Spaceman Blues: A Love Song

An impossibly pulsing, sprawling, hyperkinetic novel, propelled by a remarkably original voice: the jacket blurbs compare him to Pynchon, and yes, he'll appeal to anyone who loved Gravity's Rainbow (or a big fat novel by William Gaddis or David Foster Wallace, but also, I think, Tom Robbins, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson). But Slattery's tumbling, cumulative, evocative, celebratory prose is distinctively his own, and so is his resolute focus: this relatively slim book never wafts off into abstractions, just maniacally unfolds its manifold (but converging) plotlines against an exuberant setting of wild partying and lucrative black marketeering among the immigrants from dozens of nations in a magical-realist New York. Yes, when you're done reading it, you tend to write long sentences. I am inexpressibly grateful to the random guy in the library who recommended this to me while I was browsing the new sf. He said it was "quirky." I saw it was blurbed by Harlan Ellison on the front, and was sold. Thanks, random library guy.