Talking Man

I really wanted to love Talking Man. I wanted to love it because 1) Terry Bisson is a terrific guy and, though this is the first of his books I've read in its entirety, I've loved his short stories in the past, 2) Michael Swanwick piqued my curiosity about it many years ago when he praised it in his seminal essay "In the Tradition", and 3) Bisson is participating here in a project I find truly compelling and undervalued: injecting a strong dose of magic into a gritty contemporary American settin [...]

The creator of the universe may also be a bad-tempered old whiskey-swilling car mechanic, and his worst enemy may be his ex-wife (in a Chevrolet, but not really). A road trip across the American Myth to the cold heart of the world. My only complaint is that there wasn't more of it--if you're going to work on the level of myth, you need to be prepared for that grand and complicated scale. Somewhere between this and American Gods would be absolutely perfect. But closer to this.

Just delightful. It's a sprawling high-fantasy trilogy in under two hundred pages, and set in America (a couple of different Americas, actually). It uses roads and cars as well as "Borgel" or "Nine Princes in Amber." It has a sense of place and a sense of scale. It's an astoundingly controlled book. There are obvious parallels with "American Gods," but that book is so long and aspires to be so universal that I find it loses its way. Also, in "Talking Man," Bisson's protagonist is slightly more o [...]

Talking Man is perhaps the best fantasy book I have read. Well, what can "best" mean? Probably "that I am most glad to have read." Whereas some books are so gripping that I cannot put them down in order to sooth some discomfort from, say, a bad chair or crick in my neck, Talking Man made me so comfortable there was no discomfort to distract me, no willpower required to stay seated. Moving forward with perfect ease, a traveler (or reader) may travel far simply for the pleasure of movement.I have [...]

A beautiful and strange story, unlike anything else I've read. Bisson introduces with equal aplomb the sound of an old John Deere A tractor (Boom chunk chunk chunk boom chunk chunk) and the sight of the six-mile wide Mississippi River Canyon, with fishermen dragging out 1700 year-old catfish as big as a house. In the best possible sense, a book full of magic.

After reading a wonderful story by Terry Bisson, "Scout's Honor," I decided to check out his work. I loved his recent book "Any Day Now," which featured an alternate history of the sixties and a protagonist who was a mechanic. Bisson's an auto mechanic, among other things. Then I read "The Pickup Artist," which was okay, funny. Today I read the short novel in question, and it contained some of the same things from the other two novels. Road trips, for one. Both "Any Day Now" and this book contai [...]

It's too tiresomely personal and difficult to go into. I never grasped what it tried to hint, and I do not certainly wonder it.