In the City of Shy Hunters

This is the long-awaited new novel by Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, a novel which got me into semi-deep trouble when I selected it for a book discussion group once. Spanbauer is just NOT an easy author. Not for suburban matrons, no, no, no... Definitely a stylistic challenge (there are no quotation marks anywhere, so you have to parse it out in your head as you read) and the material and setting have certainly been used before (the joys and agonies of New York City at the beginning of the Age of AIDS), but there's a definite attraction meshed in with all its difficulties. The flashbacks to the narrator's strange, abusive childhood in Idaho are lovely and touching, and the characters are nothing if not memorable---performance artists, homeless people, wannabees and waiters. There are multitudinous references to Native American and Western American culture---Stranger in a Strange Land goes 80's, told in a late 90's style---which inform and propel the narrative and the characters' motivations.It's not like anything all that stellar actually happens---Will is looking for a childhood friend who got a scholarship and moved to NYC years before---and his quest is filled with blind alleys and, of course, with self-discovery. There's a good deal of violence and queasy-making descriptions of edgy sexual encounters and acres and acres of humankind's-inhumanity-to-humankind, but there's also a warped beauty to the whole thing and moments of sincere love. Imagine Tales of the City directed by Sam Peckinpah in a benevolent mood...

Something like a mixture of Dancer from the Dance, Huckleberry Finn, and Gravity's Rainbow, this book is not going to be for everyone. But if you like storytelling, philosophy and style, you may just love it. I do.The author has a unique voice, and I can understand people who have trouble with it (skip the prologue if you do). The book tells a good if classic story, but it's also an exploration of perception, memory and reality. It understands that since events exist by perception, their geography is in memory, not in time. As in life, the absurd and the tragic and the sanctimonious and the sentimental all crowd in on one another; but the characters are fascinating, and I found it easy to get caught up in their lives. The comic scenes are masterful; my favorite is one in a crowded laundromat, where the narrator tries to guard a finally-available washing machine from other aggressive new yorkers while his laundry remains out of reach. I liked this book because it told a good story and made me think.

To paraphrase William Parker, the narrator of this amazing new novel, You're going this way, something happens, then you're going that way. If you haven't read *The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon*, then you're in for an extra treat because you can now read two wonderful novels. Reading *In the City of Shy Hunters* over the last week has been a beautiful, joyous, heartbreaking experience. Unless you are a really tiny-hearted person, you will probably fall in love with this book, just as the book's narrator, Will Parker, "William of Heaven", tells you right off the bat that he has fallen in love with you. (He means it.) The vision that informs this book (as well as TS'searlier books, but here on a near epic scale ) is unlike any other in American fiction. It is huge, mystical, generous, "sexually haunted," erotic, and deeply spiritual. If you believe in the power of books and poems, music and art in general to reflect and renew what Wallace Stevens called "the voice that is great within us," then you will be glad that Tom Spanbauer is in the world, and grateful for his generosity and hard work as a writer and as a human being. Please read this book. *Mitakuye iyasin!*

Readers who have already experienced The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon do not need to be told that Tom Spanbauer can write a stunning and excruciating book. But I do think that they will find In the City of Shy Hunters to be more stunning and more excruciating than even that earlier work.Without saying too much, this is a novel that any serious student of literature or culture cannot afford to ignore, and I hope it finds an audience far wider than that. Buy it, read it, lend it to your mother. A great, great writer is among us and publishing books and we had better not let them go unnoticed.

I waited, and waited, and WAITED for the release of this, Tom Spanbauer's third novel (all good things to those who wait!). A lot has passed in the 10 years since the release of Spanbauer's incredible "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but by some ethereal craft, he has managed (again) to bring his readers to a very special place he knows, and we love--where things exist, dream-like/life-like, on several planes at once. Here, he again shares with us stories of a few more of those who are, and always will be there--loved by us. If you believe in magic, and in the pathos that life brings to all of us, then you, too, will fall deep (hey! even deeper than that!) into the story of what happens to sweet, sweet William, and the people he knows and loves. The joy and sorrow of modern American living and loving plays out on these pages like an ancient Greek tragedy--it is the stuff that timeless tales are made of. It is the stuff of eternity...