Marsupial: Our Mother for the Time Being

Fiction. Derek White's latest novel is called MARSUPIAL: OUR MOTHER FOR THE TIME BEING. "The meta-novel is more or less told from the perspective of a young Southern boy who shows up in Paris in order to be a stand-in for his brother in a pretentious low-rent scifi B-movie about junkies addicted to 'bug juice.' Slipping in and out of bodies, names, and identities, the narrator is hardly reliable. He may be dreaming; he may be a figment of his brother's imagination. This instability is mirrored in the episodic structure of the book, as we pass, quick-cut style, back and forth through a number of narrative frames-childhood memoir, dream sequences, dictionary definitions, screenplay, film shoot, forensic documents, erotic fantasies. These are presented in different typefaces and genres of documents, and are interspersed with lots of White's gnarly and evocative dada-punk collages" - Erik Davis.