Louse

The valet and reluctant confidant to a Howard Hughes-like tycoon, Herman Louse discovers that his compulsive employer's carefully constructed environment is threatened by a conspiracy that may end in his freedom. A first novel.

Debut novelist Grand evokes the frightening, impersonal futures of Kafka, Orwell and Philip K. Dick in this chilling account of a gambler who forfeits his memory in order to pay off his debts. When the reader first encounters him, Herman Q. Louse works as a domestic orderly in an ultramodern complex in the middle of the desert. His daily task is to administer near-lethal narcotic injections to Herbert Horatio "Poppy" Blackwell, the Howard Hughes-like Executive Controlling Partner of the Resort Town of G. A fabulously wealthy aviator and movie producer wasted now by age and drugs, Blackwell has created the hermetically self-sufficient Resort of G as the apotheosis of his megalomania and as an assurance of entering into Paradise. Staffed with numberless drugged drones who must study their "social contracts" to know what is and is not appropriate behavior, G promises the future trustee the chance to move up in the system by moving down "and in the process of moving down, he will move up." Louse, in many ways a model worker (he hunts vermin with alacrity and obediently injects himself in the palm when he feels the need to sleep), is troubled by the introduction of subversive forces into G's humming efficiency, forces insinuated by Poppy himself, which call Louse's very identity into question. Grand methodically and convincingly constructs Louse's antiseptic, delusionary environment with a control, dark humor and vertiginous imagination that are remarkable in a first novel.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grand's ambitious, frustrating debut takes the form of a memoir of a dutiful servant who chronicles the collapse of his banal and all-powerful master and the suffocating, pointless world that he has created. Herman Q. Louse, dressed in his regulation gray flannel suit, is valet to the aging Poppy - a Howard Hughes - like mogul, now bedridden and engrossed with germ paranoia. Poppy's final project has been the creation of the Resort Town of G., where hundreds of unwilling servants, deprived of their long-term memories, go about tasks that are spelled out for them in a manual. Louse attends to his duties, hums Mozart (as mandated) while injecting Poppy with his nightly Valium, but he feels a vague distance from his life. He - s shaken out of his ordinary rounds of humiliating ministrations to Poppy and recreational fly-swatting, however, when a note is taped to his thigh during sex with one of the anonymous women he - s required to mate on a regular basis. It tells him he - s been chosen to take part in a conspiracy to subvert the established authorities of G., in accordance with the Poppy - s theory that - If there is no enemy within, there is no enemy to fight. - And so when Poppy orders Louse to give him a triple-strength (and probably lethal) injection, Louse complies and receives a promotion. After this, certain forms of Louse - s numbness abate: He begins to feel stirrings toward a woman he works with, and bits of memories start to emerge. A man who claims to be Poppy's son - and the real Herman Q. Louse - appears with a slew of quasi-explanations and begins to organize an escape from G. Is this, then, a scathing satire of organizational mores, a chilling tour of a murky authoritarian world where reality is plastic, or simply a dizzying litany of comings and goings that challenges readers to figure out what (if anything) is really going on? Grand's confident and clever fantasy runs disappointingly shallow: Despite the flashily ominous scenery, there are few moments that resonate or disturb. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In his first novel, Grand puts a Kafkaesque spin on a brave-new-world tale with a central figure based on historic fact. Howard Hughes^-like wealthy recluse Herbert Horatio Blackwell is so frightened of germs that he has created the totally contained resort town of G., staffed primarily with gamblers who fall deeply in debt and are kept drugged to obliterate long-term memory and made to follow regulations that prohibit the exercise of free will. As one of the caretakers of the physically fading Blackwell, thirtyish Herman Q. Louse ignores rumors of conspiracy circulating throughout G., until he is unwittingly designated a sanctioned conspirator himself. It is little surprise that money is at the heart of the matter and that little is what it seems here, including the title character himself. In controlled prose, Grand takes readers on a surrealistic ride, and they're unlikely to get off before it's over. Michele Leber

Hubert Horatio Blackwell is a Howard Hughes-like figure, tended in his decline by seemingly innumerable and faceless staff in the gambling "resort town of G." Among those charged with keeping his surroundings germ-free is Herman Q. Louse, a kind of indentured servant. Blackwell, or "Poppy," as Louse affectionately calls him, is about to experience a rude change in circumstance, as a conspiracy is afoot within his world. Grand, winner of NYU's Creative Writing Fellowship for fiction, portrays Louse as a man without memory, family, or allegiances. He appears amoral, brainwashed into assimilation in Poppy's legion as he works off his gambling debts. Though reality-based, the story has the aura of fantasy, an sf setting populated by androids. The reader has clues to Louse's life before his acquaintance with Blackwell. But who was he really? Will Blackwell ever be released from his miserable existence of paranoia and his consuming fear of microbes? And why does Louse refer to him as Poppy? Appropriate for both academic and large public libraries.?Margaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.