Go Now: A Novel - Hardcover

Hell, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684822342 ISBN 13: 9780684822341

Publisher: Scribner, 1996

Synopsis

Billy, a burnt-out, drug- and sex-addicted punk musician, sets out with his erstwhile French girlfriend, Chrissa, on a cross-country writing assignment that turns into a ricocheting, brain-searing, agonizing head trip

About this title

Review:

... guided by a ranging, meditative mind, the story becomes an emblem of how we live now. With candor the teller transforms blunders into the only shapely and reliably honorable offering that can be made of such materials: art. I was captive shortly after word one ... makes Beckett's despair seem chirpy. Billy's most sordid plunges are rendered in a slit-eyed dryness worthy of Burroughs, but Billy is kin to Kafka and Bartleby, as well Hell nails the autoerotic urgency of sexual hunger, our ability at the flick of a neuron to find everyone arousing, the landscape morphing into a mirror of our restlessness. -- Laurie Stone, The Nation

Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels. Yet in the end Mud is Hell's greatest gift as a novelist. In the ambiguity of Mud's characterization lies the power of Hell's language. Only a writer as versatile as Hell could describe Mud's bout with heroin withdrawal with sympathy and pathos, then go on to make us despise his semi-conscious hero. Hell, like Mud, plays a great, bold game with the reader, proving himself as a writer with a vision that is not easy to shake off. -- BookPage

Hell's brilliant junkie novel, Go Now, is prison writing from the lockup of the head, but unlike the majority of addiction testimony, narrator Billy's sentences are hammered out of hard-won insights, snaking around your basic pillars of consciousness, loneliness, self-disgust, oblivion, and sex. -- The Village Voice

[S]harp, clear and hysterically funny. With a detached prose style that is both brutally honest and self-conscious, Hell can be frightfully insightful Forget Jim Carroll, Go Now is the real junkie rock 'n' roll literary masterpiece. -- James Marshall, High Times

From Kirkus Reviews:

A punk-rocker of modest renown and a self-styled poet, Hell debuts with a pointless and plotless fiction that lacks either the drug authenticity of a Burroughs or the transgressive aesthetic of an Acker. A junkie's journal, this clumsily written narrative relies on the thinnest of premises: A punk performer named Billy Mud, kept from recording by a record company dispute, is hired to travel cross-country and set down his impressions while his sometime girlfriend takes photos. Despite empty gestures toward literary predecessors (on Baudelaire: ``I identify with him a lot''), Hell, via Mud, mostly poses throughout as a super-studly anti-bourgeois rebel. Mud is so bored (he'd say ``full of ennui'') with his own story that he takes time to describe the physical dimensions of his notebook. And, of course, he describes the new wardrobe he needs if he's to blend in with the normals. Once on the road--no Kerouac he- -he wastes away in motel rooms, planning how to score sex or dope. Luckily, his girlfriend Chrissa is French, so he benefits from the cultural dissonance--i.e., she falls for his tired act. Throughout, Mud's stream-of-drug-consciousness writing is laughably incoherent; his observations on drugs equally silly (``Junk is like an orgasm stretched in time''); and his commentary on America revealing of his own limitations (``America feels boring''). As a social critic, Hell sounds more like Paul Simon than Patti Smith. As a writer? Let's just say that rock lyrics aren't poetry, and addled scribbling not a novel. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684822342
• ISBN 13: 9780684822341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176