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The Exagggerations of Peter Prince

Steve Katz

3.92 · Rating details · 13 ratings · 6 reviews

The Exagggerations of Peter Prince is an adventure for the reader and for the hero. We join with Peter Prince in his merry search for himself in old myths and new legends and in the very creation of the book. Peter Prince guides us through an exciting, uninhibited plot, which is simply meant to extend the reader's definitions of fiction and life.

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Hardcover, 281 pages

Published January 1st 1968 by Holt, Rineheart, and Winston

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· 13 ratings · 6 reviews

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Feb 15, 2020 Vit Babenco rated it liked it

Do characters of books pray to their authors like human beings pray to God?

Fuck the ‘Existence of God.’ What does it mean to me when I can be incinerated with the whole rest of my race by men. Even if I accept it, for instance, and say He does lead me around on a leash. How could He possibly know what I need or even care about it when this is where He brought us so far. It’s some kind of sport He’s playing, the Stupid Asshole, and He’s playing it with me. I mean, Job that poor fucker. Just becau

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Jun 14, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it

Shelves: 2014-gelesen

The good folks at Verbivoracious Press have slated a March date for the re=issue of this Crusty Classic. You fans of Danielewski's (and even more, Federman's) designed books will definitely need to get yourselves a copy.

"Trivia About The Exagggeration... No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »" --gr's=Bad Ass Self

“One of the most mooving reviews I’ve read on gr in many days.” --Will Self

“The best, if not one of the best, interpretations of The Exagggerations of Peter Prince gr has produced in t ...more

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Mar 20, 2017 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it · review of another edition

Do you know this? Even ever heard it exists? An Amur'kan Classic. Now in its second edition from the trepidationless Verbivoracious Press. Now shipping!!

Seriously guys, if you like Federman and you like Sukenick, Katz here is the third of this Trilogy and this is his Book. I mean, if you like this kind of stuff, the Exagggerations (always three g's) has a solid spot in the top 10 of this kind of stuff.

And like everything else you're reading, it serves as solace in this Age of Rump.

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Jan 18, 2015 MJ Nicholls rated it really liked it

Shelves: buried-books, merkins, novels, art-or-illustrated, tortured-artists

Steve Katz’s 1968 novel is, to quote the DJ, “simply meant to extend the reader’s definitions of fiction and life.” Doesn’t sound too ambitious. A forgotten metafictional opus-of-sorts, Katz’s huge rectangular novel pits antihero PP (a womanising drifter who drifts through the novel’s sequence of stop-start helterscrewball antics) against various threats his nefarious author has dreamed up while his electric fan buzzes to keep him cool. Among the pomo things-of-note in this novel: a section that ...more

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Apr 30, 2020 Ben Lieberman rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is a book I considered putting down about halfway through--right around the part with the “deleted” passages--but I have a soft spot for the precocities of Bronx Jews, and, admittedly, Steve Katz can write. Since he appears nominally in Exagggerations itself, I suppose it’s worth comparing Katz’s book with that of his friend Sukenick’s, to wit Up, a novel(?) I read at times with something like pleasure and at times with bewildered anger. Less anger here, with the Peter Prince of the title, This is a book I considered putting down about halfway through--right around the part with the “deleted” passages--but I have a soft spot for the precocities of Bronx Jews, and, admittedly, Steve Katz can write. Since he appears nominally in Exagggerations itself, I suppose it’s worth comparing Katz’s book with that of his friend Sukenick’s, to wit Up, a novel(?) I read at times with something like pleasure and at times with bewildered anger. Less anger here, with the Peter Prince of the title, but less pleasure, too. I find his pseudo-biographical reminiscences about the great City of New York to be interesting, even at times tremendous; but too often Katz makes the conscious choice to throw away rather carelessly his obvious talent for prose writing in favor of either some over-designed deconstructed text, which in all honesty has not and will never do anything for me, really, or to couch Peter’s insolent childishness in terms that, however realistic, make him banal and unappealing.
Still, and at present, I rank my experience with Katz above that of same with his Fiction Collective cronies, being the aforementioned Sukenick and the heretofore unnamed Federman. While acknowledging Ray’s great talent, I’ve yet to form a coherent opinion on the man or his writing, seeing as how in the main his books are terribly hard to come by. Sukenick, likewise a writer with talent to burn, put me off with his politics of sex and gender, which square with those of a neanderthal. I am not a sensitive reader by any means--indeed, Peter Prince’s woman-hating strikes me as fairly pedestrian stuff--but I believe there’s a passage in Up in which Sukenick wishes rape and other defilement on the women of Brooklyn. Something like that.
The Exagggerations is a fine book. It is quite funny--especially the first “chapter”, if we can call it that--and it moves at an almost-breathless pace. But it is almost completely incoherent, in the traditional sense of a novel--again, not something I necessarily shy away from--and, on the spectrum of Writerly Respect for the Reader(™), it is an anarchist; it is not the dully contemptuous work of an overburdened realist, laying everything out in front of the reader; nor is it almost-mathematically precise, in the way we might expect of an OuLiPo writer or perhaps Joe McElroy; certainly it is not at the middle of these poles, either. Instead, it decides almost moment-to-moment, as you read it, what it wants to be: at times the story of a conventional 60s layabout with minor artistic ambitions and saddled instead with more quotidian realities; elsewhere it attempts to infuse charged topics like racism and the Vietnam War with a macabre and not always effective humor; but then, all of a sudden, Peter Prince is plucked out of Queens (which perhaps is more real to me because I live in New York) and is plopped down in Italy or Egypt or Ethiopia.
On each adventure the cast of characters change, save Peter Prince himself, and the strange, evanescent personages of Philip Farrel and Linda Lawrence; most notably, you’ll never find Peter Prince spending time with the same woman twice. If this is some authorial conceit or perhaps just the fickle womanizing of the protagonist at work, we’ll never know. But I suppose that’s the point: with fiction this experimental, it’s hard to say who’s really in charge. The problem with this, of course, is it’s been done to death, and when Katz finally gets around to telling a “straight” story in the last forty or so pages--with frequent interpolations by the author himself(??) smattered throughout the preceding pages--it is tedium itself. Probably an okay thing, in the end, seeing as how it’s hard enough to find in its one original printing and the reprint is likewise a scarce commodity. Even the press that reprinted it seems to have gone belly up. I could see in this occurrence the capriciousness of the publishing industry--hardly my bosom friend--and lament the suppression of interesting and groundbreaking fiction in favor of a lot of dreck, but the reality is Steve Katz and his writing are right where they belong.
You just have to know where to look.

PS I want to give this book a decent rating but the Conradian tale of Peter Prince traveling down the Nile was a fairly agonizing read. Whence: 2.75.

PPS Do yourself a favor and, if you want humorously conceived, innovative fiction, read Harry Mathews instead. ...more

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Oct 23, 2015 Geoffrey rated it liked it

As metafiction, it's clever and delightful as all get-out, but man, the title character is a truly unbearable little shit, and I have the sneaking suspicion that Katz himself is not quite cognizant of the extent to which this is the case.

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About Steve Katz

Steve Katz

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Steve Katz (May 14, 1935 – August 4, 2019) was an American writer. He is considered an early post-modern or avant-garde writer for works such as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), and Saw (1972).