I don't even know where to start with commenting on this, but I didn't get past more than a few pages before I kind of wanted to smack myself really hard in the face to end the pain of this book. Let's take a few looks at this shall we?
"As he neared Amoeba Music on his right, he got a wheel, deciding at the last second to flip the Strip a bird, ditching its crank, kinetic energy and high-strung lights for the calmer canal of Cahuenga, beating it north toward the mist-hung lavender hills." - So, just for the slow among us, he decided to turn around and go the other way. Also, holy run on sentence Batman!
"Flickering through the festoons of smog, it offered the barest hint of a cantilevered, white cubist haunt clinging to the ledge." - Ahhhh, I see what you did there...with the thesaurus you have sitting in your lap! Not everyone can search for such irrelevant words as well as this.
"The graphic quintessence of California, it would call up everything that Hollywood was supposed to be: nights with stars, golden records, and round turntables….
But no. Yawning campily from the opposite corner, it, too, was a huge let-down. Like everything else he laid eyes on, it failed to live up. A vine never to be climbed, the hype out here wound on forever, like Jack’s beanstalk, higher than the mortal eye could see and more Byzantine than the most Machiavellian mind could dream." - I understand the words being used but not in the manner they are being used. Just for the record, we are talking about the Hollywood sign.
"In this place, even the lampposts wanted nailing, for worry they’d have no takers: everything here could be had, for a price." - Horny lampposts! Now I've seen it all.
"Threading the vein of Vine with his ’69 Stingray-past the brassy terrazzo stars immortalized in their granite finery, forever walking the frozen carpet of fame; past Trader Joe’s at the intersection with Selma; past Borders and Bank of America, then back again across Sunset; past El Pollo Loco and Office Depot, toward the crumbling, graffiti-painted cinder blocks of Theater Row-he could see more clearly now, as the raveling images dollied toward him in his lightening windshield;
Forget paradise." - That mess is all one sentence folks. ONE FUCKING SENTENCE! Yet despite the earlier mention of not wanting to be told where to go by a Tom-Tom, this is essentially just giving you driving directions through LA.
"At last count, of the roughly seven thousand greenbacks he has started out with, all he had left was a measly sixty-nine hundred-not an altogether mean sum, he reckoned, for a pimpled deadhead hitting the road; but for a newly unemployed twenty-nine-year-old petticoat-mechanic, with no other proper work experience, and now no old man to fall back on?-It was a pittance!" - Again, ONE SENTENCE! This is not the same grammar I learned in school, we learned that run on sentences were bad and boring and annoying. Oh, btw, $6900 is a pittance? Really?
"He had blown out of Atlanta like a man fleeing a succubus." - Wait what? LMAO! Succubi seduce men into sleeping with them while they are sleeping. Where is the opportunity or inclination to flee?
"Even in his harrowed state, he had not forgotten to swing by the bank. The teller had looked as if she feared he might pull a gun. Needing no bog-downs or hold-ups, he had refused to give that grinning gold-digger the time to stall him, not letting her idle his engine long enough to close, or even to forfeit his standing orders." - So you went to the bank and decided that based on some obscure thing like a look the banker thought you had a gun. Why? And based on completely unknown criteria she is a gold-digger. Again, I ask why? Maybe she had gas pains.
After this the blood started shooting out my eyes and I wanted to stab myself in the leg with a fork. I decided that this book and I were over at that point. It's a mess filled with run on sentences, meaningless meandering, and abuse of the thesaurus.
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