|
"Often one finds
surprises in a novel, but it is rare to find a novel that is a
surprise. Richard Melo's 'Happy Talk' is just that. It is
like a collision of William Gaddis, M*A*S*H and The
Beguiled. It is a Haiti I could never have imagined and will not
soon forget. These nurses are crazy and I wish I knew them."
--Percival
Everett, author of 'Assumption' and 'I am Not Sidney Poitier'
Happy Talk, a novel by
Richard Melo, imagines a star-crossed love affair in the Haiti of 1955
under the auspices of a U.S. Government plot to re-create Haiti as the
next Hawaii.
Gun-slinging American student nurses and
boozy-NYC-playwrights-turned-educational-filmmakers can't wait to get
off the Magic Island, while their directive to create a film short
promoting tourism turns into a fiasco. All the while, voodoo is in the
air, manifested as ghostly drumming in the distance.
Front and center are Culprit Clutch, hero of anti-heroes, who appears
mostly through rumor and innuendo, and whose intrepid adventures lead
him to strange encounters with people not acting like themselves and
Josie, his ghostly paramour with a morphine habit and who may or may
not have voodoo spirits flowing through her.
The cast of characters includes a Scandinavian zombie, an ancient
Egyptian phantom, a power-mad doctor channeling Baron Samedi and bent
on Culprit's destruction, and Culprit's black sidekick who sees through
it all (including his role as sidekick). The novel’s
cascading epilogues include a legendary car race down the length of
Mexico; street theatre in Golden Gate park, circa 1968; a Skylab
mutiny; origins of the musical comedy Godspell; and cameos by the
Nation of Islam and early followers of Jim Jones.
Written in the style of a 60s-era post-modern novel and driven by its
Catch-22 style dialogue and Rice Crispies atmosphere, Happy Talk is a
novel as picaresque as it is picturesque, knotty as it is naughty,
scathing in its satire while loving at its core, lyrical,
hallucinatory, and hilarious.
COMING IN SUMMER 2012 from Red Lemonade |