THE SUBTERRANEANS
This
novel is set in San Francisco, California, on the western coast of the United States, in the summer and fall of 1953. It is a novel of the "
beat" life, introduced in the first person, by a young man of raging
honesty and intemperate appetites. He is an outsider, even among the other outsiders, the Subterraneans, as this group of people calls Itself, or they are called by others. The boy falls in lust with Mardou Fox, a beautiful young black (and Cherokee and white, on her father''s side) woman, and eventually into bed with her. She is crazy and knows it -- he is too, and only gradually comes to realize that -- yet his honesty within himself as he attempts to understand is bitter and beautiful and untouchably wonderful. His attitudes are wildly contradictory -- he should have committed to this relationship, and does not, so she cannot; and when she sleeps with his friend-rival-enemy Yuri, it is over between them, except for the walkaway. Yet between the dream and the reality, between the
madness and the truth, and the truth in the madness, there is no barrier. It is a fierce
book, intense as only
love that tears the heart apart can be. It is a rambling loveletter to a passing love, and without mercy or romance. How can we love when we hate ourselves? And can an
artist every truly love and be loved, when his one true love is his art?
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