Chip Martin
Published: 2023-06-02
Total Pages: 508
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“California!” raps a voice in this echoing band of novellas. “California, that land where the fruits of Modern Times have been plucked on such a scale that we seem to find in its ripest form what old tradition has prized – Freedom! ah, Freedom… And what is the nature of this eternal mirage?” Many quests are pursued through these five interlinked tales, which travel from London to L.A., Southwest City to Araby, real to unreal landscapes where the Anglo has thrived, in license or pathos, until he or she begins to seem a vanishing breed. Kerouacian bodhisattvas, soap-opera plutocrats, shape-shifting femme fatales, redemptive spirits ready to lay down and die on a beach – through realms of materialism, erotic longing and anomie, a cast of personae from a receding past plays out its epic melodrama. The end of the road is at once gorgeous, grotesque, transcendental and aesthetically haunting.