The Big Sandy - Paperback

R.F. McEwen's The Big Sandy is a splendid imaginative feat that calls to mind the work of three Irish masters: Sterne, Joyce, and Beckett. Like the best literary novels, The Big Sandy is both highly allusive and hugely engaging. While encased in a thoroughly-destroyed Plymouth Fury (read: Michael Fury, an invisible yet ever-present character in Joyce's The Dead) in the heart of Nebraska's Sandhills, McEwen's hapless duo survive by inventing an imaginary landscape and a peopled world that draws on Ireland and America. Linguistically, The Big Sandy occupies a space between both countries while absorbing from both. McEwen's heroes, Jodey and Flann, resemble Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon-they are trapped and hoping for deliverance. At the same time, both men are caught inside their own narratives: McEwen reminds us that all lives are stories and that most storytellers report unreliably on their own lives. The Big Sandy, a most-exciting genre defying novel/drama, is the work of a master storyteller.