PRESS
"DeWitt delves deeply and unflinchingly into an addict's mind, bearing witness to what happens to a man as a drug renders him inhuman... Ablutions has achieved something remarkable." -- New York Times Book Review
<< READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW PRAISE FOR ABLUTIONS"The success of Ablutions stems from deWitt's old-fashioned writerly exactitude. His sentences often depict brutal events, and their cumulative effect can be mind-numbingly horrific, but they are crafted with a rare degree of care and display a truly original voice." "(DeWitt) crafts a narrative of precise subtlety and seemingly effortless invention." "DeWitt conjures up moments of both painful humor and tender beauty." --Financial Times "Deeply affecting... Ablutions' revelation is the freshness of deWitt's prose... The book strikes me as a marvel." -- L.A. Weekly "Read this rambling and gloriously downbeat novel... Melancholic, sentimental, and very funny." -- Harper's Bazaar (UK) "Patrick deWitt's sensitive and hilariously deadpan portrayals of assorted human detritus, juxtaposed with the narrator's struggle for an alcohol-free identity, makes this an instant classic of boozy literature. When you read Ablutions, you get to walk through the fire with deWitt himself, and to share in a spiritual resurrection that would have made Lazarus proud." --Dazed and Confused "This unusual and forceful account of bottle-to-mouth living is still weirdly engrossing, and the precise observations drip with black humor." -- New Statesman "DeWitt's unsparing writing is so clear and unfussy - and so punctuated with tiny, heartbreaking moments of grace - it becomes impossible to put the book down and abandon your narrator to face that world alone." -- Portland Mercury "Patrick deWitt's hilariously gloomy tale is a sober reminder to stick to the diet tonic water... The subtitle is "notes for a novel", but there is nothing unfinished about Ablutions. The sentences catch the light like drops of Jameson whiskey spilled as a drunk rushes for a puke." -- The Independent "Ablutions... reminds us that a writer with enough talent can approach the most familiar paths to the most familiar destinations, step into the rough, and find a way to walk there that surprises the hell out of the most jaded reader... The writing is just that startling, that precise, that good." -- Hobart "Like all novelists who write successfully about Los Angeles, deWitt is susceptible to the city's peculiar horrors. We are lucky he is willing to transcribe them." "The novel is a twenty-four carat beauty... DeWitt more than warrants his place on the list of the dozen or so writers to watch in the future." -- Bookmunch "Startlingly honest... Ablutions is a revelation unlike any other into the gritty effects that drugs, alcoholism, and most of all loneliness can have on the human spirit." --Aesthetica "DeWitt elevates his grubby, often comic tale and its lost inhabitants with a veneer of elegiac sadness without feeling the need to reach towards redemption."-- Metro "Viciously hilarious... An accessible, side-splitting story... Its strange and funny declarations evoke much more than a drinker's life... A welcome rarity: an experimental novel that's also a page-turner." --Time Out New York "DeWitt's writing is sharp and bitter and funny." --The LA Times "Stunningly depicted. . . DeWitt writes beautifully about ugliness, and his book casts a haunting spell." -- Booklist "A brilliant inside view of addiction." --The Times (London) "A brief, intense and carefully sustained piece of writing about the blurry edges of existence, shot though with remarkable lucidity. Warning: Cheers it isn't." -- Guardian "Ablutions is an unstinting book about drinking and drugging that will inevitably draw comparisons to Charles Bukowski and Denis Johnson, but deWitt's clipped and grimly humorous observations of the doomed are also reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson in his prime." --Boldtype "Ablutions is like an intense art-house movie, where the lead actor is in every scene but makes the whole thing sparkle with his star power." -- The Oregonian "Ablutions aches with honesty." --Hot Metal Bridge "A hypnotic cross between Lorrie Moore and Denis Johnson." -- The Seattle Weekly "Patrick deWitt's writing is deeply charismatic -- a coiled ramble of note perfect sentences, mysterious and burbling declarative tones, the saddest humor imaginable, and the strange physical proportions of a magician's top hat. I was equally taken aback by the needling brilliance that surfaces at its every turn and riveted by the brains and heart it must have taken to finesse such a clearly broken down yet perfectly clear and penetrating world. I love this novel very much." -- Dennis Cooper "The best book I've read in ages, Ablutions is like a perfect cocktail - a heady concoction of debauchery, poetry, and incredible insight. It keeps you clinging night after night to its pages, like a parched alcoholic clinging to the bottle." -- Richard Milward, author of Apples "DeWitt's dirty realism makes me want to roll in the mud with him. Brilliant." "Ablutions is an astonishingly original and blackly comic debut novel." -- Iain Sinclair, Big Issue "Patrick deWitt is the 21st century poet of Hollywood's desperate souls, the misbegotten, broken, and the lost. He writes with a fierce compassion about people treading the vague boundary between homicide and self-destruction, loveless sex and sexless love, all lined up and looking into our own culturally shared abyss. Beware, beware. But read Ablutions." "Ablutions is funny and precarious, a novel that shifts the ground under the reader's feet, a naked-lightbulb self-examination that doesn't shy from high comedy. DeWitt has a gimlet eye and a dead aim with words."-- Luc Sante, author of Low Life "Ablutions is a novel about the deteriorating health of our livers and the malaise of our dreams. Perverse in its humor, but ultimately about our potential for redemption, it's riotously funny and cripplingly sad all at the same time. Patrick deWitt takes on our diseases and depravity with prose that may yet rescue us from the gutter." |