Child of Satan, Child of God - Susan Atkins (Book Review)

"Child of Satan, Child of God" is Sadie Mae Glutz' uncluttered entry into the curious storehouse of Mansonian literature. Atkins rhapsodizes on the psychical, crude beauty of the desert, a sprawling terrorism of sirocco hippie troupes, biker convents (Mother Superior Danny DeCarlo is, however much to the offense of historical courtesy, cheaply manumitted from the narrative, a questionable gesture on Sadie's part, and at most a signal displacement of pure epistolary facticity), watercolor toughs, backroads musicians, wizened old ranch-hands, and ibid. Though the prose is severe and shorthand, the mystic invitation of Sexy Sadie's story is deeply companionable. "Child of Satan, Child of God" is a cross-grained examination of the Tate-LaBianca murders clean of the rigid demagoguery of Bugliosi's account, though suffering from frightfully bloated spells of nearsightedness and revisionism, and the sobbing sweeps of a spiritually taphephobic young woman.

You & Me - Padgett Powell (Book Review)

“Life will not be explained; sweep away the evidence.” 

And as it were, Powell’s “You And Me” lumbers an amphetaminic tarantella through profuse, express-way aphorism and that indelicate gafflegab which instructs the pages of Lewis Carroll’s beloved relic of a sweetheart. Powell exercises, with unmolested profundity, a romanticism of the absurd quotidian go-arounds, bedecking his booze-soaped interlocutors with wit, pith, and a most sparkling cynicism – from Judy Garland to Julia Child, to crooked-nosed poets to the springs of morphine, the inherent biology of the story is cellular and celluloid, much delivered of the trappings of contemporary literary dilettantism. 

These “sloppy vampires” chat earnestly about the coiffures of nihilism, the prose tottering deliberately in benumbed stupefaction, as every moor of imagination is explored, though hardly remarked. The somnambulistic dialogue may feel awkward to some, but philosophically the work is nearly sick with the existential sexuality of Sartre. Powell indexes nostalgic fires with “halcyon” sureness, and, sometimes, prefigures all the purple ballyhoo with a methodical silence, for “disputing nothing is the first step unto miracles.”

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I received an advance copy of Mr. Powell's novel; the anticipated street date is July 31, 2012. ( Ecco/HarperCollins)