What do You think about George Mills (2003)?
''Learn this, Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like cards. There is natural suzerainty* like the face value on coins. ... It's as simple as the scorn in my voice when I talk to you like this, as natural as the italics my kind use and your kind don't. Now do as I tell you, get on your horse.'' 'You've doomed me,' Mills said. 'You've cursed my race.' ''It was so. Mills apologized silently to the sons he was yet to have - if they ever got out of this mess - for the heritage he was yet to give them, grieved for the Millsness he was doomed to pass on, for the frayed, flawed genes - he thought blood - of the second-rate, back-seat, low-down life.'' Here, in part one of the novel, at the time of the First Crusade, our Ur-George and all his Georgic decedents receive their place in the structure of society, they are defined and delineated and trapped. They will remain so for 1000 years. Always subservient, always second-rate, always existing just above the bread-line. Part two leaps us forward to two generations of Georges in the twentieth century (with much more focus on the son). This is the main focus of the novel, and forms the majority of the book. After that, we spend some time in the early 19thc, before coming back to the "current" George. So, that is the temporal structure. The prose, however, the prose is just astonishingly good. "He do the police in different voices", that’s for sure. I include some more quotes here, to give you a taste: ********** from p7 "There was no sea of course, only the flat and fertile plains, pastures, arbors, and orchards - a green garden of agriculture in which the peasants and farmers seemed engaged in some perpetual in-gathering, a harvest like a parable, as astonishing to themselves as to Guillalume and Mills who, in what was not then even England, had, in that wet and misty bronchial climate, seen bumper crops merely of grass, measly grains, skinny fruit. Here it was the actual skins and juices of fruit staining the farmers' flesh and beads, all their up-shirtsleeved bucolic condition, their breech-clouts puddle-muddied at the knees with a liquid loam of opulent fermentation, a liquor of citrics, a sour mash of rotting - because there was too much to in-gather, vegetables discarded half eaten - potato and cabbage, squashed squash, cucumber and carrot, a visible strata of vegetable artifact, a landscape of the overripe like a squishy gravel of flora. The horses leading them through all this, grazing at sweet-toothed will, chewing in surfeited content from the broad green groaning board of earth."p354 "And do you know, madam, in what my honor subsists? Why in my peculiar, spangled lust. In the singularity of my ruling passion, my most feeling fetish. Which we neither hide nor hinder, watch nor ward. Why should we? Is the Prince custodian of his ruling passion or only the lowly drayman of his drives?" "Hear hear!" said honoured guests. And 'Three Cheers!' And 'Give three times three!' "I asked to milk you, madam. No husband but husbandman plain enough. Oh, plain. Plain, quite plainly. Ive this sweet tooth for softs, this yen for your puddings. George the Famished, George the Parched. Georgie the pap prince. Feed us, ma'am. Slake the slake rake! Sow, sew this rip!"************See now, that is just lovely stuff. So, in short, this book is funny, beautiful, filthy, sad and all the rest. Flashes of Barth (Sot-Weed period) and Coover abound, though Elkin is very much his own man. That Gass praised his prose should be praise enough. A big, messy, wonderful book. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty
—Jonathan
