Busy Monsters
Page 25
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to:
Bob Weil, my Maxwell Perkins, who found half a novel and made it whole.
Philip Marino for his incalculable insight and support.
Steve Almond for showing the way with fire and love.
Ed Minus for twenty years of teaching.
Lorin Rees for meals and deals.
The editors and readers who made a difference: Mitch Wieland, Steven Church, Erin Gay, Jane Jones, Todd Zuniga, Christopher Schelling, and Matthew Mahoney.
Bill Pierce, Chris Walsh, Tom DeMarchi, Julianna Baggott, and John Stazinski for encouragement when it mattered, for being the scribes and pals they are.
The committed staff at W. W. Norton, the best in the business.
Katie, my bride, and Ethan, my boy, for being here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM GIRALDI teaches at Boston University and is Senior Fiction Editor for AGNI. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and Salmagundi. Giraldi lives in Boston with his wife and son.
Further Praise for
BUSY
MONSTERS
“The prose is electric. . . . Genius.”
—Poets & Writers
“Busy Monsters may be the best literary present you could bring to a brainy guy’s bachelor party. It boasts lots of gonzo adventure, wacky sex and an endorsement by Harold Bloom. . . . William Giraldi’s cocky first novel is a romance for real men—real nerdy men willing to fight for a woman’s heart. . . . These busy antics are awfully funny. . . . Hijinks keep spiking through this screwball narrative, but what really keeps pumping it alive is that impossibly odd and self-conscious voice, a mixture of 19th-century gentility and modern hipster. . . . It’s irresistibly strange. . . . One of the weirdest comic novels of the year. And it has a delicate sweetness that shows through at just the right moments in what is, after all, a very old, romantic story.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A certain kind of reader, weary of contemporary fiction’s polished ‘craft’ being mistaken for distinctive style, will not be able to stop reading when teased with [Giraldi’s] sentences. Although Giraldi admires (and has been obviously influenced by) the late Barry Hannah . . . he is the bastard literary son of Evelyn Waugh. The title of Busy Monsters is not the only way in which Giraldi’s novel resembles Vile Bodies, Waugh’s second novel. Both are hilarious; both satirize the unruliness and overindulgence of their characters’ lives and yet revel in every minute of it; both are terrified of boredom. . . . And beneath the facetiousness and verbal hijinks, there is a seriousness of Christian purpose to Busy Monsters. . . . Giraldi’s model is the ‘antithetical fusion’ of high and low, superb and uncouth, which Erich Auerbach describes in Mimesis as the ‘mixed style’ of Christian rhetoric. Giraldi resorts to it to suggest the need for something that is missing in most postmodern lives.”
—D. G. Myers, Commentary
“At the heart of Busy Monsters is Homar’s brilliance, humanity, and understanding. . . . Homar is a giant in his multifariousness, a gushing-blood romantic whose longing infiltrates every sentence. . . . What makes Giraldi’s enormous characters so fascinating are their complexities and contradictions. You’ve never met these people. But then again, you’ve met all of them.”
—David Holub, American Book Review
“William Giraldi . . . achieves a sort of poetic lunacy in this debut novel. . . . Giraldi’s prose throughout is enveloping but it’s also intimate, reading almost like the lovesick diary entries of Franz Kafka. But beneath the surreal, there’s substance: The encounters with fantastical creatures and lampooning of famous epics (like The Odyssey) are merely set pieces in his Gen-Y ruminations on relationships and mortality. . . . The fun here is not in the destination, but in the journey itself.And with monsters like these, what fun it is.”
—Jeremy Medina, Time Out New York, Critics’ Pick
“Wacky as it is, Busy Monsters has a lot to say about literature with its off-kilter meditations on literary conventions, including strained father-son relationships, love stories, quest narratives and the contemporary phenomenon of the made-up memoir. Busy Monsters is hilarious, ridiculous, brimming with energy, and makes a promising debut for Giraldi, a writer with a strange and appealing mind.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Skewering the false bravado of the aughties memoir craze, Busy Monsters also reads a bit like the type of screenplay Wes Anderson might write in the midst of a roid rage. . . . The whole fun of Busy Monsters is in Giraldi’s sentences, which manage to be both parodic and wholly original.”
—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
“In his riotous debut novel—up there with, say, James Wilcox’s Modern Baptists—Giraldi tells the story of Charles Homar, a jilted fiancé who embarks on a hilariously ill-advised odyssey to win back his beloved. . . . Charles’s journey—filled with offbeat characters, seen through a perfectly skewed worldview, and related in an idiosyncratic voice—might remind readers of the one taken by the equally wrong-headed Ray Midge in Charles Portis’s comic masterpiece, The Dog of the South.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Here we have a seriocomic picaresque that references everything from the Odyssey to medieval romances to Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. A brilliant first novel that may well be in the running for 2011’s literary awards.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“In this very funny first novel, Giraldi launches his loquacious narrator on an absurd quest that is touching as well as comical. . . . Erudite, salacious, and frequently hilarious, Busy Monsters heralds the emergence of a prodigiously talented comic writer onto the literary scene.”
—Booklist
“As unpalatable as the fictional [Charles] Homar would be as a real live person, he’s an absolutely delicious character, making a series of hilariously nearsighted (and outright bad) decisions to propel himself through this far-fetched (and downright funny) narrative. . . . The voice [Giraldi] has given Charles is singular and arresting . . . and filled with quirky turns of phrase, unexpected literary and cultural allusions, self-aware asides, and highfalutin word choices that would make Roget swell with pride. The plot, too, is an exciting yet masterfully managed hodgepodge.”
—Salon
“Much of the joy of Busy Monsters comes from watching the protagonist bumble his way from one misadventure to the next, all the while maintaining an impressively detailed first-person monologue. . . . An absurdist jaunt, a particularly fanciful picaresque . . . governed by its own peculiar internal logic.”
—Bookforum
“William Giraldi is one of those writers for whom every sentence matters. He commands language like Kingsley Amis or Peter Carey. Busy Monsters is . . . a postmodern quest that riffs on every epic story in Western literature, yet never takes itself too seriously.”
—Powell’s Books
“The book’s antics are entertaining, but the real treat is how much fun Giraldi seems to be having with language. It’s a contagious passion that makes Busy Monsters a promising debut.”
—Samantha Nelson, The Onion
“Readers will be swept along in breathless, disbelieving glee.”
—Chris Barsanti, PopMatters
“Riotous . . . part Don Quixote, part Jack Kerouac.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“A bold, satirical debut.”
—Times (London)
“Populated by extraterrestrials, Asiatic sex slaves and beasts of the deep, William Giraldi’s first novel is not a debut that enters the literary scene blushing. This book shouts: it’s linguistically playful to the point of hyperactivity, yet self-conscious
ly attempts to place itself in the American canon. . . . Beneath the surface of this extrovert book is a story of bewildered masculinity and neurosis. The result in places makes Gary Shteyngart look restrained.”
—Financial Times
“Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Voltaire’s Candide, and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions comprise the club of picaresque that William Giraldi’s lively Busy Monsters aspires to join. . . . Bold, propulsive prose and hilarious, thought-inducing cultural references. . . . A compelling work of literary merrymaking.”
—Daily Beast
Copyright © 2011 by William Giraldi
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2012
Excerpt from High Lonesome, copyright © 1996 by Barry Hannah. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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Book design by Ellen Cipriano
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giraldi, William.
Busy monsters : a novel / William Giraldi. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-07962-3 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3607.I469B87 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011007710
ISBN 978-0-393-34293-2 pbk.
E-ISBN 978-0-393-08214-2.
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