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    The Deification
    The Deification
    The Deification
    Ebook467 pages7 hours

    The Deification

    By Jack Remick

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer’s ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffeetown Press
    Release dateDec 5, 2011
    ISBN9781603811354
    The Deification
    Author

    Jack Remick

    Jack Remick is a novelist, poet, essayist. His work includes the novels-Blood; Gabriela and The Widow; Citadel; Doubles in a Game of Chance. The poetry-Satori, Poems. The essays-What Do I Know.

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    Reviews for The Deification

    3/5

    19 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      One of the hardest books I've ever read, it leads me to believe that I do not like Beat, or that maybe Jack Remick cannot write Beat. This observation only leads me to add Kerouac to my list of authors to read, and use him as a measure to Remick.It being several months since the passing of my reading, I can only recollect the disappointments. The main character had to have been crazy: sticking around when he shouldn't, and leaving when you think things are going great for him. The protagonist's milieu is filled with all types, pushing the hero towards the end of the book. Mostly A-Types, they are oftentimes more interesting--especially one in particular early on, who is discarded in my disbelief.Remick's use of words are fine, but a good dose of less-is-more would make the book more functional, more enjoyable. And the lack of quotation became so frustrating after page 30, it was a chore-filled, lip biting read.
    • 5/5
      If American literature produces one On the Road per century, then The Deification by Jack Remick is it for the twenty-first century. This saga of the road trip of would-be poet Eddie Iturbi from Sanger to San Francisco, from innocence to art, is fast, hot, thick, mythic, erudite, erotic, and intense. The prose is lush, the story, irresistible. Remick inscribes these vivid, gender-morphing characters on the California landscape as if they'd always been there. I believe The Deification will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.
    • 3/5
      Another book focusing on the Beat Generation (my favorite poetry generation). I thought that it was pretty hard to get into at first. I found it to be quite derivative.
    • 3/5
      "Realism is a trap you fall into by will" (207) The Deification is a complicated book for me to review. So much so that I waited almost two weeks AFTER reading the book to let it settle in. Just hoping that I would have this Amazing aha-moment and my opinion would become clear.'Cuz man, I like the book. BUT then there were plenty that just rubbed me the wrong way. Like I kept thinking: Why go there!!! I don't care!!Aiight. Let me break it down. What interested me the most about the book was the homage it pays toward the Beats. Man, I was IN LOVE with some beat generation poetry and prose. Especially the fierce tempo. Spoken word was a Ginormous thing for me when I was in college. Not that **I** ever performed. Geez no. But I would spend many a night in a dimly lit, smoke filled coffee house drinking cheap beer and getting inspired. A close friend was a performer and man was he pure s3xy on stage. So anything that starts as a quest to be a part of The Movement I'm gonna read it. Even if it's merely for nostalgia.Soooo...Deification, which means to immortalize, is a hero's journey. And the hero, like any good hero is complicated and tainted. Eddie is a teenager who has ran away from home to seek out his idol and last beat poet, Leo Franchetti. And it's during this road trip that leads him to one of my all-time favorite minor character, Layne.Oh Layne.Let me tell you what. Layne is such a powerful character. Eddie picks him up at a gas station. He's a wandering tranny doing tricks to make it. Unlike the usual protocol where minor characters are used to serve as movement in Plot or externalize a Trait in the main character, Layne was FULL ON FLESH AND BONES. And man did he bleed both figuratively and literally.Unfortunately he was only in the first canto. Oh yeah, didn't I mention the book was divided in four cantos? Trendy, pretentious, or innovative?Eventually Eddie does come to find Leo and although reluctant at first, Leo takes him under his wing. Eddie's first task: "Read everything, Leo told him, because you need to know what great words feel like in your mouth. He looked up at the shelf- now half-read - of the masters. Read everything, Leo said, until your eyeballs burn. Read until your teeth fall out. Read it all because you're a keeper of the language, Eddie, a guardian of the Muse and if you let them the mongrel hordes of pseudo-poets will rape her and leave her for dead, so you read them all." (101)The journey that Eddie goes on to become a poet is imaginative and filled with magical realism. Love it! There are moments that are total WTF-ery, but in a good way. I immediately associate it with the drug usage and acid trips of the Beats even though it is made clear from the get go that young Eddie neither drinks or uses recreational drugs.All of these mystical excusions I adore but then about two-thirds of the way thru the book, the journey takes a very realistic and somewhat awkward turn. Eddie's post catches up with him and we're finally told why he ran away. Except. I. Didn't. Care. It was like I was cruisin' down the highway at 55 and then at the next curve in the road, the speed limit immediately drops to 35 without any warning. You're screwed. You've gotta hit the breaks if you even wanna attempt obeying the law. I guess what I've heard as the biggest oh no he didn't moment was the end. But I didn't feel that way at all. It made perfect sense.This appears to be a series, and this is one of book four. But don't let that worry you. I don't know if I'll race out to get book two when it's published and I'm okay with that because this one has left me satisfied.
    • 2/5
      I had trouble getting into this, and I didn't finish it. I found it very derivative. Perhaps this wasn't the best book for me, since I didn't especially enjoy reading Kerouac or the beat poets the first time. If you do, though, you will probably like Remick's re-hash.
    • 4/5
      The story of a young runaway whose ambition is to become a great poet like his hero Leo Franchetti, the last beat poet. I did not like this book at first. It was about a teenage car thief on the run with a male prostitute; they were in love but not lovers! Eventually the prostitute opts for sex change and goes off with a rich suitor. Eddie moves on , but the story still drags. To me it felt as though the author was engrossed in snakes and rats. Becoming a poet was all about rats gnawing at your heals and other absurdities. Eventually, the author found his rhythm and, while still distracted by the mysticism supposedly needed to become a great poet, I was able to read the story as I think the author intended. I began to see Pynchon and Kerouac in the nonstop one thought that was the rest of the book. Stream of conscious, no less absurd, but with a life and sense of its own. I finally got caught up in the rush and finished in sympathy with the author (I Think). The rest of the California Quartet, well, let's see what they are like when the time comes.
    • 3/5
      Author Jack Remick is obviously a serious student of literary tradition. His debut novel, Blood, invited comparisons to Camus and Genet, and his latest, The Deification, evokes the works of the brightest lights of the Beat movement - Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg. While not entirely aping them, Remick fairly approximates their various tones, from plainspoken stream of consciousness to outrageously surrealistic, and earns himself the right to be mentioned in their company. In brief, this is the tale of Eddie Iturbi, a seventeen year old car thief and aspiring poet who moves to San Francisco in pursuit of his destiny - literary immortality. Along the way, he makes a lengthy detour to pimp for a tranvestite hooker, before landing a job at City Dreams bookstore working for Leo Franchetti, an aging and debauched Beat poet icon. Eddie is a unique and intriguing protagonist. Despite a damaging childhood and his criminal past, he’s what they call "straight edge" in contemporary cultural parlance - no drinking, no drugs, no cursing. Plus, he retains his virginity for longer than I would have figured. This is all rather unexpected in a book that otherwise reeks of all the usual macho tropes (sex, nudity, booze, drugs, violence, bodily fluids galore, hookers/strippers with hearts of gold…you get the idea). But no matter how weird things get, there’s something completely mundane and normal about Eddie’s reactions. When someone tells him something outlandish or metaphysical, his rejoinder is often, "I don’t know what you’re trying to say." Since I was thinking the same thing, I appreciated having someone in the novel to ask the question for me.The first section of the book ("Canto One - Run Away Wild Boys") is completely naturalistic and very Quentin Tarantion-esque with its depiction of the hardscrabble life on the streets. So it in no way prepared me for the direction the book takes once Eddie arrives in SF and Leo becomes his mentor. From his experience in grisly self-mortification under the tutelage of the gurus of the Buzzard Cult, to his back-from-the-dead experience at the grave of Jack Kerouac, to his symbolic trolley ride with long dead poet Villon, the book is chock full of weird, otherwordly episodes which comprise Eddie’s Christ-like journey to Deification. Unfortunately, this is the story’s major shortcoming for me. I really enjoyed its more down-to-earth elements (particularly several almost soap opera style sub-plots involving both Eddie and Leo’s pasts), but, never having been a fan of Naked Lunch, I found the psychedelic aspects mostly just weird and offputting. I think by the fourth time Eddie was bleeding out of some incomprehensibly gruesome wound (inflicted by his friends and enemies alike) or the third time he was interracting with some long dead literary lion, I was about to throw in the towel. Personally, I would have preferred a bit more Kerouac and a bit less Burroughs.
    • 2/5
      “All artists—poets, writers, composers, painters, sculptors—have screwed up childhoods when they come to me.” This is what psy(chadel)ic Estelle reveals to Eddie Iturbi, who has spent the previous two hundred or so pages escaping his own hellish youth.Remick’s novel begins as any homage to Kerouac should: with a journey. But what initiates as a tight spool of plot and character suddenly and rapidly unravels into a tangled mess of energy and words that seems to be the product of an acid trip, or a fever dream, or both, but which is really a masterfully crafted (though sometimes confusing and nauseating) interpretation of poetry-as-religion. And though the story starts and ends in Kerouac-like tradition, (and Remick’s best writing is there) it devolves in the middle into a muddle of Proustian nonsense that will make a reader either wretch or go mad.The story’s Christian symbolism is overwhelming, but it’s the mythic Greek overtones in the novel’s final chapters that are the most interesting, and the most fully fleshed-out. This is a kind of reflection of the plot’s roots: while Christianity inherently seems tied up in a bow, so too is the story, and it falls flat.The reader revels in the loose ends, the what-ifs. Having all the answers borders on boring. There is one great what-if left. Eddie, our immortal guide through this rollercoaster of a book, should have died several times over. There’s a possibility that his existence at the point of unraveling (which is less than seventy pages into the 345-page novel) ends, and what remains is no fever dream, but a kind of pugatory he must endure (with some new found synethesia to boot) until he does find all of his answers. It’s just a theory - it’s possible, but I don’t have a whole lot of evidence to support it.The true problem with this homage to Kerouac is that there is no real introspection. There’s a meditative quality that seems missing. Instead, Remick (like Eddie) is just writing everything down, without truly finding the meaning of any of it.

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    The Deification - Jack Remick

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