sections:
Cashampton-by-the-Sea -- a normally idyllic world of sun and money, sex and fame, where the rich get richer and poor get dead, and where the great abstract-expressionist painter Jackson Pollock drank himself into an early grave. Enter Roger Lymon, an ambitious art reviewer who has been commissioned to find Pollock's lost, last works and to pen a biography with evidence of Jack the Dripper's alleged pedophilic past. But as he begins to delve into Cashampton society, things start to get a little out of control.
Michael Guinzburg’s second novel, a best-seller in France, is a savage satire and a loving embrace of humanity at its best and worst. Following on from the critically acclaimed Beam Me Up, Scotty, it reaffirms him as one of the most acerbic and outrageous contemporary novelists writing today.
book reviews
- The Bookseller’s Choice
“Top of the world, Ma! is a viciously accurate and compelling satire of the New York art scene and the grotesquely ostentatious lifestyles of the American superrich. A delightfully sardonic first-person narrator and uniformly black humour.” - Scotland on Sunday
“A viciously accurate and compelling satire of the New York art scene and the grotesquely ostentatious lifestyles of the American super-rich.” - Punch
“Top of the World, Ma! is a richly funny novel… the story is entertaining and witty with some wonderful twists. A darkly comic tale that posed a good-natured fun at the art scene.” - The Observer
"The reader is immersed in a fictionalised, phantasmagoric world, one reminiscent of William Burroughs though more lucid, where all forms of hedonistic pleasures are pursued ... The helter-skelter plot that unfolds is brought to a bizarre and satisfying conclusion. Top of the World, Ma! is a damning indictment of America as a consumerist, status-obsessed culture that is out of control. But more than this, it is disturbingly funny." - The List
“A thoroughly exhilarating attack on the obscene and the rich” - Sleazenation
“Alluding to The Great Gatsby and reading like Evelyn Waugh with knuckle-dusters, this is social satire at its best. Taking outrageous liberties with the living and the recently dead, Guinzburg has a fine sense of natural justice - Willem de Kooning, for example , is cured of Alzheimer’s and gets to hump a silicone-bumped porn star, a boon at any age …Top of the World, Ma is a pustulent, hairy-arsed tour de force.” - Big Issue in the North
“Imagine The Great Gatsby rewritten with a king-sized grudge and a style lifted from National Lampoon’s Animal House.” - The Scotsman
"This viciously dark satire socks it to the reader from the opening page, leaving you stunned and seeing blurry stars as he careers through am modern vision of hell among the status-obsessed rich of America’s east coast … High Society gone bad, The Great Gatsby turned into a bad trip and Sex and the City gone gonzo - Guinzburg matches Pollock for abstract explosions of raw colour."
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