In & Oz [Hardcover]

Steve Tomasula (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 26, 2005

IN & OZ is a novel of art, love, auto mechanics, and two places: the actualities of the here and now and the desire for somewhere better. Five men and women - an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor and mechanic - find themselves drawn together when they begin to suspect that the thing lacking in their lives might be discovered in the other place. Against the tension between idiosyncratic art and mass-marketed taste, each works to bridge the gulf between IN & OZ by using the medium of their trades: light and darkness; sound and silence. IN & OZ is a story as old as the Tower of Babel and as new as global markets: the story of people trying to reach beyond the limits of language and remake the world, or at least their selves. "In IN & OZ, Steve Tomasula writes as though the English language were his own invention. I'm far from certain he's wrong about this. But if we could still imagine a surrounding in which destiny lay within creatures and stones, or recognized the unconfinements of words, we might know fiction as he does. Next to being wholly new, IN & OZ is the best there is." --R.M. Berry, author of Leonardo's Horse: A Novel and The Dictionary of Modern Anguish: Fictions "With IN & OZ, Tomasula crafts a fiercely intelligent and uncompromising parable on what has become of us." --Alex Shakar, author of The Savage Girl and City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Not very far in the future, things are a lot like now, only more so, in a big American city that is bifurcated into IN, where hand workers like Mechanic and artists like Poet/Sculptor, Composer, and Photographer, who sympathize with hand workers, live; and OZ, where concept workers like Designer, as well as, presumably, executives, politicians, administrators, and other higher-ups reside (Composer and Photographer hail from OZ and, of course, can always go back there). And those higher-ups are so literally, for the outstanding structure in OZ is an immense office tower that corresponds exactly to a great hole in IN, which is, however, residential. The plot stems from Mechanic's sudden deviation from auto engineering into artwork, in which, for instance, he mounts wheels on a car's roof, replacing them with the doors, which are employed as runners. Photographer knows art when he sees it, and so do Mechanic's other new friends. The walls of class do not fall, though, in this eccentric but worthy descendant of Huxley's fatally bittersweet Brave New World. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books (July 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1892389630
• ISBN-13: 978-1892389633
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 4.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,738,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2); IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution; and most recently, TOC: A New-Media Novel (FC2/University of Alabama Press).

Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds--from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports--Tomasula's writing has been called a 'reinvention of the novel,' combining an 'attention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.' His writing often crosses visual, as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know, and how these representations shape our lives. His short fiction has been published widely, and most recently in McSweeney's, The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, American Letters & Commentary, Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre.

Images, excerpts, and sound clips from his short fiction and novels can be found at http://www.stevetomasula.com

His critical essays can be found in numerous magazines both here and in Europe.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SFReader.com - In & Oz, June 10, 2004

By 

David L. Felts "thesfreader" (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In & Oz (Hardcover)

I'm not sure In and Oz is speculative fiction, but I don't know what else it could be. It's fantastical allegory, taking place in an imaginary land consisting of two distinct locations: Oz, the gleaming city where the beautiful and successful live, and In, the home of industry and labor. Characters are named by function, hence we get Mechanic, Designer, Poet/Sculptor, Photographer, and Composer. Each of the characters is similar to the others in that they all desire something more. Only they don't know what that more is. And neither did I.

But I think that's an accurate reflection of modern life. Most of us, I think, desire `more', but more what? Money? Purpose? Happiness? Understanding? Love? If given the opportunity to ask, what would we ask for? We are all seeking something, but what are we seeking? It's these questions and more that Tomasula's characters struggle with. Don't look for easy answers though, no snippets of motorcycle Zen wisdom. The quest is in the asking, not the achieving. 'More' is not a destination; 'More' is a journey.

Musician composes without sound, seeking to be unconstrained by the limits of human hearing and the confining structure of orchestrated music.

Photographer's camera holds no film.

Mechanic no longer repairs - he instead seeks to make obvious the mysterious workings of automobiles so that those who drive them will no longer take them for granted.

Designer sits in her office with windows all around, staring down at the splendor of Oz seeking inspiration and wondering why she feels so lost.

Poet/Sculptor's media is dirt, because that's where everything comes from and to where everything eventually returns.

These archetypical characters move through an exaggerated version of our own modern society, where our peculiarities, obsessions, and foibles are have come to be accepted as normal, just as Americans accept over 10,000 gun-related deaths a year as 'normal' instead of as the tragedy it is.

It's obvious Tomasula doesn't hold modern society in much regard, though his observations are tinged with an irony and sadness that led me to believe he feels we are squandering our efforts on the less important things in life. He makes a variety of interesting observations.

In the scene below, Mechanic is standing the mansion/museum of the founders of the car building factory. Mechanic's house is under a bridge, near the end. When cars break down on the bridge, they coast to the bottom and that was how his father got his start repairing cars. But Mechanic has more to say on it:

(...)"There were other portraits of inheritance: an unbroken lineage from the painting of a long-bearded founding father, all the way up to a studio photo of a smiling, great-great-great- CEO-grandson, posing with his movie star wife as if the more money earned, the more attractive the people making it became. There was no other Art. And looking at this art history, Mechanic saw how if his parents had not lived under a bridge, neither he nor his father would have been a mechanic. Had his parents lived under a bridge that crossed water instead of a river of chemicals that sometimes caught fire, he might have grown up a fisherman. And it astounded him to think that something so central to his being could be so arbitrary- Could it be the same for whole cities? Whole nations?"</div>

Designer ponders:

<(...)"She sat in the living room of her condo, looking at furnishings she had picked, she thought, to be an expression of her self, but now seeing how she could be an extension of them, living within a spread from Condo Beautiful or some other high end magazine devoted to the art of tasteful living. How could those magazines - products themselves - not have modeled her space, and therefore her vision, and therefore her thoughts, and therefore her work, and therefore herself?"</div>

The whole book if full of such thought provoking passages that casued me to nod my head; not necessarily new to many of us, but concisely shaped and precise in delivery.

If traditional story telling is your bag, this probably won't satisfy you. But if you wander through life, sometimes feeling a vague sense of dissatisfaction and an occasional pang of disgust at the course our society moves along, I think you'll like this quite a bit.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars good stuff, October 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: In & Oz (Hardcover)

Don't be fooled by the page count: This is a big book with big ideas. It's well written and thoughtful. It's also beautifully designed, a joy to hold and read.