a novel ISBN 978-0930773-540 |
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a novel ISBN 978-0930773-540 |
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A painting that alters itself, or is altered, as the artist sleeps. A computer
that may be God and quacks like a duck. A basketball forward who disappears in the
middle of a drive. An evangelist who screams himself out of the moment as his wife
and children are blown to bits by a bomb dropped from a balloon. A cult of computer
programmers.
In his robust fiction debut, Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek
magazine and himself a painter, has written a novel about time, perception, the
nature of reality, and characters who transform themselves or are transformed as the
painting is transformed. In theme and technique, Time for Robo
invites comparison with Gravity's Rainbow and Slaughterhouse
Five.
What the Critics are Saying |
Newsweek
...[W]hat you'd expect from a guy whose first Newsweek piece compared Cezanne to Ernest
Tubb -- a surreal waltz across space, time and cultures.
Kirkus
Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! As does Jack Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight,
Plagens's first novel opens with God/the Universe/the Ghost/the Big Enchilada pouring
HimHerself out onto the page in Quack strange rhyming riverrun past Eve and Adam's tumbles
(if Quack language, it's Friday night in the cosmos, and since first-novelist and painter
Plagens is Newsweek’s art critic, you can count on him to fancy up the King's English
with slippery opening storyless ultralonggliding Beckettian paragraphs that struggle
toward some kind of focus and a tale to tell. The Ghost/Billy Lockjaw leaves Manhattan for
hometown Mylar, North Carolina, to write his second novel, his first having been fodder
for Times Book Review novelist-reviewers reviewing novelist-reviewers, and his lyrical
pages having fallen like a forest pine heard only by chipmunks. Readers bereft of a book
reviewer's stamina may start on page 48, where the novel proper begins, as we enter the
monologual mind of Billy's hero Robo, a white, ex–ABA basketball player who had a
freakish gift on the court: He could disappear and reappear midair with a slam dunk, a
feat no camera ever caught. Then a centuries-old, magical portrait of the Virgin and Child
(that speaks with the Voice of God) suggests various dates when the world will end and
falls into the hands of immigrant Serge Protector, which leads to the story of antipapist
California cultist minister Noam Sain, who preaches Blowjobs for Christ. Plot fits within
plot like Chinese boxes until Robo's boxed for years into an aluminum trailer like a
Beckett character in a garbage can. Will Newsweek review this fitfully amusing
extragalactic word salad? Will God? Or Michael Jordan for the Times Book Review? It takes
courage it to write something this original—turned down, Plagens says, by the
majors—and let the pine-tree roll where it may.
Village Voice:
"As a painter, he's good; as a writer, great. He couldn't be one without the other."
Artweek:
"[There
is] a rare and highly developed instinct that Plagens' writing . . . demonstrates:
he is an extraordinary barroom sociologist, and he uses this skill to demonstrate how a
work of art or a situation in general may be the product of the specific socioecnomic
forces that surround it, much like an ecologist seeking to show how a given organism
relates to its ecosystem."
New York Times:
". . . one of art-writing's few gifted comedians."