Customer Reviews

Up

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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."

-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.