What Now My Love

by Floyd Salas

Three people - a write, his girl Carole, and Sam, a big-time drug dealer - flee from a San Francisco pad where, in the midst of a narcotics bust, a plainsclothes policeman has been shot. From this point, the novel charts the emotional changes of the characters as their MG rolls down the coastal highways of California toward Mexico, leaving all familiarity to recede, like a billboard, behind them. They finally arrive in Tijuana on a hot, tourist-engorged afternoon. This is a Mexico far removed from the picturesque exotica of the movies; instead it is a seamy, stifling place, infested by Southern Californians eager to suck from it whatever little character it still maintains. It is these same Americans who, in their cars, apathetically pass by the violence and death that tragically concludes the trio's ill-fated flight. The theme of Mr. Salas's new novel, then, is escape, along with its vagrant confusions, dangers, exhilarations, and final irrationality.

Genres: Fiction

154 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard-boiled narrator knows better than everyone else, who just keep dragging him into trouble. The cynicism about the SF drug scene and the narrator's unflagging confidence in his paranoia and anger leave almost nobody sympathetic. It probably would work better as a screenplay, where the road trip narrative bounces around dead ends, and where nobody would have to read Salas's stand-in's thoughts. While Burrough's drug works are High Garbage (that is praise), this is just garbage.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intense text that starts at an acid factory in Haight-Ashbury where Miles and Carole meet up with Sam an ex-lover of Carole's and the three leave via a 3rd floor window jump to the next roof top because of the undercover police bust. That's the beginning of this tightly written book that I am rereading and plan to teach it in the Spring.

[Beer Bolwijn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tom, a previous commenter, deceived me. You could only bring this book to a lecture as a ghastly bomb of a novel. Not often do I slam down the 1-star. Stay away from this excuse of a book.

Written in first person, this book has a narrator who is so extremely pretentious, annoying and I-art-Holier-than-Thou, so convinced of his own brilliance and cool-ness, that I wondered if this was written by Emmett Grogan, who in Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps reaches similar levels of pompousness. Regardless, nothing interesting is happening whatsover - this is a total exploitation book, kinda like a lot of those 60s/70s movies are.

Avoid at all costs.