Review: The Condemned

Sentegraphic beauty.



The Condemned is full of beautiful, touching, groping, finger-fucking-pretty stories Oprah's Book Club will snap up any day now.

Why?

Because if ever there was a collection of life-affirming tales about the human spirt its this one.

There is sweetness in the bitter.

A boy loses his virginity in a chuch to a fat girl with mental problems, another goes down on a well-hung stranger in a theater, a moment of tenderness is shared with a transexual hooker in Tijuana and two blessed souls are brought closer together by their mutual love of watersports.

There are no apple-cheeked urchins or modle-types with needles in their arms waiting for you in The Condemned, only dregs, drugs, messy sexual encounters and the permission to have them.

Which is nice.

Everyone is entitled to toe-curlingly good sex and a little respect.

Which to some extent Cicero grants his characters.

The first story roaring out of the collection is an introduction to a woman named Kathy, a preganant stripper who would punch you in the face if you owed her money, a best friend, a junkie and there is something disturbingly comfortable about her dysfunction.

She makes seven twenties barely working at all.
There is no time in Kathy’s world.
No future, just a timeless present
There is a past, but it is not spoken of.
Her life only stretches as far as her twenties, and how she can spend those twenties. [46-7]

Her relationships frighten me. They are blurs of love and violence. And to watch her search out kindness in beatings was a difficult thing to get my mind around at first. But Cicero manages to show the reader the complexity of his characters' lives with both compassion and the tiniest of sentences.

So much so that it's prompted me to underlined most of my review copy and swarm the margins with smilie faces.

Now, if I flip through it fast it looks like the Munchkin land scene from the Wizard of Oz . . . .you know. . . . if all the actors were decapitated.

And it's because he writes things like this:

Her parents were divorced
Her dad loved Jesus and big houses
Her mom loved beer and weed.
They both sucked as people. [97]

That alone is the worth ten bucks for the book.

[That Girl Who Writes Stuff]

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The Condemned by Noah Cicero
Six Gallery Press
320 Pages