Customer Reviews

Snakebite Sonnet: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Nicholas is an artistic soul who, at the age of 10, falls deeply, irrevocably in love with an older woman named Julia. His life is characterized by his encounters with her and her treatment of him.
I am still not sure exactly what to say in review of this book. I can't decide whether it is roughly poetic or vulgar and trying too hard. The phrase `masturbatory fantasy' springs to mind. Nevertheless, the characters are extremely genuine. None seem to have contradictory motives or behave in a way that seems out of character for them. They are real people and not caricatures. Nick is a ridiculously self-aware narrator, and honest with the reader about his motivations as they contradict his dialogue. He is fascinating.
As a side note, the author is also incredibly well-informed on the subject of out-of-the-ordinary art forms, describing the processes of copper etchings and book binding, and other things I don't exactly have a name for. It was quite interesting to read about, and the descriptions did not interrupt the flow of the narrative.
I enjoyed this book immensely, although I would not recommend it to just anyone. I think it takes a somewhat scattered individual with no qualms about graphic sex and general crudeness of language.

Nicky Wertheim is 10 years old in Silver Crest, N.J., when he first sees a blond 19-year-old goddess named Julia and is smitten with a crush that endures beyond the summer. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asks her. "Several. Do you want to be my boyfriend? "Yes." "Well, maybe later," she says. After Julia leaves town, Nicky is unable to shake the key event of that fateful summer - and of his life: While hiking, Julia is bitten by a snake; Nicky rushes to make the proper knife incision and suck out the poison. The snake turns out to be harmless, but Nicky's swallowed "mouthful of girl blood" promises to haunt him forever: "I had a little of Julia's blood in me now, and with luck that bit of Julia would stay with me forever."

As Nick grows to adulthood and beyond, he holds out hope that Julia will eventually be his. But *maybe later* moves further and further away: "I'd chosen as my heart's desire the queen of the inaccessible," he says. Unaware of her continuing hold on Nick's heart, Julia flits in and out of the rest of Max Phillips's accomplished debut novel, which strings us along - through three decades! - in the hopes that she and Nick (the book's narrator) will finally consummate their sporadically torrid relationship. And even though "Snakebite Sonnet" begins to fade about halfway through, we never stop caring about these characters, or about Nick's struggle to reconcile each new romantic liaison with the unfulfilled promise of Julia's blood.

"Snakebite Sonnet" is marvelous in tracing the young Nick's immature thoughts and feelings. Phillips perfectly captures the appealingly peculiar Wertheim family, headed by eccentric pre-hippie parents who insist Nicky and his twin sister Del call them by their first names (instead of their "societal roles"). "I called our folks Mom and Dad, against their wishes, because I loved them and wanted them to act like parents," he tells us. "Del called them Saul and Suzanne because she hated them and had given up." Describing his parents' going about the house ! nearly nude, and his experimental necking with his sister, Nicky notes: "I didn't know what the routine was in other families, but I figured it wasn't like this." There's also a ton of (non-familial) sex in "Snakebite Sonnet," to the extent that it seems a bit out of proportion to the rest of Nick's life. On the other hand, Phillips writes a great sex scene, so we don't mind that this story about thwarted passion is so erotically charged. The novel is frequently very funny, as when Nick and a girlfriend tearfully break up: "After that, we went through a phase where we dated all the time, and then a phase where we went to bed occasionally and tried to see ourselves as friends, and finally a phase where she married a forty-two-year-old public relations consultant."

After a while - about the point when Nick turns 23 and moves to Manhattan's East Village, working/killing time as a bike messenger - the humor, and everything else, turns a bit desperate. As a full-fledged adult, Nick isn't nearly as fun to spend time with. And he's not all that familiar anymore. Unfortunately, many decades-spanning chronicles of lives fall victim to the same tendencies: At some point the protagonist stops seeming charmingly eccentric and countercultural and begins to come off as antisocial, unstable and inconsistent. What was precocious becomes merely precious. Sometimes the inconsistencies make it tough to get a handle on Nick. "What do you believe in?" a girlfriend asks him at age 21. "Passion," he responds. But two years later, participating in an avant-garde art show, he agrees to lie in a corner "completely mummified in masking tape." A collaborator says, "It's *got* to be you, Nick. No one else is passive enough." Which is it? Passion or passivity?

Meanwhile, in her every-so-often appearances, each of which discombobulates Nick, Julia loses all her mystery and most of her appeal. "She's grown genuinely nasty," one woman tells him. Julia's flaws and quirks start seeming pathological; her drinking and behavior turn ugly, ! and less and less forgivable. In the grip of permanent obsession, Nick too becomes less sympathetic, particularly in the area of romance. He says of one girlfriend: "I'd learned to experience desire as hatred. . . . I'd come to view sex as a long-deferred retribution for life's teasing. . . . I was rough, and loved to inflict pleasure, to bite and slap and wrench her from one posture to another. . . . The real me . . . was spelled out in bruises and toothmarks." After that disturbing relationship ends, with relief on our parts, Nick's life slows to a near stop. "I turned thirty, then thirty-one." Phillips even acknowledges the difficulty of moving a story along against a protagonist's inertia. "Now, a story, as I understand it, is a matter of What Does Our Hero Do Next?" he writes. "The difficulty in telling the story of a cement-assed depressive like me is that our hero does *nothing* next, and does it over and over."

Nick finally forces himself to come to terms with his elusive goddess, now plump and heading toward middle age but still unheedingly hovering over his every move. "She's poisoning everything," he cries out to an old friend. "She's hurt me so much! I don't care if she didn't mean to, I don't care if I sat up and begged for it! I'm choking on this backlog of things I haven't said." The inevitable final, air-clearing meeting is worth waiting for, and we find ourselves liking Nick and Julia a little again. And it turns out that, despite the flaws of "Snakebite Sonnet," it has kept us entertained and focused all the way to the end.

Knowing nothing about this book,I picked it up and read the first page. It is love novel. It's hard not to laugh. This is a novel that should recieve serious attention. Well done Mr Phillips, keep writing and I'll keep reading.

Phillips is a poet? I believe it. His prose is so sensual and original and sharp and clear it's almost tangible; his descriptions of women's bodies in particular are brilliantly tactile, detailed to the max (ha ha), which seemed absolutely right for his obsessive narrator to do. Each character is 3-D and totally alive; the dialogue is crackling, witty, sophisticated, urban. Loved the parents, Del, the Dutch girlfriend, the black girlfriend. Wow. I couldn't put this book down, stayed up way too late finishing it. Maybe that's why the ending felt a tad anticlimactic and too long in coming... I was disappointed, because this guy can really write.

Max Phillips writes beautifully. He knows how to describe feelings, sights, and smells so that the reader is right there with him. He will take you on a ride of obsession with a crazy woman. But at times you might feel like: why is he still harboring on this girl? She's unlikeable. She's inconsiderate, an alcoholic, and unreliable. She's a flirt, but she's ma