A funny yet moving debut coming-of-age novel traces Nicholas Wertheim's thirty-year sexual obsession with an upper-class neighbor, ten years his senior, and his struggle to release himself from his youthful yearnings. A first novel. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Snakebite Sonnet begins with the unbridled attraction 10-year-old Nicky Wertheim feels toward 19-year-old Julia Turrell. So begins a long on-again-off-again relationship based mostly on lust. Throughout the novel, from Nicky's childhood in New Jersey to college life at Cornell and then on to the life of an East Village punk, Julia appears and reappears to Nicky, leading to a series of encounters that bring bliss and misery in equal measures to both participants. Max Phillips' razor-sharp satirical instincts give this first novel an edge that many coming-of-age efforts lack.
From Publishers Weekly
At the outset of this poised first novel, Nicholas Wertheim, child of aging hippies in suburban New Jersey, sucks the incision he's made in 19-year-old Julia Turrel's snakebitten thigh. That the snake turns out not to be poisonous at all-and that this news comes from Craig, Julia's 38-year-old boyfriend-suggests both the intensity and the misadventures that will mark the relationship between Nicholas and Julia. As Nicholas matures, moving to the "bucolic vacuum" of Ithaca to study at Cornell, and then to Manhattan to work as an artist, he chronicles his erotic history. His liaisons somehow intimately involve Julia, whether she is physically present or not. Julia herself never loses her hold on him, even as her own multiple relationships-warped by her alcoholism and the aftershocks of a quasi-sexual complicity with her unstable father-complicate her essential bond with Nicholas. The writing-veering into lush descriptions of one erotic entanglement after another, ruefully evoking the optimism of young artists scrabbling for a foothold, or indulging the edgy romanticism of someone damaged by the vagaries of his beloved's affections-flirts with excess. But Phillips demonstrates a poet's ear for lyric precision and a comic's for surefire punch lines. Translation rights: Harold Ober; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth Looking For,
By A Customer
This review is from: Snakebite Sonnet: A Novel (Hardcover)
It boggles the mind (well, my mind) that this book is out of print while so much lousy writing and so many trite stories clutter the shelves. This man can write. And the story is alive and real and touching and funny and sexy and moving. Won't add another plot summary here -- just had to say this is one of the best things I happened to pick up all year, and I did so only because of the quote ads on the back of his recent book, The Artist's Wife. Snakebite Sonnet won't disappoint. Trot over to your local library and find a copy.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Snakebite Sonnet: A Delicious Read,
By A Customer
This review is from: Snakebite Sonnet: A Novel (Hardcover)
From his first glimpse of Julia Turrell, the brilliant, bratty,
baggage-laden redhead nearly a decade his senior, little Nicky
"The Nose" Wertheim believes he knows the meaning of the word
'destiny.'
Nick immediately appoints Julia as his muse for life. She is brilliant and playful; a Goddess of lush curls, pale skin and a small, rounded belly. She is experienced, sexy, sophisticated and needy. She is hard to hold onto. She is uncontrollable. Nick's voice takes off with your mind in tow, leading those brave enough to follow on an odyssey of love and lust unsatiated, an odyssey through the sensitive youth of a lonely artist; sweet, sensory, and lost. Raised in a two room shack by ex-hippie parents, Nick grows up in a rich neighborhood, where people don't understand poverty, Judaism, or the sweet plague that leads him back and back again to Julia. Nick is left to find his own way through an idealistic childhood, to a Gen-Xish bohemian adolesence, to that first whipcrack of rebellion that leads him finally, slowly, into adulthood. Snakebite Sonnet is a delight in every sense; a delight _for_ every sense, from the first sight of the radiant Julia to the tang of the curry with which Nick and his twin sister have supplemented all of their recipes since teaching themselves to cook. You will not understand love when you're done feasting with Nick on the wonder and terror of growing up in a thrill of passionate dreams set against a humming monochrome of reality. You will not understand fate, but maybe you will accept it. What is certain, though, is that you will feel the warm gulleys and cool edges of adolescence once again surfacing within you. That you will see yourself, somewhere, through Nick Wertheim's restless eyes.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delivers,
By Rick Ollerman (Littleton, NH USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Snakebite Sonnet: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a coming of age, lost in life book. The kind you've read before, and you know what you're getting. You travel through life with the main character, from boyhood to nearly middle age, never quite understanding him or where he's going to end up. The feeling's the thing, the themes of unrequited love, lost youth, surrendered years. With a book like this it's the journey that matters, not the resolution, which, if there is one, can only be steeped in melancholy one way or another.Phillips' Hard Case Crime book is very good, and I love his Forrest DeVoe, Jr. superspy books. He's a versatile writer and I wish he'd write more books. I'll happily read them.
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