Your Monkey's Shmuck
Flamingo paperback 1990, original paperback
The Guardian, Tim Radford, April 26 1990:
Simon Louvish, is a breeze, fanning aglow the dog-ends in literature's
gutter. The hero of Shmuck (no, I won't explain the title: the joke
is too awful) is a would-be pulp writer, camped in New York, surviving
on bagels, chutzpah and other people's goodwill, and writing with vicious
energy and an appalling imagination, shlock so awful that even the
worst magazines wouldn't print it if you paid them (the book is dedicated
to "all those who suffered the slings and arrows of Rejection
Slip Shock"). There is a story of sorts, something Mean Streetish
about a disappeared friend, a worried ballerina and a couple of cans
of film. It serves as a skewer upon which chunks of justly-rejected
manuscripts are threaded. The total effect is modestly nourishing,
wonderfully tasty and faintly nauseating, like a spicy kebab. Thrill
to King Kong and the two dropout Sloane Rangers, making up a harmonious
menage a trois (well, a quartre if you count the ravished elephant).
Chill to Drekula, the self pitying Jewish vampire on the run in New
York ("People die of 'flu jabs every month. I should be the one
they are hunting?").
Warm to the startling private eye, equipped with an enormous pecker,
woops, beak and a Panatella in his wing tip ("Hey man" I
said pointing before I could stop myself. "You're a fucking chicken." "You're
hired," he said, not a feather ruffled... ) Spare yourself the
chap discussing philosophy with his own turds (yep, they answer back).
Cheer the bland, po-faced letters of rejection that arrive in every
post (Dear Author, good fiction demands strong believable characters
... ) Feel your toes curl up at the story of Winnie the Poof and his
chum Faglet. Get hooked on the tangle of dreadful sf, awful disaster
movie and squalid thriller involving Bernardo Pratt the pusher who
swallows a miniaturised spacecraft caught up in his spaghetti bolognese
and ...
Mercifully, hardly any of these stories is ever finished. There might be a serious
purpose behind all this, but who cares? It's a treat. Buy it.
From the Jerusalem Post, Peter Schertz, 18 January 1991:
Author’s dream of writing a novel like Simon Louvish’s
Your Monkey’s Shmuck; it is chockfull of schlock as Louvish indulges
in parodies of the world pulp and science-fiction writing.
The hero of the book is Danny, a Jewish writer from England struggling to make
it in New York with a desk full of stories and a drawer full of rejection slips.
Danny writes a King Kong Story, which is rejected. Apparently some editor did
not like the idea of a pachydermal nymphomaniac chasing a giant gorilla through
Kenya. He sends “The Story of E” to The Parmesan Review, again
it is rejected, apparently such dialogue as “Eeee, eee, eee ee eeeee
eeee! Eeee Eeee” is not sufficiently “avant garde and nouvelle
prose.” Even Danny’s ethnic masterpiece, “Drekula,” about
the tribulations of a Jewish vampire in the Big Apple searching for a supply
of virgin Jewish blood, is rejected by Jake Akimbo’s Science Fiction
Magazine. Though some might question the judgment of anyone who rejected “The
Thing in the Bog (a faecetious tale),” it was a wise editor who did not
reject Your Monkey’s Shmuck.
 |
| |
|
|
|
