By REYoung
Publication Date: 11/1/1997
ISBN: 9781564781642
In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.
Reviews
"Ambitious and passionately written.... REYoung's style of compressing material is unique and viable; time passes so swiftly that events seem pancaked on one another." —Harvey Pekar, Austin Chronicle
"REYoung unveils a social babble that masks the bankrupt spiritual and emotional quality of human existence.... It is a disturbing book, but it is disturbing because it effectively captures how the centrality of humanity has been wholly drowned out by the babble of money." —Rain Taxi
"The enigmatic REYoung's Unbabbling reads like a wild romp through the subconscious of such esteemed modernists as Joyce, Pynchon, and Kerouac. REYoung has come virtually from nowhere to deliver this stunningly well-crafted novel.... It is the dynamic prose style that really makes the novel. REYoung alternates between a Pynchonesque vaudevillian satire to a tortured, rapid-fire stream of consciousness more typical of Jack Kerouac. A truly inspired piece of work." —Booklist
Biographical Information
REYoung earned his B.A. in literature from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and then spent several years in the army trained as a Russian linguist.