Diane Trap (trap@mail.libs.uga.edu)
Wed, 30 Jun 1999 10:14:13 -0400 (EDT)
> More intersting: did some of you ever read
Bowman's
> novels? are they as superficial as his critical
work?
>
> E.Borgers
I haven't read any of Bowman's fiction, but a quick search of
the book reviews on www.nytimes.com came up with a review of
his first novel, _Let the Dog Drive_. The review connects
Bowman's writing and hardboiled detective novels, so I've
posted its relevant bits below.
-----Diane Trap
trap@mail.libs.uga.edu
(Note: This is extremely edited. To see the whole review, go
to www.nytimes.com, go to the Books page, and search the
archive for Bowman.)
The Hippo and the Belle of Amherst
Date: February 7, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline:
By Tim Sandlin;
LET THE DOG DRIVE By David Bowman. 295 pp. New York: New York
University Press. $19.95.
...Bud Salem, an 18-year-old Californian with a mother who is
a faith healer and whose father, a former Tarzan stand-in,
was killed by a baby hippopotamus in the Tournament of Roses
parade. Bud raves and rambles. He rants at life with the
unstructured, unrepentant energy of Henry Miller or the early
Philip Roth. He sprays the page with a machine-gun fire of
images, ideas and allusions, some so apt the reader may put
down the book to applaud. Others don't seem to make a lick of
sense. In other words, the kid takes risks. Bud is not your
generic drowning-in-angst teen-age narrator as cloned by the
hundreds since Holden Caulfield first observed life in the
pop of a pimple. Bud is an intellectual, a walking cultural
data base of literary, movie, music and biblical
cross-references. While detective novels of the 1940's are
his field of extreme expertise, he is also on familiar ground
with Joan Didion, avant-garde photographers and Bible verses
dealing with dogs. Imagine Jack Kerouac with an M.F.A.
...Bud's grandfather, Rex Ringer, who wrote 38 private-eye
novels between 1943 and 1959...is given free rein to inject
commentary. His advice: "Kid, put the past in the bird cage.
. .
. If you don't have the common sense to write a detective
story, then shoot down to El Dos Passos or wherever and write
a goddamn book about Central America."
After his own fashion, Bud takes his grandfather's advice. He
meets the standards for a detective novel -- gallons of
alcohol are drunk, a few people are killed, and there's a
nifty torture scene that may be unique in the annals of
first-person narration -- and mixes it with that Latin
American style known as magic realism...Raymond Chandler
merges with Gabriel Garcia Marquez....
For the record, the novel does have a plot and
characters..."Let the Dog Drive" won the 1992 Elmer Holmes
Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. The book is fresh, fun and
well written, and it deserves this and any other awards that
apply to first novels
-- all novels, for that matter. Now that David Bowman has
emerged, it will be interesting to see where his
surrealistic, hard-boiled, intelligentsia style takes him
next.
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