golden Calf, which archeologists have (supposedly) just unearthed. The final sections return to cartoonish and Vonnegut-esque fantasy, with left-wing sermons about poverty and crime. After the rapes and gangbangs of Sukenick's Paris, these straightforwardly moralized arguments seem out-of-place; meant, perhaps. to counter Sukenick's narcissism, such passages simply demonstrate it again.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

"Personally, being Jewish is just an advanced case of being human, and being human may be a personal disease that's run its course." This novel by one of the most significant writers and editors of postmodern fiction explores what it means to be human in an often-inhumane world. The book is structured very loosely after the Bible, with chapter names like Genes, Ex/ode, Umbilicus, Numbers, and Autonomy. Sukenick employs graphic symbols, transcripts of tape recordings, and other metafictional techniques, but this is primarily a thinly veiled autobiography for the first 200 pages. His tales of womanizing and debauchery support his claim that "Freud didn't invent the id, he just dropped the Y," but this book is far more than a drunken roll in the literary hay. To paraphrase an old rye bread ad, you don't have to be Jewish or postmodern to love Mosaic Man. Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.AJim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; 1st edition (April 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573660795
• ISBN-13: 978-1573660792
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #764,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rain Taxi/Summer 1999 by Matt Dube, June 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Mosaic Man (Paperback)

Rain Taxi/Summer 1999 by Matt Dube-- Ronald Sukenick's tenth book, MOSAIC MAN, poses difficult questions about the form of the novel and the creative act. Sukenick writes what he calls "heterofiction," autobiographical narratives that are opened up by fictional conceits.... Sukenick's prose is rich and distinctive, with lyrical nods to the Beats and a Joycean ear for puns. While Sukenick's long reach is at times frustrating, it constantly makes the reader aware that he or she is reading an object constructed by human hands. Perhaps it is here, in the book's unwillingness to cohere and in its wholehearted embrace of its human origins, that Sukenick escapes a charge often leveled against other authors: that of laying claim to a divine originative role.