When Ronald Sukenick's first novel, UP, came out in 1968, post-modernism, avant-pop and autofiction hadn't been invented yet. UP invented them. Ronald Sukenick's ten subsequent books are typically twenty or thirty years ahead of their time, and UP is more timely than ever. Ronald Sukenick is himself the main character of his book, in which he glides undisturbed from present to future, from reality to fantasy. Some of the time he's an adolescent Brooklynite, at other times a part-time English teacher, a struggling writer living in a Lower East Side tenement, or a fantasist deftly moving in and out of numerous alter egos. His comings and goings produce a stunning tour de force of a novel—mutinous, violent, sexy, sad, and above all, funny.
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"Beg it, buy it, borrow it or steal it. UP is the most serious and valid anatomy of our culture's ills this reviewer has encountered in the past year's reading."
—Minneapolis Tribune
About the Author
Ronald Sukenick (1932- 2004), a writer whose novels and stories over a 38 year time span have been credited with breaking new ground. Sukenick was an English professor and creative writing director at the University of Colorado. He founded The Fiction Collective, an avant-garde publishing house, and was founding editor of The American Book Review.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book Week/Chicago Sun-Times June 1968,
By A Customer
This review is from: Up (Paperback)
Ronald Sukenick's first "Novel is captivating , yet painful. For while most of us spend labyrinthian lives hiding what we really feel, this former New York college teacher has that rare, run-naked psyche. Just as jarring is "Up's" fresh form. Spurred by his conviction that the novel can longer handle reality, Sukenick's book treads a wide path between easy experimentalism and galloping originality, as fiction is strangely reined to autobiography...."how this cultural chaos affects individuals...sick of hypocrite jobs sick of kindness to animals sick of media tease sick of packaging sick of insurance salesman sick of plastic...sick of marriage sick of adultery..." ...The crucial "thing," though, is a man who cannot stop searching passionately for meaning, whether teaching flying a kite along the East River, or loving: "'Make it last,' she kept saying. But it was as if she were articulating with her body something more like, Get through to me. Help me."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saturday Review July 6, 1968,
By A Customer
This review is from: Up (Paperback)
-by Edward M. Potoker-Ronald Sukenick's "Up" is one of the funniest books of the season, a hilarious outburst of wild comedy that mocks the pretensions of the young, whether they involve op, pop or slop. The book, Sukenick's first full-length fictional work, has a solid intellectual substratum as well, in which serious points are made cooly and without the pontifical solemnity some cultural historians require.
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