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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unbearables Rock!, April 13, 2008
This review is from: Neo Phobe (Paperback)
The Unbearables Rock! With "neo Phobe" two of the group (Jim Feast and Ron Kolm) have established themselves as auteurs of post-modernist Bohemiana. Woven within the structure of a fast-paced missing-persons, serial rapist mystery are the threads of beating-down modern life, conspiring to turn us all into blathering robotic infidels. Here are tales of the neo Phobes, radicalist, do-gooders, in all of their garb, up against the world's ills. Here is Karen Polanski, erstwhile copy-editor in a new job previously occupied by the now-deceased rapees. Here is Misty Blum, temp extraordinaire, sniffing around for clues about the victims and wondering over the plight of women as victims. John Uranus and Frank Reynard balance out the neo Phobe's male section as they all, separately and together, fend off both local and global social catastrophes in this tour de force of New York's inimitable head-spinning politicocultural miasma. The writing is crisp, the characters oddly believable and it's a damn good romp on paper!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Collective I, March 27, 2008
This review is from: Neo Phobe (Paperback)
When writers write about writing there is a particular theme that always emerges: that the act of writing is singular. This is the theme in Hemingway's 1954 Nobel Prize speech when he says, "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life...For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day". This is what Graham Greene means when he calls writing "the most private of all the arts." Shortly after reading Jim Feast and Ron Kolm's Neo Phobe, I was reading Joan Didion's "Can't Get that Monster Out of My Mind" on the subway, and not being able to get Neo Phobe out of my mind myself, when I read Didion's claim, "I think we would all agree that a novel is nothing if it is not the expression of an individual voice, a single view of experience" I could only smile. You see, before Neo Phobe there might have been a nod of the head, or my eyes might have just casually moved along the words while my brain filed them in the mental cabinet I like to keep for writers writing about writing. But after Neo Phobe there is only a smile, like the smile of a person who knows a dirty little secret.
Neo Phobe is essentially writers writing about writing. The novel follows an underground collective of writers, the Neo Phobes, in an effort to solve the "Demon Lover Rapist" case in order to write a best-selling true crime book. Their investigation leads them through a complex network of Pro-Life evangelical Christians and technology corporations, all while trying to land a book contract, arrange readings, organize Le Bal Des Artistes, and discuss a rabbit's involvement in the Kennedy assassination, whether Poe's or Dickinson's case of necrophilia was worse, and the central problem of the modern era--temps. As a novel, Neo Phobe is singular in its plurality. In its very title, Neo Phobe resists the singular, oneness. This, after all, is not the single word neophobe, one who fears change, technology, and social transformation. What is this two-word Neo Phobe? I like to speculate that the anagram for "one" that The Matrix has already sent into our collective consciousness here coupled with phobe (phobia, fear, aversion) suggests the retraction, the pulling away from oneness that characterizes the novel.
In dealing with a collective of writers collaborating, Neo Phobe challenges this sense of the singular voice and the single view of experience. Just as the writers try to figure out how these disparate women became victims of the same crime, the reader throughout the novel is trying to figure out how this disparate group of people will ever solve the mystery and become authors of the same true crime book, surviving each one's claim to be doing most of the work, their different and fluctuating attitudes toward the project and toward their fellow Phobes. Dealing with the hot-button issue of abortion is difficult. The tendency is to reduce both or either side to simple caricature or to become too didactic. While Neo Phobe does not deny itself the fun of caricature, it paints a richer, more complex portrait of the debate and its many--not just two--sides, sustaining a number of views on the issue (Deacon Thistle struggling with his Pro-Life beliefs, haunted by the face of the dead girl he turned away from the abortion clinic, Marcus Riley struggling with his Pro-Choice position, thinking of abortion in connection with racial genocide and the history of sterilization, traditional Chinese views on infantile death and aborted fetuses).
Beyond the multiplicity of characters and views are the various issues of genre. Neo Phobe defies a single genre. It does not fit too snugly into the conventions of detective fiction. In fact, by S.S. Van Dine's 1928 outline of twenty rules for detective fiction, Neo Phobe is not detective fiction at all (cite that there is more than one detective and criminal, cite the giant talking animal at the end, cite anything in the book, really). It makes a nod to science fiction with sound retractors, memory implanters, Rayograph Bibles, and Astral Projector holograms invading the streets, `beheading' people. Interludes of erotica, episodes of the thriller, various genres come into the novel. And into what single genre can you put the conversations the Phobes get into at the Bull and Shamrock? About five different languages come into Neo Phobe, and the novel also breaks down its archetypical oneness in its very form. It seems the novel itself cannot bear the story and has to mine other literary forms to move it forward. Unwieldy conversations seem to call in the help of dramatic format, for example:
Riley: "Say what?"
"The medulla is the brain space[...]."
Uranus: "What's that got to do with what we're talking about?"
Poetry takes on the role of direct speech with a machine, and the novel ends with an interchange of prose and poem.
Having read Neo Phobe it is hard to look at the novel the same. All those accepted generalizations on the novel and writing are called into question, and Neo Phobe itself is called into question. Is Neo Phobe the anti-novel in its rejection of the singular voice and its sense of collaboration and crowdedness in what is supposed to be private and alone, or is it the ultra-novel in its maximizing on the dialogic and heteroglossic character that Bakhtin found peculiar and central to the novel? For those interested in the fate of the novel and where the novel is going, Neo Phobe is essential. Does the breaking down of the singular and the rampant plurality suggest a cancer and the imminent death of the novel? Or does it suggest the expansion of the novel into a new literary age? While we, indeed, must deal with the defining problems of literature in our times, leaving aside these more weighty questions for a better form--a conversation--I conclude that Neo Phobe is ultimately a strange, fun, and enthralling read. Jack Uranus towards the end of the novel half laments that books are collaborations, that there are no more "hermetic geniuses" producing literary masterpieces. "Whole groups must come together," he says, "to make one great authorial voice." The question remains after reading Neo Phobe, would you have it any other way? --AS (A Gathering of Tribes, [...], September 2006)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Neo Phobe review by Arnold Skemer, ZYX magazine, February 27, 2008
This review is from: Neo Phobe (Paperback)
This rambling novel has the nominal semblance of the mystery genre but the pursuers of crime are not laconic police dicks, cynical private eyes, or eccentric ladies in small English villages but rather, of all things, an association of poets, writers, and artists from New York's literary sub-culture. They are intent on finding the "perps" in a serial rape situation. In doing so the author moves through sociological and occupational truths that are absorbing in and of themselves. These culture workers are cab drivers, "temps," adjunct English instructors, and bookstore clerks who shift from job to job. They live in tiny rat-trap apartments for which they can barely pay the rent. But after all, it's Manhattan! Where else could they live? Money is always a problem in their hand-to-mouth existence, yet somehow they survive. writing poetry on their computer screens at work, using their boss's Xerox machines, getting their work published in regrettable little zines and, yes, solving crimes. And in some way they are engaged in a group literary activity which is the story of their crime solving efforts on the serial rapes. One has doubts about how serious this all is, but the novel is quick paced with amusing versions of dialect, and strong flashes of humor, as when one character is aroused by a woman recuperating in a hospital bed -- he's never had sex with a woman in a neck brace and demands immediate oral satisfaction. For this romantic offer he gets his scrotum torn with rose thorns from a floral display. The crimes are the loose framework on which to lay the many odd episodes and wild conversations, which are fun in themselves. There's nothing all that deep here, but there is a sense of atmosphere in the subterranean literary culture of Manhattan.
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