The Terrible Twos [Paperback]

Ishmael Reed (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1999

The Terrible Twos is a wickedly funny, sharp-edged fictional assault on all those sulky, spoiled naysayers needing instant gratification--Americans. Ishmael Reed's sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all-too-believable future where mankind's fate depends upon a jolly old gent named St. Nicholas and a Risto-rasta dwarf named Black Peter, who together wreak mischievous havoc on Wall Street and in the Oval Office. This offbeat, on-target social critique makes marvelous fun of everything that is American, from commercialism to Congress, Santa Claus to religious cults.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A Christmas Carol, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and Robert Coover's The Public Burning--all hover as influences over this latest production by Ishmael Reed, the novelist and poet who has been called the best black writer in America today. Reed's mastery of crosscutting techniques and his extravagant inventiveness keep the madness on the boil and help disguise this novel's essential commitment to savage social criticism. . . . In its (many) finer moments, this is matchless comic invective. Ishmael Reed is a one-of-a-kind writer." -- Bruce Allen, Saturday Review, 6/82

"Reed follows modern masters as diverse as James Joyce and Alain Robbe-Grillet. . . . His own penchant for satire and battle has earned him some devoted followers. . . . Reed weaves Rastafarianism and a reverse of the Todd Clifton dummy sequence from Invisible Man together with Dickens' A Christmas Carol in The Terrible Twos." -- Stanley Crouch, The Nation 5/22/82

"Reed has been revising the authorized edition of American history in all his novels, to give the ghosts a chance to talk, and in The Terrible Twos he achieves a kind of jive transcendence. . . . Reed is as close as we are likely to get to a Garcia Marquez, elaborating his own mythology even as he trashes ours. . . . The Terrible Twos tells many jokes before it kills , almost as if it had been written with barbed wire." -- John Leonard, New York Times, 6/17/82

About the Author

Ishmael Reed grew up in working class neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York, and at the age of thirteen was writing his own newspaper column about jazz. He attended the University of Buffalo, moved to New York in 1960 and to Berkeley in 1967. As well as being a novelist, poet, and essayist, he is a songwriter, television producer, publisher, magazine editor, playwright, and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation and There City Cinema, both of which are located in northern California. Among his honors, fellowships, and prizes is the Lewis H. Michaux Literary Prize awarded to him in 1978 by the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and is currently a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1998 he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Oakland, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr; 1st Dalkey Archive ed edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564782263
• ISBN-13: 978-1564782267
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #765,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What You're Missing, February 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Terrible Twos (Paperback)

I am at a loss to why Ishmael Reed's novels are so resisted by readers. OK maybe not a total loss. The frantic pace, unrelenting inventiveness and a satirical gift that exposes uncomfortable truths in all their multiplicity, is bound to leave some readers behind. (Despite the fact that the reading skills that you use walking down the average city street exceed what is required by most supposedly 'difficult' literature - Reed included).

For those readers of Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace and others, (never mind Laurence Sterne or Jonathan Swift that could also bear comparison) there should be no excuses.

To emphasise the positive, I personally found The Terrible Twos so funny and compelling, that I forgot what I was doing and read it to the end, giving myself sunstroke in the process (not easy to do in a Dublin garden I can tell you).

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex, layered & Faulkner-esque, February 2, 2001

By 

Kimberly Wells (Shreveport, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Terrible Twos (Paperback)

I'm excited that Reed's book has been reprinted... when I read it for a course, we had to put a copy on reserve because it was out of print. This is a marvelously intricate novel which does eventually pull all the disparate strands together in a way that if you persevere, you will find rewarding.

You'll never look at Santa Claus the same way again. And those little statues people put up nowadays with a Nativity scene and Santa sitting in? They'll make you outright chortle.

3 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weird and confusing, April 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Terrible Twos (Paperback)

I know this book was supposed to be clever, but I found it to be very confusing. There were so many characters thrown at the reader in the first two or three chapters, that when those characters reappeared later in the book it was hard to remember who they were or what role they had played earlier. I also found the constant jumping from one scene to another hard to follow.

I am an avid reader and it is RARE that I ever quit reading a book before I reach the end, but I am about two thirds of the way through and am thinking about tossing this one. Maybe it redeems itself in the end, but I'm finding it a chore rather than a pleasure to persevere. Time is just too precious and there are so many good books out there.