I loved every page of it.Ĭinema Speculation is part memoir, part critical essay, part lament for a past that has departed. "And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was."Īgain, if you’re familiar with the man’s voice, you can practically hear him saying those lines, perhaps emphasizing "because" in each sentence, eyebrows arching and voice inflecting a notch higher on the "they were right." It’s almost eerie. "Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates," he says after recounting being taken to the theater by his folks (and, later, his mom and her suitors) to see films like M*A*S*H and The French Connection as a tween. And much of the book’s early going is concerned with those dives and those exploitation flicks, as well as the cineaste’s own earned bravado. He’s an inveterate raconteur, less conversationalist than lecturer, one whose head is overflowing with trivia about which Los Angeles dives were playing which cut-rate exploitation pictures at what point in his childhood. Publisher: Henry Holt, 320 pages, $27.99.I mean this in the best way possible, as Quentin Tarantino is one of the most interesting filmmakers on the planet. Will's description of the mysterious Cammie is a spot-on summary of Chaon's method: "She's good at this withhold-and-reveal game, and it reminds me very strongly of the kinds of tall tales and lies and con games my mother would try out on me - how she'd draw you in with something outrageous and then add a little homely detail to give it a dash of realism, how she'd embellish the story in ways that'd make it personal to the listener."Ī contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews fiction and nonfiction for a range of venues, including the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. And yet the novel's intricate structure and seductive voice lift off the page. ![]() His odyssey, like that of Orestes, spirals toward tragedy there's a creepy noir scene with a chimpanzee that would fit into a David Lynch movie. Will hits the blue highways, meandering through the Midwest to the desert Southwest to the Carolina coasts - in his sideview mirrors he glimpses a country blistered with military checkpoints, flu epidemics and robot spies.ĭespite his blood-soaked sins, Will's an Everydude who strikes a balance between rage, tenderness, and gallows humor as he seeks intimacy from a daughter who may or may not be real. "Sleepwalk" is no act of dull somnambulism but rather a vigorous, polished performance by a writer in command of his gifts. A laugh you'd clown for, a laugh you'd drink up like skin drinks sunshine." There was a xylophone tinkle in it, a conspiratorial glint, a soft caress that made you think she liked you, despite all your failings. He believes she's an AI scam until she laughs exactly like his mother, "the kind of laugh a person makes as they bite down on an apple. His routine is disrupted when a young woman, Cammie, calls him repeatedly on burner phones, claiming to be his biological daughter from a sperm-bank deposit he made in his 20s. He pulls off heists, credit-card fraud, even murder - he's his mother's son. ![]() He roams the country, microdosing on LSD and doing odd jobs for a shadowy criminal syndicate, "dealers, cultists, conspiracy theorists and militias, radical reactionaries and revolutionists, trolls and goblins and parasites," the seedy underbelly of the American Dream. He's still in touch with a childhood friend, Experanza, a cipher and potential threat. Will - or Billy, or "the Barely Blur" - drives a camper his best friend is his pit bull, Flip. Raised by a mother on the lam (now deceased), he has no birth certificate, no Social Security number, no Facebook page, "a blank Scrabble piece" who goes by too-many-aliases-to-remember. Will Bear, Chaon's 50-year-old narrator, officially doesn't exist. "Sleepwalk" draws on an array of genres and narratives, but it's also a visionary work, a preview of a nation just minutes away. ![]() The same can be said of Dan Chaon's brash, exuberant new novel, "Sleepwalk," a Tarantino vibe in book form, with nods to Pynchon-paranoia and Kerouac-style road epic, Greek myths and dystopian fiction. Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino: His films are violent but often hilarious, exulting in the history of cinema, from spaghetti westerns to slasher films to auteurs such as Welles and Kurosawa.
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