4 Stars - Strongly Recommended
Pages: 197
Publisher: Stalking Horse Press
Released: September 2017
Absolutely Golden strikes me as more style than story, in that D. Foy has penned a protagonist with a sanguine temperment swimming in ridiculously lovely prose. His sentences are either abruptly short or languorously lengthy, drizzled with commas and packed with so much emotion they shine like the sun, so bright we must shield our eyes lest they themselves get burned. You can feast on his writing:
"We suffer, we people, we do. We carry secrets we know nothing of, and harbor them even, and sometimes even nurture for life. And we keep this torment because we deserve it, or believe we do, because, really, nearly always, we feel guilty."
"The sun was rising, thought still the mountains hid it. My room lay covered with that hazy pall of brass-colored light that with each day's coming makes the world seem everything's good, and yet I hadn't slept but for the haphazard snatch. And when actually I did catch a wink, it was to be assaulted by disfigured cherubs, their hair aflame, and defecating gressils, and jackals and crones, and enless piles of hacked-off limbs. Tranquility, in short, had been a distant song."
"It was so quiet, in fact, you could hear the friction of smoke on the gathering dark, of its rising from the pits, slither, slither, thither and thence, the steady trudging as well of anys in their line in the soil between a crack in the stones on the path, the motes of earth beneath their constant legs, the sound even, above, of the night itself, settling down like the breath of a woman on her sweetheart's eyes."
Keep in mind this takes place in the 70's at a nudist colony, where our narrator - a thirty something widow named Rachel - has reluctantly agreed to follow her hippy deadbeat boyfriend and his 'cousin' Jenny, chasing a much needed break in her rather stuffy, boring life.
There is much drugging and drinking and swinging (both of the dancing penises and switching of partners kind). The characters are eccentric, almost overwhleming so, and are prone to fits of fabulous story telling, regaling their audience with tales that often send the reader on multi-page-long diversions that eventually, and perfectly, weave themselves right back into the here and now (or then and there?).
I've read early reviews that refer to this book as comedic, the reviewers admitting to moments of actually laughing out loud. The back cover even refers to it as comic. Perhaps the author's sense of humor was lost on me? Perhaps I was just more strongly drawn towards D. Foy's hypnotic prose and the sheer awkwardness of our middle-aged sun-burned goddess, trying to make her square self fit into the star-shaped hole of Camp Freedom Lake?
Whatever its intent, I found Absolutely Golden to be a bright and fascinating trip back to a simpler, if not necessarily sanier, time.
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