I can't honestly imagine anyone having the sitzfleisch to wade through a 250-page comic novel by an unknown writer on the internet. In case anyone does, I would like to take this opportunity to partially disown it.
In some ways it feels like a different person wrote it. For one thing I can now see the various flaws in it. For another, the person who wrote the novel appears at times to have attitudes I don't share or make fun of things I probably wouldn't make fun of. His primary goal at all times was to entertain, but in a couple of places he should perhaps have thought more about the implications behind the jokes. All thinking persons are supposed to hate political correctness, but the writer of this book could have used a smidgeon of it now and again. Or maybe not. Maybe he was right and I am wrong. Maybe it's just that in the intervening years I've lost the courage of my own nastiness. Before I re-read this novel I was under the impression that I was a fairly nice person back then and had only recently become bitter and twisted but now I am not so sure.
It pains me to note that my earlier self was a cheerful thief sometimes. He would have preferred the term 'borrower'. He would have mumbled something about post-modernism and homage and wearing your references on your sleeve and sampling and Wasteland-style fragment-shoring and film-makers getting away with it. And I suppose the occasional allusion or intentional echo is permissible - e.g., the bit where an Iberian waiter is cuffed on the head is a deliberate nod to Fawlty Towers. But in a couple of instances he pushes it. One of the main characters shares a catchphrase with Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. (The character in question is given to literary quotation, so I suppose you could say it's a deliberate affectation on his part.) And the punchline of an early chapter is lifted from the climax of the film What's Up Doc? In neither case was this a deliberate homage. What would happen was that my 25-year-old self would unconsciously duplicate something and then belatedly realize what he had done. He would go, 'Oh, shit, I got that from x, didn't I? It's an integral part of the book now and I can't possibly rewrite it. The whole thing's ruined, ruined! I wish I had never been born.' Then he would go, 'Sod it, I'll leave it in and say it's postmodern.'
(I do like this talk of 'he' and an earlier self. I hate apologizing and owning up to stuff but this makes it much easier. I must use it in other situations. 'I cannot tell a lie, Mother, it was my earlier self that ate all your chocolates.' 'Are you the host of this party? I'm afraid an earlier self has puked in your fish-tank.')
Any attempts by me to rewrite his work would be futile as well as presumptuous. I'd end up having to do the whole thing from scratch and, well, I wouldn't.
Anyway, here it is. He not being me, I'm allowed to say I think he was inspired
at times.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24