The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel [Paperback]

Justin Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 8, 2011

“A feverish, fearless writer.” —Christine Schutt, author of All Souls, finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

“The Gospel of Anarchy is a beautiful, searching and sometimes brutally funny novel. Justin Taylor writes with fierce precision and perfect balance.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

Following his critically acclaimed short story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, Justin Taylor’s mesmerizing debut novel explores the eccentricities, insights, and unexpected grace found in a motley crew of off-beat anarchists, and their quest to achieve utopia in a crumbling Florida commune. In the vein of Chris Adrian, Padgett Powel, and Hunter Thompson, Taylor delivers a shrewd, cerebral, and often wickedly humorous vision of reality on every leaf of the mirthfully absurd The Gospel of Anarchy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Among the malcontents in Taylor's narrow debut novel (after collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever) is David, a Gainesville, Fla., college dropout with a dead-end job. After destroying his computer, he chances upon a pair of dumpster divers who appear to have more going on than he does, and so he follows them to a rundown punk house called Fishgut and quickly adopts the lifestyle, growing a beard and engaging in a relentless bout of three-ways with a couple of punk girls. They go to church together (partly for the free food) and end up forming their own cult based on the inscrutable writings of an anarchist named Parker who has disappeared from Fishgut. The Fishgut inner circle grows smaller and crazier as the crew pushes their new religion with a popular zine, though the events don't seem to build so much as pile up. Taylor can set a scene, but he takes his characters and their screwy subculture so seriously that you'd think he, himself, was a convert. With little attention paid to finding direction, the novel, like its characters, simply drifts. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Taylor follows up the story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2010), with a provocative debut novel depicting a Gainesville, Florida, swallowed by its university and an ever-developing string of chain stores and apartment complexes but in which a small but zealous group of anarchist punks rebels against corporate corruption and government oppression by rooting through dumpsters and stealing in order to survive. Enter David, a college dropout with nothing going for him but a dead-end telemarketing job and a porn addiction. Determined to shake his apathetic lifestyle, David runs into an acquaintance who invites him to Fishgut, a dilapidated house full of ruffians and hippies with utopian dreams of a world without rules. Quickly sloughing off his former self, David enters a dizzying new life of sexual liberty, drug- and alcohol-induced philosophizing, and rock and roll as he and his housemates await the return of Parker, a so-called Anarchristian whose left-behind journals serve as their gospel. Writing from various perspectives in a wholly captivating style, Taylor traces the delicate lines between freedom, spirituality, politics, and happiness, depicting a lifestyle both hopeful and flawed. --Jonathan Fullmer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Original edition (February 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061881821
• ISBN-13: 978-0061881824
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,049,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Novel of the Year July 21, 2011

By Points

Format:Paperback

Justin Taylor is something of an anomaly among the emerging group of what I hesitantly call "internet writers." He isn't an experimentalist, an anti-emotional minimalist, or what's known as a "sentence writer." He's a storyteller. He also could be the best American writer under 30.

His debut novel, "The Gospel of Anarchy," like Denis Johnson's debut novel "Angels," gives a stunning representation of a segment of society previously untouched in literature; in this case, it's a group of punks, hippies and assorted dropouts living together in a dilapidated flophouse in Florida named "Fishgut." There's all the sex, drugs and rock & roll you'd expect from a novel about modern twenty-somethings, but Taylor has much deeper goals in mind than simply exhibiting some youthful hedonism. The book is about a group of friends unified by a shared disdain for late-capitalist American society. But the central paradox is that when a fringe group decides to construct their own moral code, it can end up just as ostracizing as the conformist structures most free-thinkers seek to escape. In that sense, Taylor's novel can almost be read as a kind of Henry James for impoverished libertines, although the influences of writers like Don DeLillo and Flannery O'Connor are more apparent in the text.

It's clear Taylor is very intelligent and well-versed in Western and non-Western literary canons, but the book is wisely guided by the emotional states of its characters. The narrative structure is egalitarian, giving intimate access to the minds of several different denizens of Fishgut, and Taylor expertly modulates and organizes these different voices.

If you're looking for a thoughtful, character-driven page-turner, but you're unmoved by the preening sentimentality of modern fiction, I urge Justin Taylor upon you. His talent is formidable, and a decade from now, a lot of readers will wish they would have had the opportunity to track his development.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars cliche-ridden disappointment April 30, 2011

By profbty

Format:Paperback

I read an advance-copy of this book eagerly. I was immediately taken in by the writing of the plight of the narrator. But the book ends up telling the same-old story about young radicals: they are foolish innocents taken in by there own naivite and are filled with contradictions. do we really need another book to tell us that young radicals can be hypocrites? Read Newman's "Fountain at the Center of the World" for a novel that doesn't traffic in the same old complaints. it's easy to mock young radicals -- what's more critical in for our society is to realize what lessons we have to learn from those who believe "another world is possible."

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars (3.5 stars) "What would anarchy look like if we just started calling it truth?" February 9, 2011

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

We do love our literary bad boys and Taylor jumps into the mix with his protagonist, David, in 1999 Gainesville, Florida. A recent college drop-out with a soul-killing job, the sterile walls of David's on-campus apartment yield no clues to his interior life- or lack of. Loneliness has driven the twenty-one year old to the flickering screen of his laptop, where he has mastered the Zen of pornography, the "gleeful gilding of the filth" simply one more scam of web sites and prurient appetites, the parade of faceless women as unsubstantial as their virtual names, ghosts trapped in cyber-space. As David wanders the streets of something, anything, he stumbles upon a pair of dumpster divers, ex-students who lead him to their house, Fishgut, and temporary nirvana.

Inside, David's chronic state of alienation from the world and himself finds temporary reprieve, a loose-knit band of hippies, punks and anarchists who breach the boundaries of religion, politics and the false prophets of their world. As Katy, a kind of earth mother libertine, runs her fingers through David's hair and that of her lover, Liz, David can barely keep from crying: He realizes how long it's been since he's been touched. For all the intellectual distractions, political diatribes and search for God in an indifferent world, it is the human contact that feeds David's soul. Katy and Liz provide that contact in excess. From the David's biting commentary on the labyrinthine and deceptive temptations of pornography to the ultimate betrayal of a girl he really cared about, David's demoralization is complete, his psyche ready for the chance encounter at the dumpster.

David wallows in this nest of rebellious ideas and dirty sheets, tangentially intrigued by the quest to comprehend the Divine, testing his commitment to abandon while living in filth and dining on stranger's discarded garbage. This parallel existence meets his needs- for a time. But even this anti-world evolves, made smaller in its familiarity, albeit wrapped in drug-fueled intellectual pursuits. Absorbed into the bohemian laxity of Katy and Liz's easy affection, anarchy turns complacent, people coming and going on impulse, their putative "leader", a mysterious hobo who has long since moved on, remembered only by a tent left in the back yard. While David transitions from one dimension to another, in thrall to the changed parameters of his existence and rapturously indulging in the wonders of the flesh and the mind, Taylor leaves the reader behind to languish with the long-gone hobo's empty tent. Taylor is certainly a writer to watch. But in the end, it is the title I like best. Luan Gaines/2011.