Reviews for Red the Fiend

The average rating for Red the Fiend based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-14 00:00:00 Mark Lazor This family could make any run-of-the-mill dysfunctional families look like rainbows and sunshine. Grandma - Red's Grandma - can easily put to shame any tv show/book of the S#it My XYZ Says variety. She often breaks into over the top, endless diatribes without warning, giving one an earful about her irrational opinions, idiosyncrasies and pet peeves. Not only does she transition smoothly from whatever topic to whatever, she is quite creative with name calling too. All would be peachy if Grandma were just an amusing/annoying old lady running her mouth. But don't underestimate Grandma. She lives to make lives of everyone within her force field miserable - miserable possibly meaning something worse than whatever the word miserable means to you. Be it making Grandpa choose between cigarette and lunch, or treating her daughter like a servant and constantly telling her how she is the scum of the earth, nothing is beyond her. Her favorite toy, though, is Red. From making him eat the food he hates to beating him within an inch of his life, everything goes. While Red's retaliation largely involves practicing a semi-moronic expressionless look in the hopes that it will somehow make him invisible, it goes much deeper than that. There is no way his psyche can make it past scar-free. There are times when those festering wounds do show up on the surface and it is real ugly. This is a black comedy where you will be hard pressed to come up with a single positive quality for any one of the characters. The only hero here is Sorrentino's writing. His playful, sarcastic and often exaggerated voice worked really well for me. Writing here is mostly straight in comparison to Mulligan Stew, there are some chapters that stand out stylistically. If you enjoy dark humor and can stomach some ugliness, go for it. Grandma is as interesting and strange a literary character as they can be. She will be super-delighted to entertain you.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-05-12 00:00:00 Melissa Laughlin The thing about Gilbert Sorrentino is that he is, only occasionally, a metafictional pioneer and postmodern innovator. Half the time he wrote books like Red the Fiend which, although conceived in his usual book-as-useless-artefact style, is a work of bloody-minded breakneck realism, spliced with a world-weary comedy and an ever-present tenderness. Tenderness came to define Sorrentino's later work, especially in the beautiful and haunting memory novels Little Casino and A Strange Commonplace'both rich in spectres at once tragic and screamingly funny. Sorrentino, perhaps more than anyone, understands the precarious, perhaps nonexistent line between comedy and tragedy. Split into forty-nine chapters, Sorrentino's glib narrator coolly describes life among a dysfunctional Brooklyn family, focusing on only-son Red and his sadistic Grandma, a superb Dickensian villain of (somewhat) exaggerated Irish-Catholic cruelty, where any minor violation of proper behaviour results in Red being ladled, whipped, bashed and clobbered. There is no Dickensian moral equilibrium for Red in this novel. He's trapped in a Depression-era reality'all he can do his endure his pain and steal occasional looks up his teachers' skirts. As Sorrentino said, Art cannot save anybody from anything. It certainly won't help poor Red here. Red the Fiend is a heartbreaking and blackly comic book, and also doubles up as an effective satire of those Dave Pelzer-inspired, Please Daddy No books clogging up British airports.