THE TERRIBLE TWOS - ISHMAEL REED

A quick one day book. I was able to read this whole thing on the flight from Seattle to Kansas. Now that I’ve read all of the Pynchon, it seems like Reed is the next clear step. They have a similar style, one that is both satirical and silly while also being hyper-erudite and given to explorations of very esoteric topics on a moment's notice. Reed never wrote any long epic the way Pynchon did, his books (the ones I’ve read so far) seem like they could be excerpts of longer Pynchon books. He also focuses more on Black history and issues which has pegged him as more of a “cult” writer while Pynchon is more canonical. Obviously bullshit, Reed is just as good and interesting as Pynchon and should be read alongside. All that being said, this book is strange. It’s very Christmas focused. I mean, it’s got Santa on the cover so I should have expected as much. He uses the powerful Pynchon/Reed mindset and method (one could also crib from Dali and call it the paranoid-critical method), which involves looking into a phenomenon then blowing it out in every direction. So here the topic is Christmas and we get long looks not only at commercialism and capitalism, we also get segments about the history of Santa Clause, lots of stuff about other European versions of Santa, lots of stuff about Black Peter, the Dutch “helper” of Santa, German fairy tales, the relationship between Catholicism and St. Nicholas, the relationship between Hailie Salassie and St. Nicholas, Rastafari and its relationship to Christmas. I particularly enjoyed the model who is president in this world who travels, with Santa as his Virgil, to hell where he meets Eisenhower, Truman and N. Rockefeller who discuss their sins at length. It has the episodicness of the longer Pynchon works but I would say it ties together a bit more neatly than a lot of his stuff does. It seems like he spent a few years thinking about the implications and connections w/r/t Christmas then blasted out short, funny little novel to get all this stuff off of his mind. The man is a genius. I’ll slowly read my way through the rest of his work. Unlike Pynchon, he’s quite prolific, I’m seeing over 10 novels, plus poems and plays on his Wiki, and the man is still alive. 270 YT christmases.