Lacking Character. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Lacking Character

Curtis White's long-awaited return to fiction reminds us that the founder of one of American literature's most vibrant and innovative movements is still the King of "transcendental buffoonery." 

The story begins when a masked man appears in the night at the door of the Marquis, proclaiming a matter of life and death: "I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!"

Except he's not, really; he's just trying to get the attention of the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. And so the exchange gets badly botched, and our masked man is soon lost in a maddening America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing his cruel fate.

In a time with the crisis du jour, White asks us to remember what it's like to laugh--to be a little silly even--in order to reclaim what used to be fundamental to us: the strength to create our own worlds.

Curtis White is a founder of The Fiction Collective 2. His latest book are We, Robots and The Science Delusion. His novels include Memories of My Father Watching TV and Monstrous Possibility. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.