An intentionally bad novel presents unusual problems to the reviewer. Is there any point in remarking, for instance, that a writer's conference taught by hacks and failures and hypocrites presents too easy a target for all but the most obvious satire? Is it a waste of time complaining that sentences run on moronically, that the humor might charitably be described as sophomoric, that characterization is slack-jawed? Does it matter that the sex would gross out your average horny teenager? Is it significant that our narrator himself describes Saturday Night at San Marcos as a ``lousy novel''? And, last but not least, is anyone going to care? Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
In a bawdy, irreverent send-up of the literary scene, this riotous odyssey has blocked writer Eliot Morrison swept from New York with its agents, actresses, and "desperation panic states" to the seedy, one-grand Hotel San Marcos on the California coast, for a week-long writers' conference. While his fellow writers are driven by literary ambitions to savage one another's work and one another, Eliot finds himself at the center of a bizarre turn of events that culminates in senseless and absurd violence.
Laying bare the lives and illusions of professional and would-be writers as well as the hangers-on who inhabit the literary world, this novel is sexy, outrageous, devastating, and satirical. It has a compassion for its characters whose parallel lives, propelled by ambition and disappointment, turn to collide head-on in fulfillment of relentless destiny.
