The Ecstatic The Ecstatic

The Ecstatic

    • 3.1 • 7 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

Victor LaValle has already established himself as “one of the most eloquent voices of the approaching century” (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of imagination, and language that “crackles and hums” (Chicago Tribune). The Ecstatic is LaValle’s debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex, insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family.

Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it’s getting worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony. Mental illness has been transmitted through his family’s blood. The three women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence soon turns their house into a semisuburban asylum.

Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Anthony narrates his family’s surreal adventures through a world of grinning exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood loan sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He corresponds with a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious pack of dogs, and tries to make his own horror movie, all in search of an answer to a question he doesn’t dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit picaresques from Journey to the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the revelatory story of a family trying to save themselves from a ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2003
October 14
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
288
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
669.5
KB

Customer Reviews

MoPhilO ,

Incredibly Interesting and Involving

I love Lavelle’s writing, so this is a fan perspective. Big Machine, for me, is perfection *chef’s kiss* and I live Black Tom. There is so much to enjoy about this novel. The main character, Anthony, and his family, neighbors, and mysterious figures like Ishkibibble and Uncle Arms, are wonderfully drawn. The worlds of Queens NYC and teen pageants are presented in all their strangeness with a delicacy that doesn’t undermine the humanity of the characters struggling within them. That’s one of the powerful aspects of Lavelle’s writing.

In this novel, something feels unresolved to me. I would have loved it if the encyclopedia— the book within the book— was featured and explored even further. I wanted a lot more of it, and suspect some resolution would be found within. Nevertheless, it was totally worthwhile reading it, and a must read for fans, especially.

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