Unbabbling Book

In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.
With Unbabbling, REYoung bursts onto the American literary scene. Bristling with anger and rantings, taking place in cities that seem utterly familiar and completely strange, and cutting across times and countries with the speed of light, Unbabbling is a time machine that stretches back to the Tower of Babel (and before) and moves forward into a distant, twilight future, and along the way descends into Hell.

"This bizarre work rattles readers' sensibilities with a rich literary montage of the preposterous that carries with it a very strong social indictment of our times. Highly recommended." (Library Journal 9-1-97)

"If you're up for a challenge, or if you ever wondered what it would be like if Beckett were a lowlife American revolutionary, this is the book for you. REYoung's voice is distinctive, and his intellect is powerful." (Mining Company)

"The enigmatic REYoung's Unbabbling reads like a wild romp through the subconscious of such esteemed modernists as Joyce, Pynchon, and Kerouac. REYoung has come virtually from nowhere to deliver this stunningly well-crafted novel. . . . It is the dynamic prose style that really makes the novel. REYoung alternates between a Pynchonesque vaudevillian satire to a tortured, rapid-fire stream of consciousness more typical of Jack Kerouac. A truly inspired piece of work." (Booklist 11-1-97)

"REYoung unveils a social babble that masks the bankrupt spiritual and emotional quality of human existence. . . . It is a disturbing book, but it is disturbing because it effectively captures how the centrality of humanity has been wholly drowned out by the babble of money." (Rain Taxi Winter 97)

"Ambitious and passionately written. . . . REYoung's style of compressing material is unique and viable; time passes so swiftly that events seem pancaked on one another." (Harvey Pekar, Austin Chronicle 5-15-98)

Library Journal

This experimental novel is broken up into three stories about living in a city's underworld. The first story focuses on a veteran named Harry who fills his life with booze and drugs so that his dream life and reality are woven into a world of paranoia. His life changes when he moves in with an artist named Cassa and rises in the corporate world, which proves to be as diabolical as his drug-induced dream world. The second story carries on this internal madness in the mind of a homeless man who creates an imaginary friend he calls Nakt to combat his desperate feelings of isolation and bare-bones survival. The third story is an absurd tale of a man named Erde who is forced to live underground as the world on the surface above him spins around in social chaos. Like the novels of Kenneth Patchen and the Russian Absurdists, this bizarre work rattles readers' sensibilities with a rich literary montage of the preposterous that carries with it a very strong social indictment of our times. Highly recommended for all collections.David A. Beron, Univ. of New England, Biddleford, Me.