Customer Reviews

Toast

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

 

 

There is a lot of smarmy mainstream regional fiction out there in the world today, but not Rex Rose's Toast. Rex Rose's Toast captures the glimmer and grit of a new sort of sub-generation living in the musical/muscular delta of the Mississippi's effluvia. I ain't never read nothing like this before. In fact, I read it twice, and since I am a big time movie producer, I am going to have this work made into a screenplay. Books don't sell, movies do. I'm talking money, honey, big bucks and buxom beauties. Just you watch!

Rex Rose's novel Toast is a maelstrom of colorful characters, chaos and action, straight from the brain of a New Orleans gutterpunk who knows his turf and colors it well. Don't look here for the sentimental hallmark prose of prosaic lamentation, cuz this is the realm of hyper-absurd nonstop narration laying rubber across the asphalt of imagination, tattooing our minds with muscle-car scenes we will never forget, plus midgets and freaks and addicts bound by visions and missions of vengeance.

I read this book as a part of a Fiction Workshop class. We didn't choose the book because it was a masterpiece of literature, but rather the professor knew the author and wanted to get around to reading the book.

This book is definitely reflective of the ups and downs of a first time writer. The form is different, often chapters are interrupted by taped conversations with characters which can concurrently enhance and detract from the work.

What Didn't Work:
The characters lack a true development, you don't gain any greater insight into any of them over the last 100 plus pages of the book. The last chapter is anticlimactic and somewhat unnecessary. It's made quite apparent through a thorough reading of the text that the author does not understand people very well and what we are left with as a result are mostly stock characters, save for the few supporting ones that have individual chapters devoted to their antics

What works well:
The description of New Orleans, the river, the degradation is fantastic. In fact, Rose does a disservice to himself by not utilitizing his greatest asset, his knowledge of the area and ability to convey it visually through text. The story itself has elements of 'Pulp Fiction' in it and there are no truly good guys, only a bunch of screwups that mirror everyone in their insecurities and self-destructive habits.

All in all:
A decent read, entertaining, but not especially breathtaking or reflective. In many places as shallow as the protagonist. If you can find it at a library, (which is unlikely since there were only 1000 copies published) check it out, but I don't know if its worth the price of admission.

If you want to explore the pathos of being down and out in New Orleans. If you want to be touched by characters you could never love but only feel sympathy for, then read this book and treasure it. This book is for the man who is down and needs to work his way up, and that means a lot of us. Put this book on your bookshelf.