Status Updates From Sweet Adversity

Enjoyed Leo & Theodore. Stunning opening paragraph.

Durwood drives knife into heart and splits the fish in a stroke from throat to vent. Leo and Teddy gape at bowels slipping overboard and there in the wide cavity spills gleaming gray caviar. Daddy grins blissfully, rinsing his bloody blade in waves, and sheathes it. Stars rise on the watergardens. They row home, a red railroad lamp burning on the bow in the night.

Can't imagine book 1 standing alone. Glad Newlove decided to combine the two

Adventures of alcoholic conjoined twins Leo & Teddy told with beautiful, idiosyncratic, yet economic description and often hilarious dialogue. The present tense style gives the whole thing an intense kind of immediacy. Such fun!

Holy crap the last hundred or so pages have just been brutal. While he is very much doing his own thing, I get echoes of Coover's Public Burning (the hallucinatory stuff), some of the dark parts of Vollmann's whore books, maybe Mano's Take Five...A lot of my friends on here really need to get a copy of this asap.

I think one of the reasons I am in love with this book is that, in a similar way to Ulysses, it has such sympathy for, love of, pity for, laughter at, tears over, our bloody messy painful stupid filthy fucked up beautiful humanity. And to do that in prose that just Sings, well that is rare indeed.

This is breathtakingly good so far. Seriously. Shades of Joyce and Elkin and Henry Roth and all sorts of other lovely stuff.

They lie back, open beers, and share them. Cinnamongiving night, soothing, sapfilled, stars teasing the deeps.