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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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My Name
Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Amuse Jess
Winfield’s debut novel, My Name
Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare, pairs the perils of a
1980s graduate student at University of California-Santa Cruz with the life
of the bard. Winfield melds the two stories with great skill, and amuses
readers along the way. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter Three, pp. 16-17: This
is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often
the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of
our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if
we were
villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an
enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his
goatish disposition on the charge of a star! —Edmund, King Lear, I.ii.118 Todd
Deuter knelt on all fours, his face glowing in the moonlight, his nose two
inches from a large cow pie. Springing forth from the mound of bovine poop
was a mushroom. Todd plucked it from the patty to examine it more closely. "Panaeolus
sphinctrinus," Todd called to Willie. "Shakespeare,
you're the Latin scholar, you know what it means?" "Something
about a sphincter," Willie responded. "Correct!"
said Todd, holding up the toadstool like a puppet. "It means, I no get you high, but I maybe
kill you, ASSHOLE!" He laughed and tossed it aside. The University of California at Santa Cruz is
nestled in the treeline where the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains rise
up to meet the ancient redwood forest. The school's small residential
colleges are scattered among clearings in the trees, connected by long wooden
footbridges that span the forest ravines. The urban legend is that the school,
built in the 1960s, was decentralized by design, with no focal point for
Berkeley-style student protests. As a result, the campus itself is shady,
moody, mysterious, solitary. But between the campus on the hill and the
sleepy town of Santa Cruz below lay the rolling pastures of the Cowell Ranch.
At night, the pastures are wide open to the sky, quiet, starlit, and empty
but for the occasional group of drunk, stoned, or tripping students and the
cow patties and confused cows that are their prey. Ultraprogressive
UC SC had no fraternities, no sororities, no athletic programs, no grades,
for that matter. Students took classes exclusively on a pass/no pass basis.
With so few attractions for jarheads and jocks, it was therefore a
tiny—though not null—subset of UCSC students who engaged in the
rural-campus, drunken-frat-boy pastime of cow tipping. The activity, for
those not familiar, involves sneaking up on a sleeping, standing cow, running
at it full speed, and knocking it over onto its side before it wakes up. Good
times. The
cow pastures of U C SC were more popular for activity of another sort.
"Cow tripping," Todd called it. Go out under the moonlight, hunt
for magic mushrooms, and if found, consume immediately. Guitars, dumbeks, and
Hacky Sacks optional, female companionship preferred. That
had been Willie's plan for the night, cow tripping with Todd and a few other
friends. Willie had invited Dashka to come along, and to his shock, she'd
agreed. Dashka had studying to do, so they had gotten a late start; Willie
guessed it was already two a.m. Todd
moved away down the hill, scanning the ground for mushrooms, while Willie and
Dashka sprawled on a Mexican blanket in the grass. No one had brought a
flashlight, but even on this moonless night it wasn't necessary. There were
stars galore glimmering in a cloudless sky and illuminating the small
depression where they sat. The light from the town below and from the
occasional car coming to or from the campus was blocked out by rises in the
rolling pastures. Willie
pulled his green backpack toward him and took out his pipe and a small bundle
of tinfoil, which he opened carefully to reveal a small cube of hashish the
size of the tip of his little finger and the color of raw honey. Dashka
watched silently as Willie took the cube and waved a lighter under it to
soften it, then broke off a small corner and crumbled it into the pipe.
Dashka took the pipe and lighter, and smoked; then coughed as she tried to
hold in the hit. "Shit,"
she said in the comically held-breath voice of all practicing stoners,
"that's strong shit." I
expect the better one knows Shakespeare and the various theories about him,
the more the humor in My Name
Is Will amuses. All readers will appreciate the funny bits, but the most
knowledge will likely laugh even harder. Steve
Hopkins, September 20, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/My Name Is Will.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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