Startlingly original... an entertaining anarchist...

The following is reprinted from The Chicago Sun-Times.

Linguistic gymnastics abound in Naked

It isn't enough for Tony Vigorito to have a character intone. This Austin-based madman requires us to know that a devilish seashell seller named Diablo lets loose "a basso profundo enormity of enunciation vibrating his words."

With his second novel, Nine Kinds of Naked, Vigorito demonstrates once again that he's a wild stylist who will mix his metaphors, mangle his syntax, and cram in as many giddy clauses into his sentences if it will offer a visceral advantage. One reads Vigorito's broken-down patois remaining quite curious about the way in which this Chandleresque Swiss-waiter talks. A wind rustling through the forest is "a rustling symphony of seduction, a dryadic dance undulating at the heavens like the lazy licks of a verdant flame." A rumble morphs into "the roar of a gigantic waterfall bursting its dam at last, bellowing like a billion revolutionaries storming the Pentagon."

This verbal tornado whirls about in service of a literal storm that unstitches the raiment of churchgoers, kick-starts a birth, and inspires a repressed pastor named J.J. Speed to become a self-serving secret agent. The book spans some 25 years and even dips back a few centuries to follow a spurious serf who gets involved with a gang of gnostic gnomes. And that's only a handful of the many story threads binding together the bawdy and bizarre buckram.

When Vigorito isn't bombarding us with narrative ballast, we are given fun facts. We are told that "at any given moment, there are 1,800 storms churning the heavens, continuously balancing the opposing forces of warm and cold air circulating throughout the atmosphere." One might likewise say the same about reading this book, which is a bit like contending with a spastic kitten leaping up and down on your lap.

Vigorito's 420-friendly voice is sometimes startlingly original, but this book suffers somewhat from being overly influenced by Tom Robbins. Instead of Robbins' large-thumbed, free-loving Sissy Hankshaw, Vigorito gives us the ample-breasted stripper named Elizabeth Wildhack. But some of the book's mystical motifs feel more like a countercultural pastiche rather than an assault on our present moment.

This is a pity, because Vigorito comes to us at an uncertain epoch in American history, a time in which we need more iconoclasts to kick at hypocrisy. When Vigorito is true to his instincts, he's an entertaining anarchist. And if he can't fully shake off Robbins' yoke with this book, he may just emerge as a complete original with the next.

Review by Edward Champion.