This is a novel that records the period of America in the late 1960s, not the 1960s that are now the subject of nostalgia and distortion but the 1960s filled with drugs, prostitution, sexual torment, and betrayal. This is a vision of America that accurately unveils an underside that we like to forget or one that we do not want to admit exists. Terrifying in its details, this is a powerfully and beautifully written book that reintroduces Kenneth Tindall to American readers almost twenty years after his first novel.

Kenneth Tindall is the author of Great Heads (Grove Press, 1969). Born in Los Angeles in 1937, he lives in Denmark where he writes and translates.

Reviewed by Gregory Stephenson in GYPSY

Cargo cults, for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, are a religious phenomenon that originated among the natives of various South Pacific islands during World War II when they first viewed the airplanes and the dazzling abundance of goods brought by white men to the newly constructed American air bases. Deeply affected by these wonders, the natives built imitation landing fields and even imitation airplanes and control towers out of logs and rocks and palm fronds in the belief that their ancestors would return to them in such metal birds carrying cargoes that would suffice for all their needs, render work unnecessary, and would elevate the natives to a condition of full freedom and happiness forever.

In his novel, The Banks of the Sea, Kenneth Tindall portrays the Sixties as "The cargo cult of Aquarius. The triumph of high-school amateurism and the hick prophet." The millenial expectations of the hippies and the messianic zeal of the radical Left are presented by the author as a species of cargo cult, in every respect as naive, as futile and as pathetic as those of the South Pacifie islanders.

The Banks of the Sea is many-levelled, it is at once a novel of manners, a love story, a social satire, and a metaphysical parable. Focussing principally on Carol Gamewell, a Vietnam veteran who has just returned to New York, the story ranges from hip life in New York city to a convention of Morman elders at the Temple in

Salt Lake City, from urban communes to a mental hospital. The cast of characters includes assorted hookers, dealers, junkies, hustlers, faggots, crazies and freaks of various description, all enmeshed and entangled in interlinking conspiracies and their tributary schemes, scams, plots, designs and intrigues. The novel is a precise inventory of an era, its aspirations and excesses.

The Banks of the Sea is also remarkable for the narrative techniques and strategies employed by the author. Tindall has developed a very original and effective style in which quotations and quips, statistics and historical data, snatches of folk ballads, poems, philosophical asides, even references and notes are all interwoven with the dialogue and description that constitute the central story. These sudden shifts and sidetrips produce a collage-like effect and an eerie sense of a web of links and connections among various persons, times, events and places. Tindall has created an image texture, a narrative that is simultaneously linear and non-linear, and that achieves a hallucinatory vividness and clarity.

The Banks of the Sea is the author's second novel; his first, Great Heads, was published by Grove Press in 1969. I recommend the book, not only as a corrective to Sixties nostalgia, but as an impressive work by a skilled and talented writer. Tindall's vision is eccentric but acute, and, I believe, ultimately healthful and hopeful. His writing makes demands on the reader but pays off in amazement, amusement and insight.

Gregory Stephenson is the author of The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. ISBN: 0809315645

Reviewed by Thomas E. Kennedy in HOME PLANET NEWS

Heart of Madness:

Kenneth Tindall's second novel, The Banks of the Sea is one of those rare books whose vitality transcends literary modes and theory, an original which brings to mind other originals like Donleavy's Ginger Man or Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Like the protagonists of those novels, Tindall's Carol Gamewell has a European connection; unlike them, he has not left the U.S., but come home to it, with both Vietnam and Europe in his hat. No Sebastian Dangerfield pursuing hedonism in a society of dutiful drudges, Gamewell wanders in a world of sprung seams seeking, it seems, a home -- or perhaps just "The Home Planet Bookshop" he keeps asking for. Along the way, involuntarily massaged with a psychedelic linament, he hallucinates bizarre realities which are in fact everyday sights on the sidewalks of New York: men urinating in corners, nightwatchmen with slavering dogs, winos sleeping in glittering beds of broken glass. Poet that he is, Gamewell gives the last scene a caption: They are contemplating the difference between self-indulgence and self-denial.

When one of Gamewell's girlfriends, curious about his Vietnam experiences, asks how you kill someone, Gamewell tells her you just "drop" them; typical of those drug-focussed years, she puzzles over the verb which in her idiom means "to ingest" as one "drops acid": there is a glimmer of quintessential truth in such far-out linguistic play.

Gamewell moves lightly through the mad world of New York's East Village, taking what pleasure he can get along with his lumps. The report of these wanderings occurs in a third person voice of wry humor and graceful angles, punctuated by belly laughs, horror, and carnal delights. Anyone who has experienced the East Village of Vietnam War days will know that the bizarre stuff of a novel like this could be picked up freely off the streets there. But it takes the eyes and tongue of a poet to transform it into a vision like this, where the surreal reportage takes on the nature of a realism light years beyond the constipated, stylized, "realistic" fiction occupying center stage today, the stuff Colorado Review has suggested is the American "State Fiction."

Tindall's narrative is full of exaggeration -- or is it? How mad were we in the late sixties/early seventles? Was there really a functioning Cargo Cult in New York? Was the paranoia really pitched so high that a pack of L&M's left on top of a can of Schlitz could constitute a coded signal for neo-religious political action? Were there really women being held captive by Sadie Mae's in a cage of drugs, their thighs tatooed with carpet knives as they were fattened up for clitorectomy rituals, later to be sent off to assassinate the head of the Mormons? Did Blacks really steam into Little Italy with flame throwers? I don't know, but even if it wasn't so, Tindall finds the heart of the era by depicting it as such.

The journey down into this heart of madness is undertaken by the only kind of hero who could have lived it and survived: Carol Gamewell wanders the slum having more sex than food, seeking his love as he grows boils and hears voices ("I am Little Faith." And, "American woman give good blowjob."), getting beaten to unconsciousness by a tribe of young drunks and coming to later counting the silica glints on the sidewalk.

In Gamewell's world, dogs stand on street corners waiting for the light to change, heat pipes screech "a sound as lizards made before they became acceptable as birds," and bums on the street who look like your father wink at you and smile. Poetry on the edge.

I suspect that in writing this novel Tindall worked from a wellspring of intuition, exerting the minimum possible intellectual control over his narrative flow, allowing the book to write itself. I wonder, though, how he managed what seem to me the segments of intentional incoherence where what he seems to want to do is enter the mad communal brain or where, for example, he begins a new chapter with what appears to be a lengthy, unexplained quote from a technical manual. How did he reach the narrative decision to do so? No doubt the decision was an honest one, and he may "know" why he did it, but I don't. Nonetheless, the authority of the book makes me willing to accept it despite those moments in which I fear the narrative may have descended into incomprehensibility. I wonder, too, about the conclusion, when this wild odyssey ends on Christmas Eve in church beside a pregnant girlfriend, the two of them singing a Christmas hymn transformed into a playful bawdy ditty about a pregnant girl.

Is Mr. Tindall documenting or prescribing? Is he seeking shelter from the storm of his own literary universe, opting for an accessible form which is a variant of the marriage gambit exit from the old acculturation novel or Hollywood film? Or is he indicating with a snigger what a lost generation finally came to: traditional religion and matrimony?

I raise these questions because it is my job to do so, but perhaps also because I churlishly want this novel, which gave me so much pleasure, to be perfect. Tindall's timing, his ear for dialogue, his zapping humor, the sharp hard jewelry of his prose, his fresh eye for eccentric detail, all these qualities make The Banks of the Sea a rare and memorable experience.

Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of The Book of Angels ISBN: 1877655236, and Unreal City ISBN: 1877655171

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