Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen by Michael McIrvin

(j-Press)

This novel is about the unwitting quest of Zeke Reilly, whose prophetic visions have haunted him all his life. Distraught after a fulfilled vision of his mother-in-law's death, Zeke impulsively kills his wife and her lover, then escapes to a run-down hotel where he meets Cindy Sweet Stuff, a budding phone-sex entrepreneur. They fall in love, but circumstances force Zeke to flee south without her, eventually landing in the Mexican city of San Ignacio, where the secret of his visions lead him to his destiny.

McIrvin's prose is jagged and uneven, and a rhetorical addiction to flashback mars the continuity of many early scenes. And his plot, such as it is, consists of bizarrely fortuitous chance meetings, rambling philosophical musings on things like "flux and paradox" and countless interchangeable scenes of people longing for mystic revelations and inner peace. But after a while, when you've learned to ignore the iffy prose, this novel opens up, evens out, and takes off, turning for the last fifty pages into a kind of Pynchon-esque picaro, a critique of western values (it turns out that they're misguided) and a broad intellectual comedy.

It's a shame that the first half of this book is so slowly paced, since the finish, with its wildly impulsive improvisations, is where McIrvin's imagination finally begins to blossom. There's a Disney/McDonald's joint venture theme park, an insane meso-American General, ragged banditos, a clandestine prison, lost tribes of Central America, and an end that's also a beginning, as Zeke wanders into the jungle in fulfillment of his new role as shaman. But the journey to inspiration takes so long it's almost not worth the trip.

- Michael Ramberg