Experiments with Life and Deaf

Experiments with Life and Deaf

Experiments with Life and Deaf offers a brilliant, hyper-real vision of coming of age in working-class America sweeping from the wildest of inspired comedy to the darkest pathos. At the heart of these adventures is 17-year-old Jarvis Loop, a fugitive from the law for an every-increasing list of offenses, who is in love with the pale and mysterious photographer Kara Ruzci, a woman possessed by another man’s ghost. From the opening call to arms (as Erie, Pennsylvania prepares for the Cuban Missile Crisis) to sister Neda’s successful construction of a rocket to beat Sputnik, to the drug-induced enlightenment of Willie and his black leather-jacketed gang, the Dialecticians, who will aid and abet Jarvis’s search or and confrontation with Kara’s ghostly lover, Chuck Rosenthal’s novel amply confirms him as one of the most powerful and offbeat voice writing today.