This is the third edition of one of the finest comic novels to appear in the last half century, a book that has been compared with the very best of Flann OÂ’Brien, Angela Carter, and Witold Gombrowicz. Appearing first in 1974, Shamp of the City-Solo quickly became an underground sensation. This “fantasy” novel takes place in a dystopian parallel universe, a world set at an odd remove where the heroÂ’s hunger for fame displays its mythic origin. Hughbury Shamp is the reluctant teenager who becomes apprenticed to three “masters” at the West Poolesville Depot on the Sumpsky Prospect, across the River Sump from Big Yolk, the city-solo. His education proceeds through various misadventures with the likes of impresario Sergei Shipoff, Dr. Harry Analarge, and the World-Friar Tapsvine, all the while he is being propelled toward stardom as the breakfast speaker at the murderously competitive Arslevering Ox Roast. The writing is simply extraordinary–a style that seems born of Lawrence Sterne and Djuna Barnes, with sidelong glances at Samuel BeckettÂ’s Watt, Marcus Aurelius, and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. With her very first novel, Jaimy Gordon managed that almost impossible feat: a novel of lasting consequence.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Shamp of the City-Solo has rightly been called one of the more beautiful novels in the language...Â’ -- Allen H. Peacock, Boston Globe
It think it also wise, both under and on the surface...I begin to suspect it may be inexhaustible. -- Keith Waldrop, Margins
Something new in the great free-wheeling tradition of Petronius, Rabelais and Swift...and what could be better? --Hayden Carruth
To say Ms. Gordon is fertile with metaphor is to only hint at her abilities; examples burst with prolific abandon from every page... Gordon's novel remains foremost a comic triumph. --Aspect
When I first read this novel I thought it far ahead of most new writing. I feel the same upon a later reading. I'm struck by its originality, its loving cynicism, its irony, its poetic force. --William Goyen --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
It think it also wise, both under and on the surface...I begin to suspect it may be inexhaustible. -- Keith Waldrop, Margins
Something new in the great free-wheeling tradition of Petronius, Rabelais and Swift...and what could be better? --Hayden Carruth
To say Ms. Gordon is fertile with metaphor is to only hint at her abilities; examples burst with prolific abandon from every page... Gordon's novel remains foremost a comic triumph. --Aspect
When I first read this novel I thought it far ahead of most new writing. I feel the same upon a later reading. I'm struck by its originality, its loving cynicism, its irony, its poetic force. --William Goyen --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Jaimy Gordon was born in Baltimore, earned degrees from Antioch College and Brown University, and now teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and an Academy Institute Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. With Peter Blickle, she has translated several works of Maria Beig from the German.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Grab on to Jaimy Gordon's Amazing First Novel,
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This review is from: Shamp of the City-Solo: A Novel (Paperback)
In Shamp of the City-Solo (punctuated with likably quirky drawings by artist James Aitchison) Jaimy Gordon has given us a first novel that is as whacky and inventive as its title promises. Her picaro, teenage Hughbury Shamp, can't wait to slip away from mom, his boring hometown of Bulimy, and frustrating dialogues with his only companion, Sgt. Weatherall Brakeknot, a very deceased resident of the local cemetery.
Gordon plunges right into the action, and by chapter two Hughby has dumped Brakeknottian colloquy and fallen into the clutches of the first of his three masters, the Topical Tropist [Sergei] Shipoff. Shipoff's wisdom consists of "how to pass up nothing, but maintain the reversability of your position at every turn," a philosophy founded on an eely rhetoric: "the timeliest topos, via the slickest tropos, from the loftiest lecterns." Which sounds to me like Alfred Jarry's `Pataphysics spiced with more than a dash of fastbuck guruism. Shipoff takes Shamp in tow and the con-game to the metropolis, Big Yolk (New York?), where he sets up his lectors academy (i.e., flunky school) in an abandoned subway station near the city limits' sump and dump. Cash is Shipoff's aim, the topos (hustle) fear of overpopulation, the tropos (come-on) hibernation: more sleep, less babies. Cash is what their loony neighbors the Arsleverings have--2.5 million has already gone to the Theater of the People of Barney Street in Big Yolk!--and as the plot unfolds, Shamp finds himself more and more the bait in Shipoff's designs on the grant money. Before long Shipoff joins forces with two other hustlers, the kindly but lunatic Dr. Analarge (a devotee of researches into the Inexpressible) and World-Friar Tapsvine (the triad's religious wing, who keeps the lectors in line with his stratagem of "Waste Confession"). Hughby gets the business from all three of his mentors, and only begins to wake up when he discovers he's scheduled to orate at the annual Arslevering Ox Roast, an honor few survive; the survivor gets the money, but the competition is literally murderous. Locked in a pay toilet until the "festivities" begin, Shamp quaffs a vial of dope (Tapsvine's gift) only to meet, in a dream, his eternal bugbear--Brakeknot. This encounter, which like the rest of the novel has been beautifully orchestrated by Ms. Gordon, frees our anti-hero of his father-complex (and thus from his "tripod" of earthly masters) when he finally faces and embraces the shadowy loser who has haunted him. For like any picaro, Hughby is both a sham and a scamp, and his gullibility is the payoff for his own cravings for acceptance and position; this is, everything corpse Brakeknot lacked. In this sense, Jaimy Gordon has nothing new to tell us about human nature; we find ourselves "used" because, deep down, we want to be. And we continue to be pushed around until we recognize the dark Nobody in ourselves by throwing our arms around it in recognition. This fabulously talented author tells Shamp's story in a dazzling poetic prose (just look at the brilliant character and place-names that dot this review) which reels with a sinuous bawdiness to which Thomas Nashe might perk, and that James Joyce could have twinkled at. Shamp of the City-Solo is a brilliantly realized work, and Jaimy Gordon an author to be watched.
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