Shamp of the City-Solo

This is the third edition of one of the finest comic novels to appear in the last half century, a book that has been compared with the very best of Flann O’Brien, Angela Carter, and Witold Gombrowicz. Appearing first in 1974, Shamp of the City-Solo quickly became an underground sensation. This “fantasy” novel takes place in a dystopian parallel universe, a world set at an odd remove where the hero’s hunger for fame displays its mythic origin. Hughbury Shamp is the reluctant teenager who becomes apprenticed to three “masters” at the West Poolesville Depot on the Sumpsky Prospect, across the River Sump from Big Yolk, the city-solo. His education proceeds through various misadventures with the likes of impresario Sergei Shipoff, Dr. Harry Analarge, and the World-Friar Tapsvine, all the while he is being propelled toward stardom as the breakfast speaker at the murderously competitive Arslevering Ox Roast. The writing is simply extraordinary–a style that seems born of Lawrence Sterne and Djuna Barnes, with sidelong glances at Samuel Beckett’s Watt, Marcus Aurelius, and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. With her very first novel, Jaimy Gordon managed that almost impossible feat: a novel of lasting consequence.