"Vanden's Best Book" - Amory
This is Vanden’s best work to date, which makes it a very good book
indeed. Freed finally from the fourth-rate visions of at least two fourth-rate publishing houses, Vanden is finally able,
with Olympia Press, to do what he wants to do.
All is Well is a very ambitious book. Vanden takes an emotional
casket named Robert Thorne, one of those hollow men that seem to abound in the Middle West, and brings him through a series
of beautifully suspenseful trauma into the warm, loving sunlight of self-realization. In Thorne’s case, the new self
happens to be homosexual, but it is more than that too – it is pro-sex, pro-love, pro-life; the real enemy as Vanden
sees it, is the desiccated Puritanism of a dead and dying culture, no matter what form it might take, straight or gay.
Right on, brother!
Vanden knows what he’s talking about. He can give you the smells
and textures of a dirty old Turkish bath in Salt Lake City (Yes, Virginia, there is a Salt Lake City), the strident sounds
of an old-culture gay bar on Polk Street, the feeling of mescaline (talk about contact highs – whew!), and the simply
incredible hostilities generated by the old, lead-pipe, preacherish morality. Thorne, like Vanden himself, is a Jack Mormon
in Chapter One, which says a lot right there. Lots of garbage has to be hauled out of his head before he can even start
to define his problem, but define it he does, and deal with it.
Vanden is the only writer I can think of who knows his way around inside
the heads of two generations; mine, the unbelievably fucked-up generation now in its forties, the one that sees itself fulfilled
in Judy Garland and which will walk a mile out of its way to step in a pile of shit; and the generation now in its twenties,
those beautiful, shaggy-headed freaks who seem to know ten times more about loving than we ever dreamed of. He knows these
things, and takes his time about developing them and getting them down, starting with a beautifully controlled first chapter
and ending in a place I won’t tell you about. This is a thick, prosy work, introspective, thoughtful, sometimes much
too essayistic, but always ingenious, probing, suspenseful.
If you’re a Judy Garland fan, read this. Read it if you’re
not a Judy Garland fan. It is not a jack-off book; the catharsis is on another level, and besides, jack-off isn’t
where it’s at any more.
Highly recommended.
-- Richard Amory
Visit http://dirkvanden.com for more information on Dirk Vanden and his work.
