This is like reading Freidman through the eyes of Jonathan Swift. X Out of Wonderland, by David Allan Cates literally takes less than a couple hours to read: a novella of 141 pages printed on 5x8 inch pages. And the story moves quickly too.
X is an unnamed Joe the Plumber and Wonderland obviously the good ol' US of A. X personifies the precarious hold middle class Americans have on financial security. One good tornado destroys his house; he loses his job; he falls into low paying manual labor; he meets other dislocated people. His quest is for gainful employment as he travels the globe and keeps looking for and encountering C, almost a dominatrix corporate opportunistic female, the lady in pink lame, and the crippled young artist. Cates style is arch-satiric, cleverly spinning consumerism platitudes into cosmic forces that lays all the characters low.
Maybe I should revisit this review after I read Candide (to which this book is compared on the back cover), because it hits only half of my picaresque elements, especially weak in the enlightenment denouement department. Nonetheless, an entertaining read, more palatable in its style than other diatribes against international/global economic benefit arguments.
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