The California Quartet
The Deification
To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer’s ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?
Valley Boy
Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long-time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns—which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.
the book of changes
“Beast” is a pure innocent with one simple goal–to become an expert on the Middle Ages. He comes to Berkeley, the Cathedral of Learning, in 1971, a time of political upheaval, hallucinogenic drugs, abundant sex, and down-and-dirty rock and roll. On his quest for meaning he hangs out with a Harley-riding dwarf, a pre-goth artists’ model, a sorority girl turned nymphomaniac, and the heir to a family of French aristocrats with a bloody history dating back to before Joan of Arc. Beast soon discovers that he can’t live in the past but has to embrace the present, with its traps and land mines and the horrors of contemporary society—death by motorcycle and bad acid trips. The world is exploding, but students still go to classes, fall in love, get laid, study in libraries, win awards, even graduate. The country is on fire, and Berkeley supplies the fuel. The Book of Changes is the third book of the California Quartet.
trio of Lost souls
Bill Vincent is a killer, but in the name of justice. Not that the law would see it that way. With one murderous act of retribution for terrible violence inflicted on his wife, he leaves behind a respectable calling as a prize-winning investigative journalist and hits the road. On the run he ekes out a living in California’s Central Valley as a box-maker, a turkey debeaker, a truck driver’s assistant, and finally a field hand. In this last job he meets Jim Garret, a like-minded spirit whose thirst for justice equals his own. They join together to beat the corrupt bossmen at their own political game.
More reviews
Once in a while, an author mesmerizes me with his/her writing. It is as though I have stepped back in time to the days when writing was truly an art form and not a scientific venture into so much of a percentage of dialogue versus action versus narrative. No worries as to whether or not an agent or editor or some ‘god’ of the publishing world will approve or not approve…. just raw, exquisite writing talent splashed onto the page with such audacity and nerve that it gives you a heartache that burns a hole right through your spirit…. That’s what I have just experienced reading Jack Remick’s Valley Boy.
If American literature produces one On the Road per century, then The Deification by Jack Remick is it for the twenty-first century. This road trip saga of would-be poet Eddie Iturbi from Sanger to San Francisco, from innocence to art, is fast, hot, thick, mythic, erudite, erotic, and intense. The prose is lush, the story, irresistible. Remick inscribes these vivid, gender-morphing characters on the California landscape as if they’d always been there. I believe The Deification will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.
Remick knows California, its people and landscapes…. Like all good road novels, there is a very strong sense of place, and as I turned pages, I came to know California, began to experience it through the eyes of Bill Vincent. Which brings me to another aspect I particularly enjoyed: the protagonist. In the hands of a lesser writer, Vincent could have easily come across as a caricature, but he doesn’t, and that is a testament to Remick’s powers as a novelist. Through some type of alchemy that most writers simply do not possess, Remick manages to portray Bill Vincent as an often-talked-about-but-rarely-realized well-rounded character, and I think he achieves this, partially, with another skill a lot of writers don’t have: restraint. Adhering closely to Hemingway’s iceberg principle of character development, the reader sees only a small portion of who and what Bill Vincent is, and the rest is left up to the imagination…. Bottom line, the still waters of Trio of Lost Souls run deep. If you’re a fan of Jim Harrison, Ron Rash, or even Cormac McCarthy this book is definitely worth a read. Recommended.”
Covering much the same cultural terrain as Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road, The Book of Changes follows a young narrator’s coming-of-age in Berkeley. Yet Jack Remick’s take on the cultural revolution humanizes familiar material. Beast, the narrator, starts off eager for initiation into the Berkeley scene: the university, the drugs, the ‘broads,’ the art. But unlike Kerouac’s protagonist who rides from town to town, indifferent to and unaccountable for the consequences of his choices, Remick gives us a conscientious young man. Beast sticks around long enough to see the aftermath of drug addiction and free love. And the trail of wreckage deeply affects him. As the deaths and broken relationships tally up in his friends’ lives, Beast develops a more honest, compassionate perspective than Kerouac’s characters ever achieved. A moving tale of one young man’s struggle to carve out his own dignity and truth in the midst of radical turbulence.
Longer reviews
GOTTA READ THE DEIFICATION. IT’S HOT, IT’S SMOOTH.
HOT. SUPPLE. SMOOTH. RELENTLESS. DANTESQUE. SYMPATHETIC.
This is a tough book to review.
Tough to review because the language is pure poetry–you want to copy down full descriptions packed with images; you want to slap the dialogue onto your reviewer’s page; you want to avoid writing about the book as a thing, a product in the marketplace, so you can quote the whole book, all 345 pages, and allow the language to tell the story.
This is a tough book to review because it looks like a linear journey–from the Coachella Valley to San Francisco, from San Francisco north to the Buzzard Cult, from the Buzzard Cult east to Lowell, Massachusetts and a ritual unearthing of Kerouac’s grave, from Lowell west again, back to the Valley, where the protagonist, Eddie Iturbi, seventeen years old and dying to become a poet, confronts the characters from his Valley Boy past–then back to the city for a Dantesque journey through poet’s hell.
The linear story is there, but you’ll be reading along when the fictional floor opens up, like a trapdoor yawning, and you drop down a layer or maybe two, down into the mind of the writer, who handles this descending moment with the control of a word-master, not a word out of place, not one sentence wasted.
The book is THE DEIFICATION, Jack Remick’s second novel from Seattle’s Coffeetown Press (the first novel was BLOOD, a story about a man in prison, published in 2011). Remick’s second novel is big book, a coming of age story in the tradition of the European Bildungsroman, but a richer experience because there is no time for gloom, because you’ll like Eddie Iturbi, whose innocence gets jostled, but darkened, by his journey into discipline. As trouble finds Eddie, you’ll worry about him. Will he last? Will he find the code? What happened to his eye?
One of my favorite sections is Eddie’s time in the Buzzard Cult, where Remick combines four entities–a Zen Monastery, a Hippie Commune, an EST retreat (taking a good ironic swipe at founder Werner Erhard), and a US Navy Training Center for SEALs. Sent to the Buzzard Cult by his mentor, Leo Franchetti, Eddie meets Alma, his control–“I’m your control.” she says. “You are the postulant. You are mine to shape and to mold.” Under Alma, Eddie sits Zazen, no talking, no thinking, no food, no water, sit and breathe, wait for Alma. Eddie falls in love, Alma gives him pain. And there is always the question: Ready to quit, Loser?
THE DEIFICATION is a book of codes where the protagonist searches for the code that unlocks a manuscript dictated to Eddie by Jack Kerouac that night in Lowell when Eddie gets buried alive in Kerouac’s grave. Taking dictation is the goal of every writer. It’s grabbing the divine Word coming from an unseen, unknowable source. What writer does not want to sit there in a trance and input the words that will bring fame. When Eddie falls into the gave, Kerouac dictates a poem he never got to write–ODES TO A G-STRING GODDESS–he dictates it to Eddie, who has struggled through the Buzzard Cult discipline without quitting. But the ODES are written in code, and to find the key that breaks the code Eddie takes a journey through Writer’s Hell–broken glass, a tall fence, rats that eat your feet off–led by a crazy poet, Francois Villon, dead for 500 years and still wearing the rope they hanged him with because, among other things, he was a poet. Remick never fails to roll in humor. As they board the Poet’s Trolley, Eddie says:
“There’s no conductor.”
“And no engineer!” Villon shouted. “This is free verse, baby.”
And then Remick’s prose swings into action: “The trolley rocked side to side. The floor of the trolley was waxed and slippery. The machine slammed into a turn, and Eddie spun onto a brass knob that ripped his side open, and he spouted blood like a harpooned whale.
The trolley squealed to–“
See what I mean? The language, the timing, the humor, the strong verbs, the concrete nouns, the world beneath the world–all wrapped up in one novel called THE DEIFICATION, by Jack Remick, a writer who achieved in this book what every writer yearns for: to open up and take dictation.
End on this note: You gotta read this book!
Robert J. Ray
The Weekend Novelist
Get it Now!
Available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.
358 Pages
Publisher: Coffeetown Press (October 26, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1603811346
ISBN-13: 978-1603811347
From the Publisher
All of these books are currently available on Amazon.com. The novel is also for sale on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, and Amazon Japan. The Kindle edition retails for $5.95. Other eBook versions can be purchased on Smashwords and through most major eBook retailers. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com and Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources or Midwest Library Services.
1 Comment
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Ziva: at last. Thank you for finding this little bugger. Better now. I really like what you are doing/have done with the site. Very professional, yet very intimate and very much mine. Thank you.
Ah tz’ib