A good friend of mine named Shane read my upcoming book. He is a talented artist and is working hard to convince me that the cover should be in color. Because he just discovered the website (I hadn't talked to him in years), he didn't focus so much on the snippet part of my book (which is half the pages) and instead focused on the other half.
Before you read this review/commentary, you should know that the main character in the book is named Nick (as opposed to Nate) because, well, I can get into a lot less trouble that way.
I've know Nathan or Nick, or whoever he is for some years now, since we were wee tykes really, riding our skateboards and listening to the Ramones, so I know his particular brand of refined delinquencies quite well and of course I have been subjected to a good bit of his gibberish over the years both in print and otherwise. Even with that perspective it seems to me he has managed to focus that poetic energy here to create something truly original that does what great writing or great art should do. That is: communicate some truth about the human condition in an accessible manner that does not bore and frustrate readers into a desperate fit of suicidal depression. I'm not saying that this is a great work of writing, it is impossible for me to be objective enough to say for sure, you see I was a visitor many nights to the basement door described in the [book's] pages as both a customer and a friend. I recognize the people concealed behind the nicknames and I know the story to be true. The details of the inflow of LSD into the Midwest in the mid nineties and its impact on the generation that rode the edge of that unlikely wave into nowhere in particular is an overdue tale. In fact it is precisely that generation that is now slowly taking the reigns just as they warned us that we would back then, and it is still the most discounted and perhaps scarcely understood generation in American History. The bored generation, true rebels without a cause, acid eaters without a revolution. The overwhelming triumph of political correctness, cynical publishing, drug hysteria, and the ever increasing power of the establishment and its overreaching arm of enforcement kept the stories of my generation, yours, your friends, neighbors, and co-workers almost entirely untold but what Nathan, or Nick or whoever he is has accomplished through the unusual arrangement of the details of so called crimes that other decent folks are spending the rest of their lives in jail for combined with the everyday idle barroom chatter of the lost generation and the sordid details of his sex life is to burnish down the requisite bullshit veneer of twenty-first century literature enough to reveal a glimmer of truth, and for that matter the beauty embedded in the mundane and to shine a light on the bizarre world that has unfolded before those of us that went stumbling around looking for it. Not your typical coming of age story ready for evening television but rather an unsterilized recounting of one human story of coming of age in a capitalist paradox unfit for Oprah, and interspersed with the dilemma of mediocrity of another generation turned to booze and despair. But Oprah got what she deserved when she brought that punk James Frey up on stage and if she wants the true story let her read this book.
The Snippets will be up later today.