Pike and Bloom - Softcover

Audacious, hilarious and stylish, in the way of Beckett, in the way of Joyce, Matthew Nye's Pike and Bloom nonetheless encapsulates 21st century anxiety, apprehension, shame and guilt. Nye's obsessively thoughtful characters draw us into their souls, taking crazily smart note of the world in which they travel. Every sentence is a masterful surprise. -Karen Brennan, author of The Garden in Which I Walk and little dark "Pike and Bloom is a strikingly original comic novel of paranoia. It is almost impossible to classify: part contemporary morality tale, part dystopian sci-fi thriller, part postmodern homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Pike and Bloom examines the absurdity of our contemporary American cultural landscape, a culture made newly strange by the nation's own wartime politics and Nye's sly and hilarious literary vision. Pike is an Everyman for post 9/11-America: a nation sickened by its long-term addiction to conflict and war, marked by its hubris, defined by its delusions. This is an unnerving, and extremely satisfying, debut." -Paisley Rekdal, author of Animal Eye and The Night I Met Bruce Lee

An American odyssey in miniature, Pike and Bloom maps the trajectories of three characters-Pike, Bloom, and Clytie-as they spiral through ""the serious blues of Indianapolis,"" attempting to construct meaning from the absurd.Pike, a paranoiac everyman, lays confined in a hospital bed, convinced that the medical staff conspire against him. He flees into the city streets to seek the root of the plot, certain that he is followed. Meanwhile, the romantic, meandering Bloom attempts to make sense of his own conflicting impulses toward both chaos and order. Bloom's wife Clytie, who suspects her husband of infidelity, follows him from their suburban farmhouse into the refracted, unified field of the city center.Together, Pike, Bloom, and Clytie navigate the city's circling and crisscrossing pathways in their attempts to find out what is real.