Ronald Sukenick's first "Novel is captivating , yet painful. For while most of us spend labyrinthian lives hiding what we really feel, this former New York college teacher has that rare, run-naked psyche. Just as jarring is "Up's" fresh form. Spurred by his conviction that the novel can longer handle reality, Sukenick's book treads a wide path between easy experimentalism and galloping originality, as fiction is strangely reined to autobiography.

..."how this cultural chaos affects individuals...sick of hypocrite jobs sick of kindness to animals sick of media tease sick of packaging sick of insurance salesman sick of plastic...sick of marriage sick of adultery..."

...The crucial "thing," though, is a man who cannot stop searching passionately for meaning, whether teaching flying a kite along the East River, or loving: "'Make it last,' she kept saying. But it was as if she were articulating with her body something more like, Get through to me. Help me."

-by Edward M. Potoker-

Ronald Sukenick's "Up" is one of the funniest books of the season, a hilarious outburst of wild comedy that mocks the pretensions of the young, whether they involve op, pop or slop. The book, Sukenick's first full-length fictional work, has a solid intellectual substratum as well, in which serious points are made cooly and without the pontifical solemnity some cultural historians require.

Sukenick's mind-blowing narrative experimentation is the perfect vehicle for expressing the fragmented and constructed world of Hollywood movie-making. The novel looks at how aspiring actress Cathy June becomes entangled in the L.A. scene as the bottom-feeding director Drackenstein and the avenging fortune teller Ccrab make insidious demands on her voluptuous body and what remains of her mind. Thanks to Plotz, the spurned screenwriter who can't survive his own scripts, Cathy June becomes Clover Bottom, the hottest indie starlet in the country. As Ccrab, desperate to keep Cathy June in his life, literally splits his personality to inhabit Drackenstein, so are Sukenick's readers thrown into visions and re-visions of characterization, novelization, and exploitation. An incredibly engaging and ultimately disturbing work, Blown Away accomplishes a criticism of both movie-making and fiction writing equalled only by West's Day of the Locust.

On the title page: Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category. I'd say that beyond category would apply, but it also would be laughed out of the interview, would chew upon the grizzle (the long beard that hangs, sings, rings of obnoxious mundanity), spit out the title page, start all over and type: Degenerative Prose: gunorama (and leave it at that... so that it at least has a room). OK, into shape, of form: who are the writers? e.> Mark Amerika, Ron Sukenick (an e-mail delivered introduction that discusses avante-poop, healthy forces of chaos, surfiction, PBS, ate. etc.), riKki DucorNET (from Phosphor in Dreamland), Eurudice (a parallel manifesto including: 'i like to see language as a healing tool and metaphor as cathartic as any violence', 'the new writer is an apocalypsist', 'it strikes me that i'm avant-pop simply because my writing is the equivalent of ...'), Jan Emily Ramjerdi (wild, wild stuff beyond categorythat includes this quote: I.chBI.ndigitIT.et::fff:fff:ff&f... seriously, it does), Steve Katz (Taipei), Norman ConquestandDerek Pell (eight adult males consisting of a neuropsychological drama replete with computer images ready-made for charts and graphs for your next business meeting), Ken Dorfberg (blame it blam it on the rain th'evan), Harry Polkinhorn (hypothesis for an empirically derived cyberotics1), DN Stuefloten (she sniffs), Alexander Laurence (a highly influential piece entitled "the seasons" that has inspired some of my own writings... this piece alone warrants purchase of this tome... &, a side note, I won't be working at Disney World anymore), Steve Shaviro (Nietzsche, David Lynch... not George Lynch, Truddi Chase, Nancy Regan, and Elvira all make appearances in this piece), Keith Abbott ("Story of O" get a make-over and isn't nearly as hollow as the o in Mans()n), Ricardo Cortez Cruz (one of the masters... all skill on display in this piece), Terry Southern (in the top five of my list of writers... the author of such screenplays as _Easy Rider_, _Dr. Strangelove_, and _Barbarella_), Jill St. Jacques (Matt Cleopatra), Jay Murphy (Suture, a visual poem for Kate Moss, repletecompleteincomplete with pictures of Kate Moss and :automutilation:... not to mention...: Patti Smith, New Order, and Coney Island make the cut), Gail Taylor (the first page is written entirely in a computer's symbolic language), Ray Ogar (":phORMISm @ddiction :dialogue catharsis injection... discussing cogs, as related by Ted Kacz to the Montana brain society), aj Gnazzo (VCR and nuclear perfume), Eugene Thacker (computer programming and a quote by G. Deleuze), Brent L. Jones ("The Hulkster", another piece with a highly influential form), Nile Southern (a handbook for Jello Biafara and the yuppie tyrants and the antinike legions of bandanasbananasforgunorama), Evan Cantor (lovely language including tapeworm and birthstone). I think that the four reviews on the back cover of the book describe it best.... here they are: "In all my sixty years I have never seen such a cruel, heartbreaking bunch of intellectual hound dogs." Elvis Presley "This book will whip your mind into shape! I had a self-inflicted chain reaction!" The Marquis de Sade "Energy, matter, context, oblivion. I fell in love." Albert Einstein "A good tome to lift-weights with, and to use as a fan as I sing love songs to Freddy Kreuger." George Lynch "Inspirational!" Vince Lombardi "Green eggs and gunorama." George Bush Jr. So, buy this! Now!

Sukenick realizes that our neural pathways are being seriously altered by the new technologies (internet, instant communication, information overload, domination of mass media) that we deal with on a daily basis. Especially interesting is Sukenick's appropriation of the B-movie monsters in order to explore the proliferation of conspiracy fears and the way that the powerful can manipulate events. Near the end of the book there is a brilliant section that details a couple's growing fascination with alternative sexual practices. What is so fascinating about Sukenick's writing in these passages is that he leaves small gaps in the narrative that essentially leave out the explicit sexual descriptions. I gave this section to friends of mine and two of them thought it was amazing, one couldn't understand it, and one girl slapped my face saying that it was disgusting. The power of this technique is that our minds fill in the missing parts---essentially creating a truly *interactive* fiction in book form. I also used this section in a mass media class to point out how what we are presented through mass mediums can leave out important sections and that the makers can rely on us to fill the gaps in.

I definitely believe that this is an important and vital book--as is most of Sukenick's fiction. A great example of avant-pop technique.

Perhaps the Kirkus reviewer was looking for some old-style realism (i.e. now-fantasy). END

Rain Taxi/Summer 1999 by Matt Dube-- Ronald Sukenick's tenth book, MOSAIC MAN, poses difficult questions about the form of the novel and the creative act. Sukenick writes what he calls "heterofiction," autobiographical narratives that are opened up by fictional conceits.... Sukenick's prose is rich and distinctive, with lyrical nods to the Beats and a Joycean ear for puns. While Sukenick's long reach is at times frustrating, it constantly makes the reader aware that he or she is reading an object constructed by human hands. Perhaps it is here, in the book's unwillingness to cohere and in its wholehearted embrace of its human origins, that Sukenick escapes a charge often leveled against other authors: that of laying claim to a divine originative role.

-by Jerome Klinowitz-

Since the late 1960s, when novelist John Barth's declared that literature was "exhausted" and our most popular critics agreed at least that the novel was dead, Ronald Sukenick has been patiently proving that there is a great deal of life to be discovered in the form.

"Out" is, as all novels are supposed to be, a study of life.

What to say. I loathed it but i snapped my head into different pieces. I guess that's the best thing to say about it. I still loathed it, though. If you like fiction, don't read it. If you like quasi philosophy masquerading as slick avant blah fiction this is the book for you.