The Pickup Artist

From the award-winning author of Pirates of the Universe, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, comes The Pickup Artist--a sharp, witty, and subversive exploration of the future of art, culture, and society. In the tradition of Ray Bradbury's fireman who burns books in Fahrenheit 451, our hero, Hank Shapiro, is a pickup artist, a government agent who gathers for retirement creative works whose time has come and gone. You see, there's simply not enough room in the world for all the art, so anything past a certain age must be cataloged, archived in the records, and destroyed, paving the way for new art. It's a job that comes with risk and the pay's lousy, but it covers the bills. And, after all, this year's art is better than last year's, isn't it?

But what happens is not nearly as important as the telling. Terry Bisson is an American writer in the satirical tradition of Twain and Vonnegut and perhaps Richard Brautigan. He can make you laugh and touch your heart in the same sentence. This is a book about love, death, and America.

Science fiction needs humor, and it is plentiful in this zany, seriocomic variation on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 from Hugo and Nebula award winner Bisson. BAE (Bureau of Arts and Entertainment) agent Hank Shapiro makes his living picking up for "deletion" books by older authors in a world that has run out of room for them. Deletion also applies to musicians and artists. Frank Sinatra records, as well as Impressionist paintings, are all fodder for Hank's pickup bag. He is curious about none, just doing his job, until he finds a recording by his namesake, country singer Hank Williams. Curious, he listens to, then loses, the recording. His need to retrieve it starts him on an extended and increasingly antic road trip across America, accompanied by his dog, usually but not always dead, thanks to "HalfLifeTM". Along the way Hank encounters a young woman pregnant for more than nine years who finally gives birth, and Bob, a dead man, one of 63 Bob clones who keep hilariously popping up. Humorous episodes involve a mountainously high garbage fill on Staten Island, N.Y., and a Ramapo Indian casino in northern New Jersey. Providing continuity are historical summaries of the deletion movement, which began with protests by young artists, "Alexandrians," who are "named for the fire, not the library." In a nice twist reminiscent of the ending of Bradbury's classic, the Alexandrians ultimately decide they should be "named after the library and not the fire." (Apr. 11)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As a pickup artist, Hank Shapiro has the responsibility of confiscating works of art slated for elimination to make room for works by new artists. When he succumbs to the urge to listen one more time to a forbidden Hank Williams song, he becomes a fugitive and discovers a strange underground organization dedicated to saving the past. The author of Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories and Pirates of the Universe brings his peculiar blend of outrageous humor and incisive perceptions to a tale reminiscent of Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 with a distinctly 21st-century twist. For most sf collections.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hank Shapiro is a pickup artist--a deletion officer for the Bureau of Arts and Entertainment, that is. He makes house calls to collect books, recordings, movies, and graphic artworks whose time has come. Later in this century, you see, there is just too much art around. After a terrorist outbreak against museums and libraries, a government disposal scheme is implemented, and deletion begins. Anyway, Shapiro gets hung up on a particular pickup, a Hank Williams LP. He has to hear it, which means acquiring a phonograph, which means resorting to the criminal black market, which means getting caught in the crossfire when the exchange site is raided and killing an agent with an old gun that comes to hand. He must flee, with the corpse of his black-market contact, a nine-years-pregnant librarian, and his dying dog in tow. His destination is strictly unknown but west, probably Vegas; his goal, to regain the record, lost in the shootout. From page one on, things get curiouser and curiouser in Bisson's second novel, which in its blend of the eerie, the sexy, and the disgusting (the corpse is in for the entire journey) becomes surrealistic in the manner of a Bunuel movie. If this gets filmed, though, the Coen brothers should do it--on a Roger Corman (Bucket of Blood, Wild Angels) budget. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved