By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee - Hardcover

Janowitz, Tama

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517702983 ISBN 13: 9780517702987

Publisher: Crown, 1996

Synopsis

From the author of Slaves of New York and The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, this satire in the all-too-rare genre of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One tells a compelling story of the sex lives of people and invertebrates at the end of America's 20th century.

About this title

From the Back Cover

hor of Slaves of New York and The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, this satire in the all-too-rare genre of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One tells a compelling story of the sex lives of people and invertebrates at the end of America's 20th century.

Reviews

Maud Slivenowicz, the smartass 19-year-old narrator of this painfully precious novel, can flirt only by expounding on the sex lives of invertebrates. She lives in Upstate New York, in a trailer home near the banks of Lake Gitchee Gumee, with her mother, Evangeline, and her four siblings, all sired by different fathers. Six-year-old Leopold cooks and worries about his figure, while the eldest, would-be Hollywood heartthrob Pierce, is too dumb to read road signs. Evangeline tends to be irresponsible, ordering a $1000 vacuum because she likes the salesman. Into this loony bin walks a fey English lord who falls for the myopic Maud. He seems ready to whisk her away from her life of white trash when a kidnapping propels the family?in two groups?toward Los Angeles. The novel then morphs into a spoofy road saga, in which Maud, Pierce and Leopold set out to prostitute their way west. Janowitz (The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group) affects a narrative voice similar to those she previously has used to mixed effect; here, though, her striving for arch wackiness achieves only shrill petulance ("I realized I hated him, and he was loathsome, due to the fact that he was pathetic"). Equally awkward are arbitrary footnotes and haphazard allusions to, and quotations from, early American poetry. The dialogue and incidents dart rapid-fire at the reader as in a screwball comedy?but the screws here are loose, and what aims to be funny comes off as merely frantic. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A fifth novel from downtown doyenne Janowitz (The Male Cross- Dresser Support Group, 1992, etc.), who seems not to realize that satire, while it may be absurd, must first of all be funny. The depiction of some ``scene'' (usually urban, hip, and deracinated) has been the obsessive concern of Janowitz's work to date--to such an unrelenting degree that she has herself become a byword for the slacker demimonde that flourished in the East Village during the Reagan and Bush years. Now that history has moved on, Janowitz attempts to broaden her perspective by taking a road trip with Evangeline Slivenowicz and her five children. The Slivenowiczes live in a trailer in upstate New York, where Evangeline seduces hapless men to make ends meet and warns her daughters that ``You mustn't judge men by the same standards as women. They don't have any standards.'' One of these boyfriends proves the point by going berserk and holding half the village hostage in the library until the FBI intervenes and provokes a miniature bloodbath. The resulting embarrassment, plus the accidental loss of the Slivenowicz trailer beneath the waters of Lake Gitchee Gumee, convinces Evangeline that a change of scenery is in order, and all set out for California to help Evangeline's son Pierce break into pictures. Meanwhile, Evangeline and her daughters allow themselves to be serviced with greater frequency than their car seems to be, while the sons sulk about their paternity and work Longfellow into most of their sentences. A deranged English lord, an undersexed policeman, several delivery men, and a vacuum cleaner salesman are some of the new friends they pick up along the way, which runs along an uneven line from the Adirondacks to Key West to the desert and on to the Pacific. Tedious, clumsy, and overdone. Janowitz, in giving us her usual freak show, misses the essential element of satire-- credibility. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Janowitz dulled the edge of her unique satirical wit in The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group (1992) by overdoing the Gross-Out Queen routine, but nothing weakens the thrust of her nimble, satisfyingly nasty, and wholly unexpected humor in her newest novel. Who, in their wildest literary dreams, would ever have imagined the city cynic Janowitz parodying that most sentimental and overrated of American poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Snickering the entire time, Janowitz transforms Longfellow's precious "forest primeval" into a dreadfully gray little town with a pizza parlor called Minnie-Wawa's and a new library with practically no books and a lethal heating system. The denizens of this backwater include the ditsy Evangeline Slivenowicz and her five out-of-control children by five all-but-forgotten men. There's Marietta, given to spouting Longfellow lines; Pierce, handsome and dumb as a cork; Theodore, a wanna-be songwriter; 6-year-old Leopold, a sweet-natured chef; and 19-year-old Maud, the outrageously mercenary and amusingly foul-mouthed narrator. They live in manic squalor in a wretched trailer that eventually slides into Lake Gitchee Gumee and explodes. After adversely affecting a vacuum-cleaner salesman, a cop, and an English lord, the improvisational Slivenowiczes decide to drive to Los Angeles but, not surprisingly, end up in Florida, where they continue their wacky reign of terror. But hey, that's life in a Janowitz book: chaotic and smart-ass but precocious, indefatigable, funny, and somehow optimistic. Donna Seaman

The Slivenowicz family?Evangeline and her five children (all of different fathers)?live in a precariously rooted trailer on a hill overlooking the shores of Lake Gitchee Gumee. Lacking in conventional views on just about everything, the family lives a hand-to-mouth existence, aided by items fished out from under Evangeline's bed and cooked up by six-year-old Leopold. In her quest for a rich husband, 19-year-old Maud convinces her handsome but witless brother Pierce that he should go to Hollywood to become a famous movie star. When the weight of stolen library books upends the trailer and sends it splashing into the lake, discussion ends and the family heads west. Though separated on the road, they eventually find one another?and themselves. With its cast of wacky characters, this absurd satire is both delightful and exhausting. Recommended for larger collections.?Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0517702983
• ISBN 13: 9780517702987
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288