The THOUGHT GANG
- Book Review,
by Tibor Fischer
Amazon.com
A black comedy in the grand tradition of word-drunk intellectuals-en-dementia, The Thought Gang follows the larcenous adventures of blackout alcoholic philosopher Eddie Coffin, who, in the wake of scandal, flees his professorship in England to begin the next logical step in his career: robbery. Coffin and his new partner in crime and metaphysics, Hubert the one-armed armed robber, road-trip across the Continent in a spree of crime and epistemology, arguing a cracked history of Western philosophy and plumbing the meaning of life. Fischer was named by Granta as one of the best young British novelists of 1994; his first novel, Under the Frog, was a Booker Prize semifinalist.
From Publishers Weekly
A fat, middle-aged British philosopher turns glutton, slacker, embezzler and thief in Fischer's second novel (after Under the Frog), an infectiously immoral tale about bank robbery in contemporary France. We meet Greek philosophy don Eddie Coffin as he goes on the lam from Cambridge, where, to avoid what he despises above all?work?he has stolen the funds of a Japanese foundation, stashing them in a suitcase. Not far from Lyon, a car accident sends his carefully cached funds up in smoke, leaving him one choice: to rob banks, a trade he learns under the tutelage of crippled thug Hubert. Together, the duo are drunk, lazy and violent, but in such an innocent way that it's hard to begrudge them their subsequent fantastic run of bank-robbing luck. Coffin's stylized first-person narration (numbered in sections, like a philosophical treatise) can be grating, but eventually even wisecracks about Epictetus and Zeno?as well as Coffin's unexplained fascination with words that begin with the letter Z?become part of the fun. The juxtaposition of egghead metaphysics and juvenile gangster fantasy is summed up in the line, "The thing about a gun is, it's like being on the right side of a Socratic dialogue." Often complex in structure, incorporating flashbacks of Coffin's old friends and family to touching effect, this jaunty novel is fundamentally an exercise in wish-fulfillment: shoot guns, get cash, spend it on French food. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
One middle-aged English philosopher, improbably named Eddie Coffin, down on his luck after fleeing England because of a never-explained incident involving kiddie porn, meets Hubert, a one-armed, one-legged petty robber who is also down and out, although Hubert is a cunning criminal and a superb street fighter. The two join forces in France to commit a string of bank robberies. In between the robberies and Coffin's liaisons with the first bank teller he meets are musings about the value of money, the pleasures of love, life, the police, knowledge and education, the nature of humankind, and at least a few dozen other topics. The author is fond of constructions such as "Then the present wasn't present....Gradually, I was presented with the present of the present." After readers finish the word play, they can work on the vocabulary (e.g., words like cadge, nychthemeron, cachinnate, avolating, and phantophagous abound). Fischer (Under the Frog, New Pr., 1994) tries to be glib, clever, and amusing; sometimes, he succeeds. For larger libraries serving readers of eclectic fiction who like a challenge.?Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Times [London]
This brilliant improvisation is really a sexual interpretation of the history of Western thought. . . It deserves to become a cult novel for the 1990s.
The New York Times Book Review, Ron Loewinsohn
[I]t is most interesting for the way it consciously, deliberately rejects formal coherence or elegance, nixing all notions of being well made and choosing instead a sprawling, episodic, free-associative, "Tristram Shandy"-like non-form. A kind of grunge novel, it has a self-conscious bagginess that encourages us to reconsider what we value in novelistic form, and why.
From Booklist
British writer Fischer's new "fin-de-millennium" novel is a rocking good time. He puns his way through a text that manages to be as witty and erudite as the late novels of Nabokov and every bit as extreme and satirical as Pulp Fiction. Eddie Coffin, his hero, is a lazy philosopher with a taste for alcohol and a knack for getting himself into some extremely compromising situations. After getting arrested nude in a room full of kiddie porn, he leaves England for France but promptly wrecks his car, loses all his money, and gets held up by Hubert, a guy with assorted removable body parts and more ambition than success as a holdup man. Since he has nothing worth stealing and no way of supporting himself, Coffin teams up with Hubert, who dubs them the Thought Gang. They don Nietzsche masks, disarm their perfectly willing victims with discourse, baffle the authorities, and become folk heroes. But amusing as the plot is, it's the thought behind it that counts. Fischer's brand of hip, cynical humor is almost guaranteed a cult following. Donna Seaman
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