Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Since Chris and Alyson have already read and reviewed this book, I'm not going to go in depth about the plot. I'm going to talk about the things I liked in bullet points, and then I'm going to take a nap.

Despite nearly constant profanity, obscenity, and scatalogical references in the first two thirds of the book, VGL still managed a large number of very poignant moments, which I won't enumerate here since I think Carlton is going to read this book.

- The writing itself was really good, although it took some adjusting, partly due to the things metioned in the previous point.

- You have no idea how strange of a book this is until you get to the last third. There's barely even a hint. I think that's a positive.

- This book is funny.

One of the most interesting aspects was the way that Vernon sees the world. Despite using language that would make Scocese blush, he's really nothing more than a naive innocent, caught in the middle of events much bigger than himself, manipulated by everyone around him, and thrust into situations over which he has no control. Somehow, Pierre manages to make Vernon both vulnerable and likeable.

The only downside is that VGL might be a little much for some people. Frank descriptions of sexual abuse and violence, along with making light of school shootings, is probably going to make this a poor choice for grandmothers or children.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Aztec priests strip blue feather robe from the Naked Youth. They bend him back over a limestone altar, fit a crystal skull over his head, securing the two hemispheres back and front with crystal screws. A water-fall pour over the skull snapping the boy's neck. He ejaculate in a rainbow against the rising sun.

What. The. Fuck. I don't even know how to describe this book to you--at some level, it seems to be about a drug addict who undergoes recovery and then is cured, but along the way it takes on the form of an extended fever dream of drug use, sexual perversion, and graphic obscenity. Much of the book takes place in Interzone, a city of unspecified location (and perhaps meant to represent the state of a junky's head) where the inhabitants perform a lot of fellatio and other sexual acts on each other, as well as the strange creatures that live there. Youths hang each other, excited by their death spasms. Some people are addicted to the semen of strange translucent creatures called Mugwumps. A man teaches his asshole to talk, and eventually it takes over his body and eliminates his other parts.

If that sounds less than appealing, you're not the first to think so--this book set off a firestorm of media frenzy and obscenity charges in the early Sixties. It's not hard to see how that happened; lacking any semblance of a narrative (some episodes are arranged at random, using a Dada-like system of "cut-up"), and often being nigh incomprehensible, it is hard to piece what artistic value, if any, Naked Lunch has. I think that on a deeper level, Naked Lunch probably makes many interesting satiricial points--commenting on commercialism in society, the idea of normality, the relationship between sex and destruction--but who wants to read this revolting book closely enough to better understand them? Plus, for some reason, Burroughs has a knack for using verbs without any sort of augmentation--the phrase "he ejaculate" in the quote above is not a typo.

I've decided to officially call bullshit on the Beat movement. Having read its two flagship novels, On the Road and Naked Lunch, I can't imagine any genre in which its seminal works are of such mediocre quality.