No Exit Press - Big Machine by Victor LaValle

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and summoning him to Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom to fulfill it.

There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom have at some point in their wasted lives heard the Voice: a murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, a whisper in an empty room. All these may or may not have been messages from God. Their mission is to find the Voice — and figure out what it wants.

Big Machine takes us from Ricky's childhood in a matrilineal cult housed in a New York City tenement to his near-death experience in the basement of an Iowa house owned by a man named Murder. And to his final confrontation with an army of true believers — and with his own past.

Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle's fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.

Big Machine named:

•American Book Award 2010

•Shirley Jackson Award 2009 - Winner - Best Novel

•10 Best Books of 2009 — Publisher's Weekly

•Favorite Fiction of 2009 — Chicago Tribune

•Best Science Fiction of 2009 — Los Angeles Times

•Best Science Fiction & Fantasy — Washington Post

•Most Valuable Fiction Book of 2009 — The Nation

•Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence 2010 Winner

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'Like his spiritual forebears, Chester Himes and Nelson Algren, he speaks for the unsung so we can hear their voice. Listen.'
- Cathi Unsworth, The Guardian [read the full review]

''Intriguing and wonderfully enjoyable''
- The Sun

'Religion and money are the two great American themes, and in Big Machine LaValle brings them together by creating a world where faith cannot pay its bills and greed is the only force in which anyone can reliably believe.'
- Laurence Scott, Times Literary Supplement [read the full review]

It is inherently satisfying that Dracula might recruit a real-estate solicitor to help with his move, or that Star Wars should begin with a minor tax dispute. Similarly, Victor LaValle’s latest novel, Big Machine, uses bathos to crate a fantastical story of spiritual vigilantes dogged by fiscal woes. Its protagonist Ricky Rice is ominously summoned from his job cleaning toilets in a New York state bus depot to the Vermont woods, where he joins a group of outcasts working for an institution called the Library . These ‘Unlikely Scholars’ trawl the newspapers looking for evidence of the Voice, a mysterious force that is said to whisper messages to the virtuous. A concept such as the Voice is apt to breed dissent, and soon Ricky is contracted to deal with a splintered radical who believes that the Voice wants him to inflict public carnage in the San Francisco Bay area.

Although it presents, among other things, an allegory of present-day terrorism, Big Machine is most potent as a mock-heroic quest born of the credit crunch, a bathetic tale perfectly attuned to a time when a federal corporation called Fannie Mae went bust. Ricky is pleased with the expensive suits he receives from the Library, until they turn out to be hand-me-downs; when out on assignment he travels on budget airlines and uses telephone cards to keep in touch with the Powers That Be. In LaValle’s universe, the men in black are in the red; metaphysical turf wars are constantly threatened with foreclosure. When questioned over the threat to the Library, its Dean replies, ‘You want the cosmic answer or the pragmatic one?’ Years before Ricky arrived, the Library almost terminated its operations, not on the Voices’ instruction, but on the advice of its own accountants.

Bathos is a temperamental servant, and any novel that continuously juxtaposes the cosmic and the pragmatic risks anti-climax. On occasion here, the narrative strays into whimsy; when freshly impregnated by semi-transparent ‘angels’, Ricky manages witty apercus despite his morning sickness. In general, however, LaValle avoids this pitfall by underpinning his story with the brutal premises that our metaphysics are shaped more by financial security than by moral sense. As the radicalized Librarian Solomon Clay puts it, ‘Give any of us a little comfort and we’ll kill to keep it’.

Religion and money are the two great American themes, and in Big Machine LaValle brings them together by creating a world where faith cannot pay its bills and greed is the only force in which anyone can reliably believe.

Laurence Scott, Times Literary Supplement

'an elegiac monster of a book that could be the bastard child of The X-Files and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita'
- Peter Millar, The Times [read the full review]

'A rich, textured story structured like a crime thriller and told in vivid but unshowy prose. Thematically meaty...recommended. '
- SFX [read the full review]

'Phenomenal word of mouth regarding a new novel is not always justified, but it most assuredly is in the case Victor LaValle's Big Machine, a truly phantasmagorical experience that is quite unlike anything you will have encountered before.'
- Barry Forshaw, Crime Time [read the full review]

'spectacular...sprawling, fantastical'
- Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post [read the full review]

'unruly and entertaining...a monumental dream work'
- Ed Park, Los Angeles Times [read the full review]

'a transcendent and provocative book that is wildly original and completely absorbing'
- Katherine Tomlinson, California Literary Review [read the full review]

'LaValle employs a sly wit and deadpan humor… Draw[s] comparisons to the work of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon'
- Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal [read the full review]

'a worthwhile oddity with plenty to say on the appeal of cults and the state of America today'
- John Williams, The Mail on Sunday [read the full review]

'the first great book of the next America.'
- Mos Def [read the full review]

'a Da Vinci Code for fans of Haruki Murakami'
- Michael Buening, popmatters.com [read the full review]

'This tale is peculiar, magnificent and – as books about cults often are – quite funny.'
- Chicago Tribune

'Big Machine transcends the boundries of standard literary fiction and defies readers’ expectations at every turn. Fantasy and reality constantly mingle, but the core issues – though mess and complicated – are undeniably human'
- Stephenie Harrison, BookPage [read the full review]

'Sweeping and swashbuckling … genius'
- D. Scott Miller, San Francisco Bay Guardian [read the full review]

'The tensions between sci-fi and noir material and the realist approach makes Big Machine crackle … [This] big novel grinds up our delusions about reality, spirituality and the principles of fiction'
- Walton Muyumba, The Dallas Morning News [read the full review]

'Truly spellbinding'
- Hirsh Sawhney, Time Out New York [read the full review]

'Fractures all of our notions of how well-made fiction ought to behave ... idea-hungry and haywire, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of age — smashingly.'
- Kirkus

'LaValle is as much wry fabulist as he is dogged allegorist, and his flights of grim fancy are tethered by acute observations. He can be awfully funny, too. [His] devilish fable renders the visible world – of science, social hierarchies, and New York Times headlines – a load of cultish hooey.'
- Mark Rozzo, BookForum [read the full review]

'it's really his skill at storytelling — and in many ways, it's old-fashioned, unironic storytelling — that makes him such a remarkable new talent'
- Paul Constant, The Stranger [read the full review]

'If Hieronymus Bosch and Lenny Bruce got knocked up by a woman with a large and compassionate heart, they might have brought forth Big Machine'
- Amy Bloom [read the full review]

'If the literary Gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, and threw in several fistfuls of 21st century attitude, the result would be Victor LaValle. Big Machine is a wonderful, original, and crazy novel.'
- Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace