Avant-garde writer Gordon ( Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue ), here charts the madcap, trouble-prone, often raucous adventures of quixotic Jane Turner, aged 22 in the 1960s setting. The novel opens with Jane plotting to shoot Philip, her seductive, stingy, manipulative father, who represents a tyrannical male world of doctors, rapists, cops and tow-truck drivers who make Jane wonder whether she needs men at all. Deciding, nevertheless, to be sexually aggressive, she takes lovers--Willie Usher, a kindly black junk dealer, and then golden-haired Jimmy, with whom she lives in an abandoned farmhouse in Ohio after she escapes from the dorm at Harmonia College. Running away and eluding what she feels are unjust rules, Jane tears across the country in a ``moneygreen Buick'' and rejoins Jimmy in L.A. during the antiwar protests. Jane tends bar, and she and Jimmy drink and revel with the neighborhood oddballs--until the ominous appearance of spooky Raymozo the Rayman. Writing with witty ebullience, Gordon unleashes a tale that is nontraditional and open-ended. (May)
Jane, the protagonist of this extraordinary coming-of-age novel, lurches and stumbles through childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood in a kind of freefall nightmare which brings into question the very basis of the American way of life. All sense of family, love, and emotional relationship is twisted into harsh, often brutal forms as Jane moves from being fondled by her father as a young child to being rejected by him when she becomes a gawky pre-adolescent. The difficulties she has with her father seem to catapult her through a crazed early adult life full of odd characters, seedy back streets, and frightening incidents until, in the end, she comes to a personal resolve. The writing is vivid, intensely poetic, and just sassy enough to make palatable the harshness of the reality being described.-- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California Lib., Berkeley
