New Novel by U.R. Bowie: "LOOKING GOOD"

https://www.amazon.com/Looking-Good-Collected-Works-Bowie/dp/B08CPNPLXV/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=u.r.+bowie%2C+%22Looking+Good%22&qid=1594830700&s=digital-text&sr=8-1

Looking Good takes a long hard, but frequently humorous, look at life in America in the nineties. Its major themes include racism, sexual violence, mothers and sons. It emphasizes the ways people look at, or refuse to look at, themselves, others, and life.

            The action of the novel revolves around a sensational episode that actually occurred: the gang rape (or non-rape) of a white woman by a large number of black professional football players from Cincinnati. The viewpoint of working class white America toward blacks, Native Americans, and other minorities is broadly treated. In a book about racism the very narrative is suffused with racist views; there is, however, no overriding didactic message. Looking Good tries to show how people are: bad and good simultaneously. Neither the white racists nor the black rapists in the story are portrayed as monsters.

            Each chapter is composed of a series of short sub-chapters.  Some of these describe childhood, or future, events in the lives of the football players and the woman they raped (or didn't).  Ancillary stories, meanwhile, develop the novel's main themes. An old homosexual couple journeys to Florida, to swim with the manatees. Work progresses toward completion of the monument to Chief Crazy Horse in South Dakota. Reading his morning paper in Indianapolis, a working class white man ruminates, angrily, on his country’s problems. Periodically, the author of Looking Good, O. Beauvais, takes a break from composing his novel to bemoan the psychic hazards of describing violence in fiction. 

            Looking Good takes a look at sex cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, at manatee homosexual behavior, at radio talk show racism, at the yellow-bellied lizard (scheltopusik), at Lakota Sioux shamanic traditions, at middle class political correctness, at the ways people are kind, or horribly cruel, to one another, at the amazing fact that anything can happen in life. Anything. Even happiness.

Looking Good

Back Cover Copy

“Look at the world, the universe, and in the act of looking you’ll discern your life, your self. There it is! See? The minuscule speck of something, floundering out there in the ether. Yeah, that’s you.”

                                                                         O.G. Zakamora, Philosophical Speculations

Looking Good is a novel about looking, all the ways we look good, and look bad; the ways looking can be bad for us and good for us. A major theme of the novel is the transgressive nature of looking, how looking can sometimes be associated with violence. The novel begins with an oblique description of a gang rape, committed by professional football players in a hotel room, and the repercussions of this incident permeate the whole rest of the story. Does the reader really want to look at something as hideous as this, or is the writer himself guilty of violence—in forcing the reader to look? Such questions are implicit throughout the narrative.                  

The theme of looking also underlies descriptions of the ongoing work on a huge statue—the Crazy Horse Memorial—which amounts to a graven image of Chief Crazy Horse, carved from a stone massif in the Black Hills of South Dakota. This despite such a monument’s being proscribed as sacrilegious by Oglala-Lakota orthodoxy. Crazy Horse never allowed his picture to be taken, assuming that the making of a photograph would enable malfeasants to capture his image and conjure with it. Now, as his image emerges from out of the rock, his spirit rebels at the invasive looking he will face—the threat of the evil eye.

Although set twenty-five years ago, Looking Good touches on issues that are still at the forefront of American life in the year 2020: racism, black violence, the plight of the Native American, and humanity’s perpetual, incorrigible insistence on being inhumane to man and woman.

One more thing: who would dare publish a novel titled Looking Good in the Year of the Great Plague, 2020? Well, uh, I guess I would. How is America looking in 2020, homosapien? Be an optimist, be an American! We’re looking GOOD.