| Abstract |
Leo Gray works in a North Carolina toll booth, where he happily reads the world's great The World's Great Thinkers Rousseau's Contract, Hege''s History, Marx's Manifesto; Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche the Transcendentalists, the French poets, the Modernists, and the Beats. Everything is dandy, but then his social worker girlfriend convinces him to become upwardly mobile and Leo gets a job writing for a weekly newspaper on the coast of his home state Georgia. Sounds great, right? But his two bosses are named, ahem, Big Dick and Little Dick Taylor. And his girlfriend refuses to move with him, since she's taken on another down and out lover, "a stroke victim in his sixties struggling to relearn the alphabet," in hopes, don't you know, of transforming him too. This novel offers an unusual comic take of a man on the skids, a wildly sardonic ride that teeters on a great deal of darkness but manages to pull through in a fashion worthy of any smiling anti-hero fighting himself and surrounding ring a ding complacency. |
