In Heaven Everything is Fine
108 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:01 Jan 1991
ISBN:9780932511409
A young man's initiation into the difficulty of life amidst the hard realities of love, waste, and failure
Jeffrey DeShell's In Heaven Everything is Fine is a first novel with a difference. While engaging a traditional subject - a young man's initiation into the difficulty of life amidst the hard realities of love, waste, and failure - it does so in a peculiarly contemporary way. Reflecting a style of life into which a new generation is being inducted, the story is told through fragments of narrative and collaged excerpts from media reportage. The protagonists' state of mind is expressed through the very context of contemporary history which has created it. The whole projects the effect of humor and melancholy very much like the blues. In fact, the impact of the book is heavily informed by its allusion to contemporary rock music as it inherits the blues tradition.
Jeffrey DeShell's In Heaven Everything is Fine is a first novel with a difference. While engaging a traditional subject - a young man's initiation into the difficulty of life amidst the hard realities of love, waste, and failure - it does so in a peculiarly contemporary way. Reflecting a style of life into which a new generation is being inducted, the story is told through fragments of narrative and collaged excerpts from media reportage. The protagonists' state of mind is expressed through the very context of contemporary history which has created it. The whole projects the effect of humor and melancholy very much like the blues. In fact, the impact of the book is heavily informed by its allusion to contemporary rock music as it inherits the blues tradition.
This is the saddest story deconstucted. As a collage of ill-fated love triangles, this neo-Pop romance may be for its generation what Barthelme's Snow White was for the sixties. DeShell’s debut is provocative, compelling, and too smart to be hip--the author is his own psychosexual and philosophical brat pack.’
—Robert Steiner, author of Bathers and Dread
In Heaven Everything is Fine plays many fields. Lists of lit-crit and rock-and-roll Top Ten hits, headlines, TV news, and ads are part of the story. DeShell’s quirky, bittersweet characters wander in and out of clubs, bars, and apartments, hungering in a deadpan, I-don't-care way for a sort of integrity, for a kind of meaning. In Heaven Everything is Fine is as tender as it is smart.’
—Lynne Tillman, author of Haunted Houses and Absence Makes the Heart
Jeffrey DeShell was born in the town of government publications--Pueblo, Colorado. His work has recently appeared in Between C & D, Black Mountain II Review and Blatant Artifice. In 1983, he was awarded a Henfield Transatlantic Review Prize for fiction.
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