Victor LaValle is a terrific writer. He plays with emotions, can make you laugh in one paragraph and sad in the next, and then laugh again a few sentences later. The writing isn't the issue I had with this book. It's the voice. I read LaValle's The Ecstatic months ago. While reading Big Machine, I noticed that both main characters, while different people, had the same voice. I'm starting to believe that LaValle only has the one voice: slightly-sarcastic, self-deprecating, relatable low life. He

"Horror fiction at its best is in the business of pushing back the barriers, or risking the absurd in order to reach the sublime.”–Ramsey Campbell (from the foreword of Alan Moore’s SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING, book 1)I need to go back and amend my top 10 books of 2009 list and put Victor LaValle’s amazing and brilliant BIG MACHINE at number one. I mean, compare BIG MACHINE to the pile of steaming mediocrity of some of the ‘big’ books (big= media hype, buzz, and more buzz) I’ve been reading lately w...

“Have you ever known failure so deep, it feels biological?”I like Victor LaValle. The dude is crazy good. I didn’t read anything about this one prior to picking and digging right in. I don’t really need to with LaValle. I know it is going to be weird, interesting, entertaining and smart. I also know that most of the time I won’t know wtf is going on or where it’s going. The only thing I’ll know for sure is that it won’t be what I think it is…and that’s a good thing.Cockeyed gospels, soul eating

Victor Lavelle’s Big Machine leaves me grasping for comparisons. I’m reminded of Chicago’s Reckless Records. Years back someone working at the store started stickering new releases with commentary like “a mix of Throbbing Gristle and Teenage Fanclub with some early Yes influence.” I never had any idea of what those stickers meant, honestly, but they became a Reckless tradition that still, to my knowledge, exists today. I don’t know. I haven’t been to Reckless in a good six months.Anyway, Big Mac...

I seek exquisite, heralding, concise, quantum, stealth stories (reality fiction) to coin my phrase. Plotting and sub-plotting needs to jettison me into outer space and plummet me into hell. I won't be bothered with menial, mundane situations and tongue-wagging dialog. Dull and tedious characters kill the story and bury my interest. Am I asking too much from a writer? Hell no! Time is precious and words manipulate.Accost me with exhilarating and electrifying characters. You say that's too difficu...

Maybe you just broke up with your boyfriend. Maybe you haven't had a boyfriend in, like, eons. Along comes this guy: good-lookingish, sorta funny, kinda interesting. People you like also like him. You shrug and give him a whirl. You just cannot catch the fever, though. There is something off. Cogs that don't match up or something. Trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. He becomes a placeholder. Someone to sit next to in relationship's waiting room. That, for me, was what it was like to r...

For the first 200 or so pages, Big Machine was my favorite book of the year. It's smart, it's really fucking funny, the world I was pulled into was fascinating and weird and utterly believable, even as it was absurd and playful. And I loved the narrator. Ricky Rice is probably one of the best voices to come out of literature in the last...oh, ever probably. The prose here is stunning, smart, beautiful, and funny in the way that I want it to be:"This guy was no bigger than a bunion" (32)."Taking

If you had a really important job that you needed done, a critical mission that the entire fate of your life’s work depended on, would you send a 40 year-old ex-heroin junkie with a bad leg out to take care of it? No? Neither would I. Ricky Rice might have saved himself some serious trouble if he simply asked, “Why me?”As a child Ricky’s family had been part of a cult led by three women in Queens, and he later grew up to be an addict. Now clean he has been working as a janitor in a bus station w...

Essentially you either get magical realism or you don't. I am the latter. So, I didn't really get this book. But the writing is so good and the protagonist is so amazingly written and realized, that I didn't entirely mind. Ricky Rice's back story was so interesting it would have made a fabulous book on its own. Instead, he is dropped into a really strange (but utterly original) story about a mysterious "research" organization staffed by former junkies and criminals that are looking for messages

This is one of those books that cries "orphan" and so leads reviewers to cast about for possible ancestries. The back cover of the book itself sports three. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez mixed with Edgar Allan Poe, but more than that," writes critic Mos Def. "If the literary gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison... the result would be" Big Machine, says Anthony Doerr. "If Hieronymous Bosch and Lenny Bruce got knocked up by a woman with a large and compassionate heart, they might have b...

A book that grew aggravating as it attempted too much...plots and sub-plots and awkward time shifts.In the end, two swamp devils (or angels) rise to try to direct (or mis-direct) two unlikely and unlikable central characters to do something that by the last 50 pages I did not care about.The first 1/2 is very engaging and thus pulls you in and I felt committed to finishing the novel at that point. But the plot twisted and turned and characters were introduced that I had no idea why they were in t...

I actually quite enjoyed this one -- above all, LaValle has a unique voice, his work is original (thank you), and he is one of my favorite storytellers. The man gets his points across, with serious things to say wrapped up a rather convoluted tale, and his work is definitely worth reading. In chapter three of this book, there is a bus passenger who is "three-quarters bum" standing in the aisle yelling at his fellow passengers, telling them that there's a fight going on in the country -- a fight

This might sound a tad hyperbolic but this is, without a doubt, one of the worst books I have ever read. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. I start thinking about all the hours I wasted on it. Somewhere around Chapter 30 (when the book starts getting into the back story about the cult) I was tempted to give up, but I kept chugging at it anyway. After all, how could you ignore all the glowing critical praise on the book's jacket? Named the best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times...

The name 'Big Machine' is actually a title given by a character in this story describing the corrosive operation of doubt on the human soul. 'Big Machine' is also a story that is a religious allegory. Wait, don't run away! At least just listen a minute. It also has a lot of what could be labeled magical realism. Hang on, wait, stay, please! Fine. Run away then. You're missing out! Ok, then. Now only us hardcore literary types are still here. Did I mention the book could be defined as a novel whi...

I'm really stymied about how to begin a review of this book. First of all, I had high expectations, having heard that the people who loved it REALLY loved it, and that basically, if you didn't love it, it's because you didn't finish it. I had no trouble finishing, as I was quickly seduced by LaValle's easy writing style, a flair for cliffhangers, and swift plot. Swift as in, things happen frequently and excitingly, but I can't for a second tell you how or why. Half the time I was really perplexe...

after: Well poo. I'm sorry that I didn't like this more, honestly I am. But it just didn't, well, touch me, as mushy as that sounds. I mean, major major props for a wholly original, completely unique premise. A group of ex-junkies and -prostitutes and -fuckups receive a bus ticket to a secret retreat in rural Vermont so that they can become "unlikely scholars"? Whoa. After many months of "researching" things they don't understand, a few of the unlikely scholars have to go out in the field to fin...

This is not a good book. There were some striking passages, almost all in the flashbacks that happened in the second half of the book, but much of the story was under-described and the prose uninventive. Still I read the whole thing. This experience reminded me of a profile I read of Quentin Tarantino a few years ago (my best guess that it was in a 2004 New Yorker). In it, the director talks about his fascination with C movies and their ability to keep you just curious enough to keep watching. T...

Does anyone else think it's weird that Goodreads doesn't recognize "Goodreads" as a word in its spell check? Anyway, this book was kind of disappointing. I know 3 stars technically means I "liked" a book, but I guess I mean "like," in this sense, as if I just want to be friends with it. You know, I like the book as a friend. But if it asked me to go roller skating or something, I'd probably have to gently turn it down. The problem was that it started off so amazing. The first 50 pages or so set

I think this was two books - one about a man doing the best to survive with what the world has given him, and one about strange mysteries of the beyond. Had it just been the first, I would have rated it much higher - but the grafting on of the strange mysteries bit was ultimately unsatisfying. It was spooky and supernatural, but without a good reason.

incredible. i am going to add lavalle to the pantheon of the most visionary, prophetic and enchanting contemporary writers in the US of A. (but did you have to have the bit about loving/liking america at the end, victor?)