Billy's Blues - Hardcover

Meltzer, C. Rips

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579620051 ISBN 13: 9781579620059

Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co, 1998

Walter, a shut-in obsessed with Billy the Kid, researches the infamous outlaw with such an intensity that it becomes difficult for him to separate myth from reality

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An urban shut-in's lugubrious narrative of a life without purpose, spliced to a lengthy deconstruction of the career of the historical killer Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. Though he characterizes himself as ``built for comfort,'' Walter, the enormously fat, sugar-addicted agoraphobe of this tentative first novel from Meltzer, is anything but comfortable. A prisoner of his dead parents' New York City apartment, his expenses paid by their trust fund, Walter's waking hours are spent nursing paranoid obsessions about the neighbors he encounters on brief journeys to his mailbox or the basement laundry machines. A fidgety sleeper, Walter repeatedly dreams of a spectral figure who may or may not be the Kid, then resolves to find out as much as he can about the historical figure from books, movie videos, and other materials he orders by mail. What follows is a ragged assembly of annotated quotations (reproduced in varied typefaces) from memoirs about the Kid, Kid biographies, Kid film scripts, songs, dime novels, and other effluvia, all cluttered by Walter's fretful analysis of American culture, in which the Kid serves as a mythic icon. After demonstrating, at tedious length, how much can never definitively be verified about the Kid's existence, Walter wrestles with the possibility that the legendary hero may not have died from Pat Garrett's shooting and could be his impossibly old great-grandfather, who has been making ominous calls to Walter's answering machine. Inspired by his research, Walter comes to terms with his own purposeless life and sets forth on an antiheroic quest to ``rescue'' his great-grandfather from a rest home. A satiric gloss on the postWW II urban coming-of-age novels of Bellow and Roth, padded to book length with material drawn from a variety of exotic sources. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Combining fact, folklore and a shopworn twist of revisionist history, Meltzer's eccentric debut joins the legion of books about the legendary gunslinger Billy the Kid. Although Billy's tale may be a rerun, the storyteller's is a hoot. The narrator is Walter, a reclusive 1990s New York City apartment dweller. An unemployed, obese shut-in burdened by countless phobias, Walter is afraid of people, germs, daylight and healthy food. As he snarfs down Hershey Bar marshmallow fluffer-honey-nutter sandwiches topped with Redi-Whip, Walter becomes obsessed with the Old West's most notorious, pint-sized killer. He desperately wants to purge Billy of his brutal myth, to prove the Kid was really just misunderstood, not withstanding the 21 notches on his pistols. But even as Walter escapes in dreams to the Lincoln County War of 1878, the urban travails of his waking hours are closing in on him. Annotated and liberally sprinkled with quotations from penny-dreadfuls, the Bible and old movies like Billy the Kid vs. Frankenstein, this odd, bittersweet novel features troubles more complex than those The Kid ever had to face.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.