That's cool. If I've misrepresented anyone's opinion, please ignore this post. I just went back and checked and I realize that I may have misunderstood just which critics Donna was referring to when she wrote that she's leaning towards that camp. If so, I'm sorry. The fact that I write dumb things on the internet…

High Art
I'm the guy who tried to (utterly failing to make a single coherent argument) argue that Master and Commander was just a well told adventure story and not LITERATURE! I think that the book's core was hollow and that the few things the book did try to say about life were largely dishonest. I'm not surprised…

I chuckled aloud at many jokes in this book
The Santa vs Satan scene was probably the funniest for me, too, although I greatly enjoyed any sentence that was phrased from Muldoon's POV.

Claudine
The shrewish wife is a folk tale convention, so I think she was fair game for a novel of this nature.

She was good and innocent and pure. Absolutely boring. The hero ends up with the whore in this one, and good for him. She saved him from a boring happily ever after.

Muldoon does seem to flirt with dualism in his early monologue chapters. Ironically, her also complains that language is reductive. What could be more reductive than dualism?His later monologues contradict the dualist ideas from the early monologues, though.

FJ, I agree with that reading, but it is presented to us from the point of view of the peeping neighbor who couldn't tell if they were loving or fighting. One way to read that is rough sex, but it's also possible that they were genuinely fighting—Michael has plenty of reasons to be upset with Violet and maybe he…

No doubt he was inverting mythic expectations, but from the point of view of the Ivy League, the story can be seen as having played out in classical myth fashion, can't it?

All good points, WR, but throughout the book there are also hints that Michael wasn't completely happy in his life. At the very end anyway, he fantasizes about putting the ridiculous sex gag gift on his dick, something that he assumes virginal Rose would never stand for.

Hmmm. I agree that one purpose of humor is to be subversive, but it may be a chicken or egg kind of thing as things that are trangressive when presented in a certain light tend to make people laugh.

Good stuff, WR.

I don't say that that's all it is, but I do say that the comedy takes priority to anything else in this book and that for me, that's just fine. I think Dobyns chose this substance primarily to hang his humor on. And for me, that's just fine.

Nice catch, Joel. I thought it might be Rose at the end, but that Dobyns mentioned the bones repeatedly (even once in the last few pages) to make it ambiguous. I suppose the whole Kyd thing seems even less important than it was if that wasn't Rose at the end.

FG, not completely. Muldoon is an over the top cartoon and Dobyns is making fun of him and his philosophies, but I think other evidence in the book (the absurdity of the minor details in religious arguments causing major rifts as well as the general uselessness of those arguments to get anything done or cause any…

Just sillyness?
I think there's a bit more to this book than that, but is it OK for a book to be just sillyness and absurdity? Is it enough for a book to be funny, even if there's not too much more to it than that?

It's definitely implied that Morgan could be Michael's father, but it doesn't really matter, right?

I hear what your saying about the emotional connection, FG, but I don't think Dobyns expected you to have any emotional connection. It's not that kind of book. I think Dobyns tried to engage your brain and sense of humor, but not your emotions (I can see why that would turn you off of a book, though).

Strange, when you wrote "keep it real" I think what you meant to say was "to be more human we must be more bestial!" I loved that Muldoon wanted to just cut through all of the bullshit, and I think it's fairly obvious that Dobyns agrees. Did Dobyn's have to put so much b.s. on display in order to make that point? I…

The Jungle/Sirens of Words
In a quest, isn't the hero often delayed through magic or whatever by an inescapable maze or jungle, or maybe there are sirens on islands to try and distract the hero. Isn't that what all of the religious arguments were for Michael? Wasn't Jack Molay a Calypso of sorts, delaying and…

If you don't like Muldoon, then honestly, I don't think this book is for you.