(The following review of Love and Other Pranks was originally published in Foreword Reviews. The review was written by Amanda Adams.)
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A novel that can be parsed several times to uncover new meaning, Love and Other Pranks is a must-read.
Stylish and surreal, Love and Other Pranks by Tony Vigorito is a wild ride through both the past and present.
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8
Captain Porton Down is a doll of a man. His natural expression is a suntanned, clean-shaven, gaudy grin, and his blonde hair falls leisurely to one side. Relentlessly self-assured, he could sneeze with a mouthful of toothpaste lather and make it look charming. He’s a real-life Ken doll, and I reckon his wife drives a pink Corvette.
I explained Blip’s situation, that he was a professor, and that Sergeant Wilt had refused to release any information about his arrest status. Captain Down’s rosy smile was softened by an expression of frivolous concern.
The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze
twelve centuries earlier
“I am not the bottom sentence!” Clovis yelled from some faraway dream, carrying the bellow into his waking world with all the imperiousness of a king’s proclamation. Clovis had awakened himself before the second syllable of “bottom,” and heard himself holler “sentence!” as he was stumbling upright out of the bed of acorns within which he’d been nestled. Unnerved by the bossy nonsense of his own decree, he was rattled all the more when he found himself clutching a fistful of dry, dead leaf crumble, a handful that only the previous night had been his carefully collected and ecstatic bouquet of bejeweled oak leaves.
(The following review of Nine Kinds of Naked was originally published on Reality Sandwich. The review was written by Stephen C. Thomas.)
If there’s one thing Tony Vigorito knows, it’s that the infinite complexity of the universe is reducible to an elegantly simple word: Now.
If there are two things he knows (and I’d wager this the case), the second is that somehow that word is also the funniest damn thing anyone has ever heard. The eternal moment, it seems, is also a never-ending cosmic giggle. Go figure.
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6
The institution of the university was transformed long ago from a center of learning into a center of earning. The pursuits of wisdom, truth, knowledge, and freedom are as antiquated as the masonry monuments which bear such academic platitudes, having given way, respectively, to the corrosive pursuits of profit, efficiency, technical expertise, and employment. Ivy-covered buildings shelter the bespectacled neurons of technocratic consciousness, department after department attracting grant money to generate research to create new industries and professions to make more money. Status competition keeps us racing to publish, and if we fail in that regard, punishment is swift and severe: teaching. Dr. Blip Korterly taught full-time, though his employment was considered part-time. I, on the other hand, have not taught a class in over five years. I, Dr. Flake Fountain, molecular geneticist, have been a willing and well-paid servant, a slave butler who gets to wear fancy clothes and sleep in the mansion, but a slave nonetheless, and subject to beatings if I don’t cower with a bow.
26
Actually, the only person in the church not undergoing her own profoundly personal rebirth experience was the daughter of Bridget Snapdragon, who was merely undergoing her first birth. Whether Bridget was assisted by the exceptionally low point of barometric pressure or the greatly amplified adrenaline gush occasioned by the tornado itself is a matter of some conjecture, but Bridget bore her daughter in less than five minutes. And though it was not apparent to the oblivious Dave Wildhack, her cries were not of agony but of ecstasy. Breathing like a bellows at a bonfire, Bridget experienced her contractions as waves of unbearable pleasure, so maddeningly rapturous that Bridget lost all sense of time, space, and the distinctions thereof.
4
The average ocular distance, that is, the space between a set of human eyes, pupil to pupil, is 6.5 centimeters. Tibor Tynee, the president and CEO of Tynee University (so renamed at his financial insistence), has an ocular distance no greater than 4 centimeters. A lifetime of narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips has left his face decidedly pinched. The expansive facial features of Blip’s wife, Dr. Sophia Carthorse, are precisely the opposite. This was apparent even over the telephone as I called her and relayed the news about Blip. She did not seem surprised, and asked only that I meet her at the police station in an hour. I agreed, allowing that I’d be a little late due to a 1:30 meeting that had been scheduled for me with President Tynee.
The title of my third novel, Love and Other Pranks, was borne of a conversation with a good friend sometime in 2007 in an A-frame in Austin, Texas. As I had not yet completed my second novel, and because I’d recently realized that all three of my books should take place within the same fictional universe, I included an Easter egg reference to Love and Other Pranks in a paragraph on page 288 of Nine Kinds of Naked that first linked the three novels together:
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Last weekend, a gentleman on Valencia Street blockaded my path, demanding, “Have you heard the philosophy?” The pointedness of his question paused me, and though I resumed upon my way once I’d gathered that his bloodshot eyes were pickled in alcohol, I couldn’t help wondering what timeless wisdom I’d hurriedly declined.
(The following interview was originally published on Globalish, and is exclusively about Tony’s first novel. A more general interview is available here.)
Spoiler Alert: In discussing his novel, Just a Couple of Days, the following interview necessarily reveals major plot twists. If you wish to be entirely surprised by the story, the reader is encouraged to enjoy the book first, and to read this interview as an Afterword.
Globalish: First off, we loved the book. Congratulations on such a marvelous work of art. So, to begin, everything we do at Globalish lives at the intersection of awakening and emergent global culture, and as we see it, Just a Couple of Days also lives at this intersection. For our interview today, we’d like to focus less on plotline, characters, etc. and more on your “personal” journey and the topic of “awakening,” something you seem to consistently point to throughout the book. Question number one—can you tell us a little about your “seeker’s journey?” In order to write at the depth you do in Just a Couple of Days, it would seem that you have done quite a bit of self-inquiry.
Tony Vigorito: The “seeker’s journey” you mention brings to mind Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” According to Campbell, each of us is potentially the stout-hearted hero of our own life. A hero must be willing to enter the wilderness without a map, to err, to stumble, and to suffer injury, for as Hermann Hesse reminded us in Siddhartha, “wisdom cannot be passed on,” but can only be wildcrafted from the ruthless experiences of one’s own life.
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