[.ca] Celebration: A novel (ISBN 0684848104)

Masterpiece:
Don't pay any attention to the other reviewers, this is a Gawd-Almighty masterpiece, the book Crews was born to write. Besides that, Too Much is real, I know a woman just like her, and I do live in Florida. If you like your Florida literature serious and literary, yet hilarious, or if you'd ever wondered what would happen if Flannery O'Connor dropped acid, read Celebration!

CREWS LIGHT:
This tortured soul has been one of my favorite writers since I first read him twenty-five years ago. And I must admit that CELEBRATION contains some of the fascinating elements that drew me to his other works. The biggest problem here is that the story is too far over the top. Furthermore, the characters tend to be fantastic rather than fiercely real, as we've come to expect from this writer. Nevertheless, the book is filled with shimmering passages of prose that are reminiscent of earlier work and is a far cry better than the disastrous MULCHING OF AMERICA.

Atypical Crews:
I've been a fan of Harry Crews since first reading "The Gypsy's Curse" about 25 years ago. His novels are populated by grotesques; and his story lines are often comic, sometimes bizarre. However, he writes with gritty realism. His characters are intensely credible, human and sympathetic. Some are even appealing. This is what I've come to appreciate about his writing. "Celebration" is different. I don't mean that it's bad. It's just not what I'm looking for when I pick up a Harry Crews book. A beautiful young woman moves into a trailer park full of old people who have little else to do but wait to die. She works, rather obscurely and mystically, to open up these people to what she calls "the chance of ultimate possibility". (I must say, however, that some of her methods are entertaining.) Many of the characters and their conduct are rather surreal. I had a hard time understanding them, let alone relating to them. This novel, particulary its "surprise" ending, owes more to the horror-fantasy writing of Clive Barker than to the hardcore southern grit tradition that Crews usually represents so well.