Loop's End
Chuck Rosenthal. Gibbs Smith Publishers, $21.95 (330pp) ISBN 978-0-87905-478-6
Garbage collector Jarvis Loop of Erie, Pa., who philosophized about life in the Loop's Progress and Experiments with Life and Deaf , is back in this uneven mix of folksy naturalism, absurdist black comedy, family drama and magical realism. Set in the late '60s, this novel, like its predecessors, presents a gallery of irascible eccentrics. Grandpa Funster, who spouts mystical gibberish, shoots a cop named Liverwurst in the back; young Funly Funster, stuck inside a tuba, becomes a supermarket attraction; Visitor, Jarvis's son, calls everyone Dad, including their dog, Polly Doggerel; Neta, Jarvis's 300-pound genius sister, delivers pseudoprofundities as banal as his own. Two elements in this string of misadventures are deeply touching. One involves Loop's dead wife, Kara, who appears intermittently as a ghost. The other is the uneasy relationship between Loop's parents--Red, his German Lutheran father, a laid-back brick salesman, and Helen, his pious Polish Catholic mother, a college administrator who hoards religious statuary. Rosenthal expresses his zany imagination in a vernacular prose style, a combination that can be grating at times. But the book also has its moments of lyricism, in which Rosenthal touchingly affirms love as our bulwark against death. (Nov.)
Details
Reviewed on: 09/28/1992
Genre: Fiction