Technicolor Pulp: A Novel - Hardcover

Nelson, Arty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446518190 ISBN 13: 9780446518192

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1995

Synopsis

With a pocket full of borrowed money and a head full of rain, Jimi sits in a pub in London, where he has traveled for no reason except that London isn't Boston, or Manhattan, or the college where Jimi wasted four years, or the brick alleyways where he's puked and made love and crawled and laughed at the night.
Jimi Banks is 23: went to school as a hockey player and now just skates: diseased and innocent, criminal and pure. His summer love that started on a posh island crashed on the dusty mainland. And his best friend is dead.
From London in a cloud of hashish and tobacco, booze and beer...to Paris to stay with the daughter of a banker who wants to be a patron of the arts...back to London, broke again, where a man named Rosie declares his undying love and it's all right with Jimi if it just comes with a meal....Jimi Banks is dodging shadows. There's his friend, Ray, who hung himself in a gorge outside Aspen; his family who won't return his phone calls anymore; and the vast quantities of booze he has to drink to call them.
Out of money, out of favors, Jimi is just not out of places to run.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

At the opening of this self-styled "Slacker" novel, the narrator, a 26-year-old waste case named Jimi (as in Hendrix, of course) tells us, "All I got is this story. A story of drifting. It's not my story. I'm just a small piece of it." Not quite. The novel recounts a few months in Jimi's craven life. His girlfriend leaves him after he practically rapes her; he feels betrayed somehow and goes to London where he mooches off his buddy Doobe in an orgy of booze and drugs and denial. His father disowns him, as does his wealthy godfather; a couple of women take an interest in him, but no relationship lasts more than a night or means more to him than a four-letter word. One of the short chapters in this distasteful novel is devoted to Jimi on the toilet; another to his upset stomach during a case of food poisoning. The book's title, in fact, is a play on the euphemism for vomiting: "technicolor yawn." Jimi is a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered misogynist who alienates everyone he comes in contact with-the only dose of humanity he's allowed is to muse about a brother who killed himself a couple of years back. The narrative, too, is underdone, having no development to speak of and an entirely ad-hoc resolution. The writing is lackluster and dismayingly un-visual. The only encouraging thing about this first novel is that Nelson has an edgy sense of humor, which almost redeems a small multitude of sins.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0446518190
• ISBN 13: 9780446518192
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 204