It’s rare that I read a book in one sitting anymore these days. There’s just so much reading material vying for my attention: novels, comics, collections of comics, literary scholarship, glossy magazines, student papers, blogs—I’m generally partway through a dozen or so reading projects at any given moment.
But occasionally, a book reaches out, grabs me by the lapels, and says Finish me. Finish me or I will cut you. It is my great pleasure to inform you, with a slight quaver in my voice and a quick glance over my shoulder, that Victor Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse is just such a book. I was fortunate enough, by virtue of letting Mr. Gischler soundly thrash me in two-out-of-three rounds of Golden Tee every couple of months*, to procure an advanced reading copy of Go-Go Girls a couple of weeks ago. I was done within hours of having turned the first page—my eyes red, my hair noticeably grayer, and my suit spotted with mysterious red blotches.
Let me hasten to assure you that nothing about the title is metaphorical. This isn’t a tender coming-of-age novel in which a small town boy with a rich imaginative life is led gently from innocence into sexual experience by an embittered but kind older woman who learns to love again. This isn’t a novel in which the “apocalypse” refers to the protagonist’s tentative first steps into adulthood. This is a novel in which the protagonist sometimes has to shoot cannibals dressed in orange University of Tennessee gear from a slow-moving train powered by juiced-up bodybuilders and captained by a punk-rock chick with an eyepatch. This is a novel which asks and answers the eternal question, “Will there be Jack Daniels after the apocalypse, and if so, what will the label read?”
This is a novel that makes On Chesil Beach seem like an embarrassing waste of your time. Sorry, Ian.
I recently described Go-Go Girls to a friend as “a smart book disguised as a trashy book.” But I’ve decided that’s not quite right. The trash isn’t a disguise. Peel back that first layer of trash and there’s more trash, but soggier and covered with old coffee grounds. It’s a lowdown sex and violence sleaze-fest in the best pulp tradition. It’s a book that imagines the only force for civilization in the wasteland of the future is the go-go club. (Not the “titty bar”! An important distinction, as the book will show you.) But I stand by my claim that it is a very smart book—one whose keen insights into the human condition and the organization of society can be easy to miss, considering the velocity at which the novel rushes past and the bruising force with which some of its best scenes pound you.
It’s inevitable that in our post-The Road world Go-Go Girls will draw comparisons to the work of Cormac McCarthy. I know that Mr. Gischler is (along with most of the rest of the literate world) more favorably inclined to McCarthy’s work than I am, but their visions of the post-apocalypse diverge pretty sharply. It’s not that Go-Go Girls shies away from depicting the brutality and horror of humanity at its worst, certainly. But: there’s a moment early in the novel in which protagonist Mortimer Tate is at the mercy of a rapist and murderer named The Beast who seems drawn straight from the central casting office in McCarthy’s brain. The stage seems set for an exploration of pain and brutality and suffering and existential terror: yet the way in which Mortimer gets extricated from this situation made me laugh out loud—only the first of many, many guffaws the book would inspire. I won’t spoil it, or anything else in the book, which like all good books really must be experienced to be fully understood, but it’s as clear a repudiation of the nihilism of McCarthy’s work as I could imagine. Not to say that the novel has what you would call an optimistic message, nossir. But it locates a kind of hope in what otherwise might be seen as less attractive aspects of human nature: our pettiness, our vanities, our selfishness, our herd mentality and our compulsive conventionality.
Lest this sound too highbrow for you, there’s also a daring blimp rescue.
You may view this endorsement with suspicion, since I know the guy and since it’s my turn to pay for burgers next time he beats me at video golf. Forget all that: Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse is the real deal. Pre-order it now. It’s out July 8. Be ahead of the zeitgest for once in your life. I’ll keep reminding you.
Can’t wait? Here’s a link to other fine works by Victor Gischler. You may recall that we wrote favorably of his Pistol Poets a while back.
Not a metaphor for sex. Or is it?*
**No.
Uhm, you sold me at “daring blimp rescue.”
I think Pistol Poets—which was one of my favorite things read in 2006—is what’s selling me on this and everything else. I gotta go snag the other books!