Review by Edward Tanguay April 13, 1997

Warning: Certain language contained in this review may be unfit for immature audiences.

If banning books is your thing, starting with this one would not be a bad decision. Its value to society approaches zero: it is shocking, pornographic, sick, hard-drug-related, psycholocially disturbing . . . yet it punches out its own space in 20th century literature. It has the zest and the explosion of On the Road, but that's it. It's one big explosion, one big drug-induced chemical orgasm. Reading this book is like licking an ashtray: it is distusting and repulsive. Parts of it are five times worse than a violent TV show. It's not the best of the beat generation but its necessary to read if you want to be taken to the limits of this fascinating and energetic movement in literature.

William Burroughs is formost a drug expert. He's done it all from heroine to cocaine to RX and C (whatever that is) to what he calls "junk" to god knows what he has shot, swallowed, eaten, smoked, and inserted into his body. On top of this, he is disgusting. This book is a flurry of a few basic themes: drugs, genitals, bodily excretions, copulation, violence, blood, acid, filth--it is the lowest you can go. You can't get lower than William Burroughs in this book.

This book has no geographical basis, except perhaps somewhere between Tangier and Interzone, "a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity."

In a lucid introduction, Burroughs describes the state he was in while he wrote this book:

I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit--and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit--I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision--a grey screen always blanker and fainter--and not caring when he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk--no one ever does. Thirty grains of morphine a day and it still was not enough.

Descriptions of drug experiencies abound in this book. If you have done heavy drugs in your lifetime, you could probably relate quite well to Mr. Burroughs descriptions here:

We are getting some C on RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot . . . you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it.

This book is more like poetry than a novel. There were patches of nice descriptions:

When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity.

Burroughs is at his best when he drifts from the real into the fantastical. Here he describes a sexual act (I think) waxing in and out of a shocking degree of fantastical violence:

Her neck snaps. A great fluid wave undulates through her body. Johnny drops to the floor and stands poised and alert like a young animal.
He leaps about the room. With a scream of longing that shatters the glass wall he leaps out into space. Masturbating end-over-end, three thousand feet down, his sperm floating beside him, he screams all the way against the shattering blue of sky, the rising sun burning over his body like gasoline, down past great oaks and persimmons, swamp cypress and mahogany, to shatter in liquid relief in a ruined square paved with limestone. Weeds and vines grow between the stones, and rusty iron bolts three feet thick penetrate the white stone, stain it shit-brown of rust.
Johnny dowses Mary with gasoline from an obscene Chimu jar of white jade. . . . He annoints his own body. . . . They embrace, fall to the floor and roll under a great magnifying glass set in the roof . . . burst into flame with a cry that shatters the glass wall, roll into space, fucking and screaming through the air, burst in blood and flames and soot on brown rocks under a desert sun. Johnny leaps about the room in agony. With a scream that shatters the glass wall he stands spread-eagle to the rising sun, blood spurting out his cock . . . a white marble god, he plummets through epileptic explosions into the old Medjoub writhe in shit and rubbish by a mud wall under a sun that car and grab the flesh into goose-pimples. . . . He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells, feeling the delight of prickly pubic hairs slide up his cock.

It's sensual, yet with a chemical, acidic aftertaste. You don't get to experience anything natural or healthy in this book. It's all perverse or chemically induced or disturbingly violent.

I've read that this book contains social criticism but for me it was hard to find, unless they meant the passages regarding an overly authoritive and dominating government and police force, which I didn't find too earth shattering. Occasional satire was descriptive:

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.

There was an appendix in my book which was a kind of drug encyclopedia--an interesting description of various drugs and their effects, from first hand experience.

In all, this book is shockingly unique, not a must-read (I would hate for everybody to read it), but a piece of art none the less. It takes you down, down, down into the low world of dirty subways, male prostitution, needles, cocaine, perversity, and disgusting violence, so that "you can see what is at the end of the long newspaper spoon"--your naked lunch.

Edward Tanguay

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