When Johnny wakes up he can’t remember where he is. Two nights at his parents’, a night at his sister’s, and last night on Mike’s couch. It’s all been disorienting. For the past two years, Johnny has been waking, pissing, shitting, showering, eating, working, and sleeping at the same time every day. The routine has grown on him like another layer of skin.
I'm missing nothing and moving at a rate I don't think I've moved at for years. To others, I must blur. My muscles are pistons, my blood petrol. I can feel my hair start to dampen with sweat, can feel it on my back and thighs. I don't look at the clock, don't stop.
There is something you must know my dearest cousin Ego. These days I am not only a big idol, but I think and go for stuff that moves me beyond boundaries. Up I have gone till I soar like the pound sterling against the naira.
I was prepping the bull for a ride by looping a belt around its testicles when Walter from the Mission put a call into Mom, said her brother Richard was in trouble. I wash my hands. I use more soap. We drive through the night.
Thomas E. Kennedy’s In the Company of Angels : A Novel is an elegy to the human heart. It begins on the couch of a Copenhagen psychiatrist treating a Chilean torture victim, Bernardo Greene.
The Hair of Harold Roux is a densely layered novel, but despite the metafictional elements in play, Irving’s characterization of Williams as “a wonderfully old-fashioned writer…that dinosaur among contemporary writers of fiction, an actual storyteller,” is sound. These qualities are in fact the foundation of my regard for Thomas Williams.