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America's Magic Mountain
Filled with many compelling, outrageous, and comic voices, White's novel is disturbing, charming, and biting. Curtis White's new novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book, though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centres. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves from addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. It is about a weird and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognisable as our own.
231 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 28, 2011
I haven’t read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, so I can’t comment on how accurate an ‘update’ this novel is. That’s quite frustrating as it means I can’t comment on structure or plot, since each might mirror the Mann novel, therefore armouring itself against criticism. Clever that.
This novel is a hodgepodge of elements. It’s sort of the The Shining meets Infinite Jest, if one wanted to do that modern comparison thing so beloved among reviewers. (And one does, and one did). Hans visits his cousin’s retreat for alcoholics, whose sole treatment involves drinking more and more after listening to demented preachers inside a sweaty shack. Hans stumbles around, getting abuse from a little prick called Teddy, dreaming about a romp with middle-aged Cecile, and brooding on his parental issues.
Like Requiem, the book becomes overtaken with voices, and the novel drops its linear structure halfway through for a parade of eccentric characters, psychobabble parody, and dark little episodes that further Curtis White’s obsession with drunk fathers and broken childhoods. It’s an absolute mess on every level, but so funny and erudite, you can’t help but love it.
This novel is a hodgepodge of elements. It’s sort of the The Shining meets Infinite Jest, if one wanted to do that modern comparison thing so beloved among reviewers. (And one does, and one did). Hans visits his cousin’s retreat for alcoholics, whose sole treatment involves drinking more and more after listening to demented preachers inside a sweaty shack. Hans stumbles around, getting abuse from a little prick called Teddy, dreaming about a romp with middle-aged Cecile, and brooding on his parental issues.
Like Requiem, the book becomes overtaken with voices, and the novel drops its linear structure halfway through for a parade of eccentric characters, psychobabble parody, and dark little episodes that further Curtis White’s obsession with drunk fathers and broken childhoods. It’s an absolute mess on every level, but so funny and erudite, you can’t help but love it.
April 6, 2021
Spoiler: it's corporate landrape atop toxic slag radiating the dream debris of ruined lives. Drunk children, undead sprawl, and literary panache are all here. Something is rotten in the Rust Belt. Actually everywhere The Bottom Line is the Golden Calf. Hysterically tragic.
February 3, 2018
Social satire for the same bookshelf as Vonnegut, Nabokov and Alexie, I found White's cruise along the spiral ("circling the drain" we call it in 12-step programs) of a treatment center for alcoholics eye-opening, funny, and tragic.
Eye-opening because who knew? the recesses of American culture require full and extreme exploitation of the individual's will, ambitions, and identity for its sustenance; that as dedicated consumers, we Americans must take a loyalty oath to consume as much of what we are sold as possible, be it TV and social media, alcohol, fast food...and the liberal be damned who wants to clean up the slag pits, stop the cycle of consumption and end the madness.
Funny because the characters and their speeches reel into dementia, repetition, insanity, egotism, fallaciousness, and corruption (my favorite was Professor Feeling). Hans being a student of Industrial Psychology skewers (in a backhanded way) our universities and colleges of their erudite exceptionalism and rationalizations of corruption. White's story takes place in a heartland setting (or central Illinois for those keeping score at home) and the barbs strike at the root of American culture. Defunct shopping malls, a Quonset hut for a meeting hall, tanker supply of vodka, the Orwellian doublespeak for psychological madness all reveal the treatment center known as the Elixer to be nothing more than hemlock for the thinker.
Tragic because it lampoons, well, us and those of us who care about what it is like living in the bowels of a rotting empire. I read Mann's Magic Mountain in my undergrad days long ago but now I want to go back and compare White's remake to the original because, frankly, I cannot recall what happens to Mann's Hans Castorp--I do recall that I greatly admired the reading experience and went on to read more of Mann. I cannot give away the ending to White's Hans Castorp except to say that it is deliciously ambiguous.
Take this book on if you dare to be challenged. White is intelligent and pivots fast; he requires full attention--and it is a very rewarding reading experience. We need more Curtis Whites writing about the madness that is America.
Eye-opening because who knew? the recesses of American culture require full and extreme exploitation of the individual's will, ambitions, and identity for its sustenance; that as dedicated consumers, we Americans must take a loyalty oath to consume as much of what we are sold as possible, be it TV and social media, alcohol, fast food...and the liberal be damned who wants to clean up the slag pits, stop the cycle of consumption and end the madness.
Funny because the characters and their speeches reel into dementia, repetition, insanity, egotism, fallaciousness, and corruption (my favorite was Professor Feeling). Hans being a student of Industrial Psychology skewers (in a backhanded way) our universities and colleges of their erudite exceptionalism and rationalizations of corruption. White's story takes place in a heartland setting (or central Illinois for those keeping score at home) and the barbs strike at the root of American culture. Defunct shopping malls, a Quonset hut for a meeting hall, tanker supply of vodka, the Orwellian doublespeak for psychological madness all reveal the treatment center known as the Elixer to be nothing more than hemlock for the thinker.
Tragic because it lampoons, well, us and those of us who care about what it is like living in the bowels of a rotting empire. I read Mann's Magic Mountain in my undergrad days long ago but now I want to go back and compare White's remake to the original because, frankly, I cannot recall what happens to Mann's Hans Castorp--I do recall that I greatly admired the reading experience and went on to read more of Mann. I cannot give away the ending to White's Hans Castorp except to say that it is deliciously ambiguous.
Take this book on if you dare to be challenged. White is intelligent and pivots fast; he requires full attention--and it is a very rewarding reading experience. We need more Curtis Whites writing about the madness that is America.
July 4, 2024
As a great admirer of the works of Thomas Mann, I was pleased to learn that someone had attempted an American version of The Magic Mountain. I opened America's Magic Mountain with the hope that this novel would do justice to Mann's original. Sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth. The only similarities are the name of the protagonist, Hans Castorp and that he was visiting a cousin at a health retreat.
I sought in vain to find any qualities that could justify White's reference to Mann's novel. The setting is absurd, the nature of the cure is ridiculous, the characters are without intelligence or any redeeming social qualities. I guess that the author's aim was to write a comic novel but there is no humor to be found therein. The reader is introduced to one ridiculous character after another, each having succumbed to the alcohol cure.
I decided to stick with the book until the end, hoping that at some point the author would redeem himself. That hope was in vain. If you are looking for a novel with no inherent worth, with a plot that is without a point, then this book is for you. If, like me, you are an admirer of the great Thomas Mann, don't waste your time. There is nothing to be found here for you.
I sought in vain to find any qualities that could justify White's reference to Mann's novel. The setting is absurd, the nature of the cure is ridiculous, the characters are without intelligence or any redeeming social qualities. I guess that the author's aim was to write a comic novel but there is no humor to be found therein. The reader is introduced to one ridiculous character after another, each having succumbed to the alcohol cure.
I decided to stick with the book until the end, hoping that at some point the author would redeem himself. That hope was in vain. If you are looking for a novel with no inherent worth, with a plot that is without a point, then this book is for you. If, like me, you are an admirer of the great Thomas Mann, don't waste your time. There is nothing to be found here for you.
November 1, 2016
You’d think that Curtis White, in his satirical novel, America’s Magic Mountain, would be most interested in channeling Germany’s grand old Mann of modernism. After all, his, too, is the story of the “unassuming” young Hans Castorp, who intends just a short visit to his ailing cousin in a sanitarium but ends up staying for several years. During those years, he encounters the long-winded avatars of Decaying Bourgeois Society, debates with them the meaning of life, and becomes, in a manner of speaking, a philosopher.
Only occasionally does White, a novelist and cultural critic whose most recent book was The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, capture the contemptuous, ironic language with which Thomas Mann frequently flogged his hero. Here, a brief aside manages the trick nicely:
“Cecile looked if not through Hans then into him far enough to see the dense little black marble that was his consciousness. But we shouldn’t give up hope. After all, the brilliant cosmos once flashed from such a dense, black dot.”
Instead, White has built his unusually dyspeptic dystopia on the foundations of George Saunders’ recent classic, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. His characters, like Saunders’, are hyper-articulate, self-referential, and vacuous, like walking televisions. They populate a world in which there are greasy fast-food joints like Daffy Duck’s Chicken, a franchise that hires desperate single mothers and then supplies them with amphetamines. Their subsequent march on Washington is dubbed “the great Duck Walk for Fast-Food Justice.”
Read my full review here: http://bit.ly/2eb9X8I
Only occasionally does White, a novelist and cultural critic whose most recent book was The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, capture the contemptuous, ironic language with which Thomas Mann frequently flogged his hero. Here, a brief aside manages the trick nicely:
“Cecile looked if not through Hans then into him far enough to see the dense little black marble that was his consciousness. But we shouldn’t give up hope. After all, the brilliant cosmos once flashed from such a dense, black dot.”
Instead, White has built his unusually dyspeptic dystopia on the foundations of George Saunders’ recent classic, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. His characters, like Saunders’, are hyper-articulate, self-referential, and vacuous, like walking televisions. They populate a world in which there are greasy fast-food joints like Daffy Duck’s Chicken, a franchise that hires desperate single mothers and then supplies them with amphetamines. Their subsequent march on Washington is dubbed “the great Duck Walk for Fast-Food Justice.”
Read my full review here: http://bit.ly/2eb9X8I
October 3, 2008
I think this might be the first book of fiction I've finished since school started, after a series of books that were just too boring to bother reading. None of them will turn up here, but there were a handful that I tried and dropped, tried and dropped.
I should have gone to White sooner, but I hesitated because I felt like I didn't really enjoy _Requiem_ as much as I appreciated it as a well constructed work that nonetheless didn't speak to me. This, though, well, I'm not sure it spoke to me, either, but it tickled my funny bone a lot, made me scratch my head and giggle uncomfortably. It's vintage White, with lots of weird ideas and seriously stunted characters (the mayor who interprets all dreams as being about lost genitals, the father whose authority is vested in his parts and his dominion over the remote control; the intervention of Professor Feeling in young Hans family dynamic)-- there's a lot in this book to really like, and it all works because there's a madcap air of it not quite needing to hang together-- I mean, Mann's book is a mess, right, so why expect more from White? A real treat, a page turner, and my salvation, for at least a week or so.
I should have gone to White sooner, but I hesitated because I felt like I didn't really enjoy _Requiem_ as much as I appreciated it as a well constructed work that nonetheless didn't speak to me. This, though, well, I'm not sure it spoke to me, either, but it tickled my funny bone a lot, made me scratch my head and giggle uncomfortably. It's vintage White, with lots of weird ideas and seriously stunted characters (the mayor who interprets all dreams as being about lost genitals, the father whose authority is vested in his parts and his dominion over the remote control; the intervention of Professor Feeling in young Hans family dynamic)-- there's a lot in this book to really like, and it all works because there's a madcap air of it not quite needing to hang together-- I mean, Mann's book is a mess, right, so why expect more from White? A real treat, a page turner, and my salvation, for at least a week or so.
December 8, 2008
This started out interesting enough, but it soon got slow and boring. I lost all interest toward the end of the book, and couldn't even tell you what it was about really. The plus side is that I designed the cover as well as the interior copy layout (also, it was reviewed in Playboy the month of its publication, so a picture of my book design graces the book review that month).
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews