Patrick Alexander thinks he's going crazy. At age 30, he's frustrated with his life in the small Mississippi town where he grew up, stifled by his unhappy marriage and his soul-crushing pizza-delivery job. But when he drinks, his world becomes populated with the hallucinatory characters he invented as a child, including a Martian and a talking monkey. In the midst of an existential crisis, Patrick leaves his wife and the only home he's ever known to embark on a spiritual quest where he will find new loves, face his long-missing father, and confront the demigods of his personal mythology.
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By David Hornbuckle
May 16, 2010
Via Amazon--Review by J. Butler Lyonness, Mississippi is a small town that's actually "bigger than it seems." So is David Hornbuckle's novel. Zen, Mississippi -- findable through Amazon or [...], not on any earthly map -- follows the creatively loony Patrick Alexander and his certifiably loony father as they stumblingly ramble (though never together) through Mississippi and Alabama and various other states of mind and geography. The story is sometimes baffling, always invigorating, and deceptively ordinary at first glance. Before their separate wandering begins, the father installs garage door systems for a living; later, the son juggles dough at the local pizzeria. Just your ordinary working-class down-home fellas. On the other hand, the supporting characters include a Martian Army commander named Zord, a man-sized lizard with blood-red skin named Harold, and a simian screecher simply called Monkeyman. The son invented them and sort-of believes in them. The father believes... More > in them even when he's out of sorts. This is not Faulkner's Mississippi. It's not science-fiction, either. The fiction has its share of philosophical meanderings - Martin Heidegger has his innings -- but it is blessedly free of science. Here's how Zen is described: "This is the parallel universe created by a childgod, where everything exists and nothing dies, where the absurd becomes rational and the rational becomes moot, where a shred of hope becomes a shred of evidence, where spirits dwell and play, where good and evil know no boundaries, where the muses, the angels, and the furies mingle in harmony, where matter is constructed from the most tenuous knowledge." Right. At the end, the wanderer notes that "... all roads go somewhere." The roads into, through and from Zen, Mississippi, go many somewheres. And that's a trip.< Less
