Loop's Progress

by Chuck Rosenthal

Book Overview

Restored to the author's original version, Loop's Progress is the first of The Loop Trilogy. An uproarious novel about coming-of-age that reflects the gritty reality of modern urban America. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555840019
• ISBN13: 9781555840013
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
• Length: 233 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Twenty Years Later: Loop's Progress by Chuck Rosenthal

Many fine writers slip by without notice: sad, but true. Their books are published and don't sell for lack of publicity, poor timing, bad luck. Some get a second chance. Ten, twenty, fifty years down the road someone will run across one of their books, notice its value and promote it. Martha Gelhorn, Henry Green, Joseph Mitchell, Dawn Powell are recent examples. A shame they're not around to enjoy this appreciation, When Chuck Rosenthal's next book is released, I hope it catches on and resurrects his previously published books as well. When I read the first of these, Loop's Progress, published in 1986, I was amused--what an outrageous family, what an explosive neighborhood, what intelligent, although unbalanced, kids and insane parents, what brilliant writing--until four-fifths of the way through I realized the humorous incidents were anything but. For wasn't the narrator, Jarvis Loop, hanging out with kids (the Dialecticians) who regularly experimented with "deaf." "Dialecticians snorting morphine, Dialecticians smoking pot, Dialecticians debating with the gods, Dialecticians shooting horse, Dialecticians thoughtfully meditating on their veins, on their arteries, on the edges of knives and the barrels of guns." They carried firearms, and supported their activities by armed robbery. The full impact of what was happening didn't hit me until I read the line: "And that's when the gun went off." This is a tragedy of the best and the bravest given a chance to demonstrate courage in WW2 (explicitly, the hand-to-hand Battle of Midway Island), and the aftermath of damage, drugs, and decline. Rosenthal tosses a deck of clowns into the air, but by the time they settle each is human. A brilliant, heart-breaking book.

The wrong side of the tracks in the rust-belt

I found this book in a bargain bin back in the eighties and never forgot it. In fact, I was very sorry that I let my own copy go, because it is out of print and difficult to find- or at least it used to be.If you find the disfunctional family genre of humor amusing, then this is the book for you. Think of "Married with Children" on steroids. Moreover, if you were born in a working class family, on the wrong side of the tracks, anywhere in the rust-belt, then you'll find much to identify with. Most of the action is set during the Eisenhower recession of the late 50's (boy, do I remember that one....)The character development is exceptional and excentric, but it is Red Loop, the father of Jarvis, the main character, that steals the show. Here is a bowling ball-pumping, forge-working, two-fisted Hercules of a working class hero. He takes nothing from nobody, no matter how great the odds against him. Yet, when called "stupid" he spends a summer reading two hundred classic books and jotting down his opinions of them in a private notebook.... I easily rank this book up in the top three or four funniest novels that I've ever read. There are truly some laugh-out-loud funny scenes here. The only problem is the way Rosenthal decided to end this book after all the laughs- it is literally like a punch in the gut.

How did everybody miss this one?

Loop's Progress is a hilarious, thoughtful book about growing up lower middle class in a decaying city. Rosenthal's use of hyperbole and magic-realism accentuates the story and never gets tiring. He assembles some of the most unforgettable characters, and, unbelievable as their actions sometimes are, the reader always wants to find out what they'll do next. FIND THIS BOOK! Then tell all your friends! (Also the follow-up, Experiments With Life And Deaf.)

Luck, Chuck, if you find this book...

Loop's Progress is the first book in Chuck Rosenthal's Loop Trilogy, which continues in Experiments with Life & Deaf, and Loop's End. It's narrated by a kid named Jarvis Loop growing up in a blue collar suburb of Erie, Pennsylvania in the 1960's.Jarvis is a congenial and observant voice, relating the idiosyncracies of his family and everyone else around him with deadpan hipster inflection, kind of like a Beat Huckleberry Finn, a less introspective Holden Caulfield. That doesn't quite get it, though; this is one of the most original and funny voices I've ever read. Jarvis is funnny and odd and streetwise, belying a true sort of innocence. He's surrounded by oddballs; his mother's a Catholic whose miniature statues of the saints sneak around the house when nobody's looking; His father, Red, is a towering volcano of a man who loves kids, spins bowling balls on his pinkies, blasts all the house's doors off their hinges when he's mad.His sister Neda is a genius who can do anything, up to and including building a rocket and putting a neighborhood kid into orbit for a science experiment. Uncle Jon is a lunatic who can float in the air and becomes uncontrollably invisible. Jarvis' street gang, the Dialecticians, concern themselves with "experiments," researches into life & deaf (sic) that bring Jarvis into confrontation with history.The book spins through history; his parent's stories and his grandparents are revealed in increasingly detailed passes through the trilogy, and Jarvis has to come to terms with the living and the dead as the story progresses. This is like Gabriel Garcia Marquez territory; Rosenthal plays with time, and Jarvis' encounters with the past and the dead become almost as commonplace as his dealings with the living present.This trilogy is really, really hard to find, but you might see it laying around in a used bookstore someplace. It's one of the funniest things I've ever read -- not one of those books covered with blurbs that talk about how funny it is, and then turns out not to be funny at all (I'm thinking like Portnoy's Complaint, here, or Confederacy of Dunces) but like really, actually read-it-in-public-and-get-weird-looks-from-total-strangers-funny. I don't see how Rosenthal came in under the radar with these books; I don't know anyone who's even heard of them. Rosenthal's is a distinctively baroque American voice, and I can't recommend his books more highly. I read, incidentally, that he's working on something called Coyote O'Donahue's History of Texas, and I'd love to hear from anyone who knows anything about that. Chris Packham