I don't think it's a great book, but it was a marvelous book...

The following is reprinted from Beernink.

“In Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins inserts short chapters in which he has a conversation, although somewhat one-sided, with his typewriter. In Just a Couple of Days, Tony Vigorito uses a similar device. He poses a question, Why aren't apples called reds?, which he discusses in the prologue, and keeps returning to throughout the novel. But Vigorito is more intense than Robbins, and echoes of this question are found everywhere, as the question takes on a personality, even a sex life, of her own.

Just a Couple of Days is billed on its cover as "a Dr. Strangelove for the biotech century." I would describe it as an apocalyptic utopian comedy, which can't possibly make any sense unless you have read the book. As the first sentence of the first chapter explains: Everything makes perfect sense in retrospect. Which indeed it does, or at least way more sense than it does when you first start reading.

Dr. Flake Fountain's best friend, Dr. Blip Korterly, is acting strangely. Normally he is a free spirit, living life without rules, purely for the experience. But now he's starting to act paranoid: he's leaving strange graffiti messages on freeway overpasses, claiming that mushrooms are extra-terrestrial probes, and worrying that the inmates in a local prison are being tortured. Blip kicks off a sequence of events that leave his friend very concerned, and when Flake is asked to join a secret project at his university, he starts to discover that Blip is not as paranoid as he seemed.

Dr. Fountain accepts the potentially lucrative assignment, and we are drawn into the complexities of a bizarre plan to develop the ultimate biological weapon. The story is entertaining, but the story isn't totally the point. Instead the story is a way to raise questions about humanity, society, and our role on earth. In the process, Mr. Vigorito displays a fiendish cleverness, a love for preposterous situations, and a definite profound streak. I repeatedly found myself marvelling at the clever scenarios he came up with, and how the elements of the story interacted with each other. I don't think it's a great book, but it was a marvelous book, full of life and questions and fun.

This book is a little more difficult to get into than the average novel, so if you don't like your books to make you think too much, you might want to skip this one. If you do read it, after you're done, go back and reread the quote from Led Zeppelin at the beginning of the (original edition of the) book:

And it's whispered that soon,
If we all call the tune,
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn,
For those who stand long,
And the forests will echo with laughter.

Either he was very lucky in finding an appropriate quote, or the book was fully inspired by the song.”