Reviews

DNC. Barely got into the book and was deeply off put by the representations of gender and sexuality. At least in the beginning, the author doesn't really name some of the characters, instead, they're just referred to repeatedly as "the transgender woman" and so on. Perhaps this was intentional and later on the characters get to be more dimensional than just their gender/sexuality.

mccordian's review against another edition

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5.0

This is a Whitman's sampler of characters and their varying slow burn relationships with Neva, a magical Christ-like figure cursed/blessed with the power to dispense seemingly endless love. But this is delicious, vulgar, beautiful, sick Vollmann. One chump's polished turd is another's oxygenated jewelry. Some sulk in the moonlight as others bask in surplus sunlight bouncing off of a big space rock. However, all of us are users, abusers and addicts of love.
I walked away from this book with a much higher awareness of the worth of everyone around me. The A-Listers, the understudies, the chorus, the backstage crew, the audience, the ticket takers, the folks in the alley behind the theater.

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