Need : A Novel

Amazon.com Review Nik Cohn is not the kind of novelist who is content to write about the merely downtrodden. In his new novel, Need , the belly dancers also deliver Verse-O-Grams; the sad sack has a shoe fetish and dreams of making his fortune as topless car-wash magnate; and even the psychic moonlights running a bizarre pet shop. Of course, the novel is set in New York City, where all this and more is possible, really. There's something a little hallucinatory about Need , as if the strange characters and the even stranger circumstances they find themselves in were all part of a troubling dream one can't quite wake from. Gritty as the urban landscape he details, Nik Cohn's language is the engine that keeps this novel running to the very end. From Library Journal From British journalist Cohn (The Heart of the World (LJ 1/92) comes this apocalyptic, surrealistic novel set in contemporary New York City. The four extravagantly confused and existentially troubled main characters?Willie, who has a relationship with Anna but is obsessed with Kate, and Joe, to whom Anna becomes attached?meet at a pet store on the Upper West Side called Ferdousine's Zoo. The characters inhabit a world of hipsters, junkies, strippers, and down-and-out types, and disaster is clearly in the offing. This is an ambitious novel, and the author does his best to make something heroic of his characters' suffering and their search for meaningful human interaction. Ultimately, however, he is unsuccessful. Modernist in style, with lots of deliberate obfuscation and abrupt, dislocating shifts of time and perspective, Need makes for difficult and sometimes confusing reading. Fans of linguistic pyrotechnics may be attracted, but otherwise this is not recommended.?Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Technical Coll., Ct. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Four New York misfits search for a reason for living. One is a pimp, the second a woman who works as a target in knife throwing contests, the third a belly dancer, and the fourth is a black Irishman. Their hangout is Ferdousine's Zoo, a Manhattan pet shop, until the action switches to the subway system for a confrontation with the Black Swans, a tunnel cult New York City is in the grip of a bad-moon heat wave, with the street-corner preachers running amok. Into the fray, four damaged lives come together at a pet store on the Upper West Side, each one consumed by a private hunger and driven toward an inevitable fate. 304 pp. 15,000 print.