My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Exhaustively – and often exhaustingly – funny, this novel uses every comico-literary trick in the book: mixed metaphors, wildly over-extended metaphors (“You can’t see the metaphorest for the trees”), parody, surrealist riffs on just about anything that pops into the author’s head: they’re all there. (A technical note: I love the ongoing game with speech verbs and, at one point and to great comic effect, their absence.) Genre-hopping from hard-boiled-private-eye-meets-dark-lady to mad-scientist-saves-the-world-by-destroying-humanity, with the unexpected casting of a group of mimes as the baddies, the book is finally almost too overjoyed by its own weirdness to sustain itself as, well, a book. But if you like the idea of a post-modern Groucho Marx crossed with an off-the-wall pop Oulipiste (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?), you’ll love this. Looking forward to the next one, D2!
CHARLES LAMBERT 