Lush Life….by Richard Price
First, let’s talk about the cover. I know it’s hard to see with the small pic below. A bunch of downtown hipsters crowded, lined up outside some upscale, nicely lit, happening joint in New York City. Downtown—could be SoHo, Tribeca, Gramercy, Union Square. But it’s the Lower East Side, another outpost of the gentry, reestablishing a […] |
Walpurgisnacht…
All the screwy, bitter black comedy of Catch-22 (I could fill up pages of this blog with a comedic greatest hits) crawls to a climax near the end of the book in The Eternal City episode. It is a classic night journey, a wandering among horrors, perhaps hallucinatory, perhaps not. Perceptive early critics called this […] |
Chapters and episodes…
Chapters. Everybody in Catch-22 gets, at least, their own chapter, or two. It’s one of the reason’s the book was mostly panned early on—“it’s not a novel,” and “it gasps for want of craft and sensibility” (how about sense?), “it’s a collection of anecdotes, a parade of scenes.” Heller is a “brilliant painter who decides […] |