A Book Review, & More

My review of The Flamethrowers , by Rachel Kushner:

Pretty good book.

Blurbs for The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner:

“It’s a good book because it’s an honest book about lies.”

     -Earnest Hemingway

“If I were reading this blurb aloud, it would sound 100x more pretentious.”

     -Deborah Eisenberg

“I red a bok 1nce.”

     -John Grisham

“Infinitely orthogonal to all planes of conception – a metaphysical anomaly though explicated.”

     -Jorge Luis Borges

“Frivolous in the way our most serious works must be. A great Bunbury.”

     -Oscar Wilde

“Cut out all the articles and prepositions and you have a masterpiece.”

     -Gordon Lish

“The ending could’ve been sadder.”

     -Devin Kelly

“I am speaking behind a lectern and wearing a headdress, so you can import paramount profundity and cultural knowledge unto this blurb.”

     -Zadie Smith

“Skeptical.”

     -Len Allergy

“Fabulously original. Teeming with loins and panache.”

     -Truman Capote

“The remaining 300 pages are classified.”

     -9/11 Commission

“Too much sadness, not enough Devin Kelly wearing only a sweatshirt to bed.”

     -Danielle Steele

“Fucking thieved my denouement.”

     -Garth Hallberg

“3.5 Mics. Needed more feats.”

     -The Source

“Like we should give a whit of shit. Duly disregard this minor refuse.”

     -Thomas Pynchon

“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me?”

     -The look and repose of Rachel Kushner in her author photo on the back cover

I have somethings I need to say now. To all the nonbelievers, who didn’t think I could pound Jim Beam on a Sunday and make it to work the next morning. Though my commute on the surface is statistically insignificant – from the bed in my bedroom to the desk in my bedroom – in reality this commute is elasticized infinitely by the festering molecules of Jimmy Beam hanging on my neural wirings like rotted branches fallen from a thunderstorm. Point is, I made it, and I’m god damn proud of it. I shouldn’t be, you say? I shouldn’t have, you challenge? The only reason I shouldn’t have had so much to drink during the Super Bowl is because of your stupid admonishing face. Otherwise, pure glory. I’m so good at drinking it hurts. I bleed rectally for it. I’m Peyton Manning in his prime on steroids. My passion is measured in 1.5 oz. glasses of amber syrup that, for laymen sippers, might be an acerbic shot of bourbon, but for guzzle-giants like myself is a fucking thimble that I throw back as if merely inhaling oxygen to continue living and prospering. I have no regrets. My only regret is that Bernie Sanders is no more likely to win for it. My only regret is that I didn’t drink more.

I want to recede my roll-tides of defensive fury and give SHOUTS OUT to George, who found the percolator for my moka pot this morning. Because of this, I’m now tremendously caffeinated and have deviated from my regular programming – i.e. my lunch hour at work – to waterboard you with this deluge of torturous words.

SHOUTS OUT to any relatives reading this, since I’m hoping to the Christ only half my extended family believes in that the irony laced underneath all this is exploding as you traverse my awful overgrowth of verbiage, this Vietnam of verbosity.

SHOUTS OUT to Verne Lundquist, whom George likens to as, ‘a bag of biscuits that exploded in a suit’.

SHOUTS OUT to this guy , who’s more a murderer than any Steve Avery I know…Seriously, it’s like, lure the girlfriend to a prodigious body of water when hammerheads are looming ubiquitously overhead…Then again, anyone whose warbling ululations of fear sounds like a bag of biscuits exploded in Ricky Gervais’s voice box most likely don’t got the wiles to do anyfing that clevah.

I want to redact some of the things I said earlier. I regret having called your face stupid and/or admonishing. It’s truly a lovely face. It’s just that I get so scared sometimes.