RELLIK: An Anti-Novel by Dom Ritter , Tina Lewis
Now here I’m sitting here about to read this novel. I gots me drink, a little smoke and I’m thinking I need like a little more to blow me head away. You know what I mean. I was getting ready to make that cell call. Well, so I decided to go on and read a few pages and I say, ‘god d—, what!!!’ Me head gets BLOWN AWAY! It’s like this dude Toby, the main character who’s been looking for a satisfying lay and now working it nice and proper in coitus with a real fine woman, and about to make another nice satisfying thrust when Bam! Right in front of him APPEARS MIA, the ex whom he had only just broken up with a few weeks ago. The beautiful rider atop him screams from the man’s shockingly abrupt grip on her breasts and it appears right from there on, this dude, who had just broken up with Mia a few weeks ago, is headed to a whole series of volcano gripping shocks and stuff because MIA IS A GHOST.
Okay, alright. Another lady appears somehow on the scene. She’s a little older than our protagonist. So it’s like I’m sitting here, my drink (little wild turkey bourbon yall) helps me recover a little bit, take a little toke, reading along. So like at Toby’s place – hey, did I tell you how somewhere, a feature of Somerset Maugham appears on Toby? You remember Betty Davis in ‘On Human Bondage’, a cub-footed Leslie Howard hopelessly pursuing his life’s love thing on her? Well yes, it appears that crazy man, author Dom Ritter, loads Toby down with a special feature of deformed toes. ‘Chinese bums’ he calls them. Let’s skip that, and I’m wondering here should I make that call when somehow the dude appears in Dr. Webb’s office where she weasels his life to the final embarrassing question: ‘You ain’t never had no committed long-term relationship with a woman’ and our gent wants to stop it right there. Any other dismissal of his existential angst could not have been more fatal, even Toby’s apparent lack of control of his bowel movements when unconsciously under severe stress. ‘Get off my back, I ain’t gay.’ He says something similar. And it’s like immediately his luck turns and something continues in the same pace, the same way and manner of the near quixotic searching and questing similar to the ongoing pounding on that Gunther Grass tin drum. Only ringing out before Toby’s eyes as svelte and mysterious as she wants to be is….
No, wait. There’s too many angles to all of this. Too many morsels, too many delectable features of these routes turned out in an anti-novel whacking and morphing and photoshoppng Toby’s sexy Philip Roth-like romps through some brilliant and fantastic twists of multiple duplicitous personality syndromes. I want to say that Dom Ritter handles this funny, sophisticated, and whacky tale of sex, love and mystery with thorough and mischievous aplomb. Ceaseless times you will retrieve your head and sanity through Toby’s near miraculous escapes only to have it again caught and BLOWN AWAY. Goodness god, gracious. And I never did have to make that call.
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