Distortion, by Stephen Beachy
http://www.distortionthebook.com


The second novel by Stephen Beachy is a paradox: it's
a difficult novel that's easy to read. A loosely
structured, Altman-esque book, it follows the
adventures of Reggie, a young, biracial,
speed-addicted hustler, and the demimonde surrounding
him. The novel follows him from L.A., where he
becomes a huge MTV star-cipher, to Florida. Along the
way, we drop into the lives of his friends and
families, perennial flies on the wall. Most of the
characters are disenfranchised in one way or
another--gay, poor, or ethnic minorities; they are not
the usual denizens of complex, experimental novels.
In this way, it recalls Samuel Delany's epic novel
Dhalgren. The quirky characters, which include a
wandering punk-rock poet, a video-producer dying of
AIDS, a woman who works with abandoned kids among
others, are sharply delineated. The shifts in locale
and points-of-view is often dizzying; it resembles
both the frantic editing of a music video, and more
encyclopedic activity of hypertext links.

Woven into these densely interior vignettes are
hallucinations and dreams sequences of the various
narrators. At times, it's impossible to see where the
"real" fictive world end and the
drug-and-dream-induced imagined parts begin. Part of
it has to do with Beachy's trademark drunken wordplay.
The man is incapable of producing an uninterested
sentence. The imagery is always startling, the syntax
and rhythms seductive. It is his verbal facility,
more than anything, which provides the novel what
structure it has. Somehow Beachy is able to create
intense character-driven fiction, and rich
phantasmorgia simultaneously. His authorial
voices--at once hip, goofy, and scary--waxes
philosophically about love, family, film and video
theory, sexual abuse and race. This novel is not for
everyone--the barrage of images can lean toward the
extremely sexual and the disturbing. But those who
opt to follow Reggie and his friends on their journeys
will be moved. Imagine the trenchant social-realist
fiction of Susan Straight or Jess Mowry thrown into a
blender with the elegiac, drug-fueled fabulations of
Philip K. Dick, and Distortion might be the product.
--Craig L. Gidney

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"Those that bite the hand that feeds them sooner or later
must meet...The Big Dentist"

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