Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102130041
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Here is the book that generations of English majors have been waiting for.
In one compact illustrated volume, the authors have skewered most of Western civilization's major works of serious and popular literature. Their subjects range from the Greek classics to Stephen King novels; their weapon is the sequel.
Anyone who ever plowed reluctantly through "Moby-Dick" will appreciate the techno-thriller version, "Moby-Dick II: Raise the Pequod!" Kipling may not have written "The Man Who Would Be Queen," but it's a good idea. So is the Joyce Kilmer couplet, "I think that I shall never spot/ A poem like an apricot."
The parody of Emily Dickinson is terrific, but "The Lighter Side of Sylvia Plath" is even better: "I love my husband,/ But hate his guts, so there!/ I'd stick my head in the oven,/ But I just washed my hair!" In some cases, just the titles are enough. Consider Jane Austen's "Pride and Extreme Prejudice" or the TV listings of the mini-series "War and Peace and Remebrance" and the movie, "Sister Carrie's Sister, Carrie."
The map of the T.S. Eliot Wasteland Theme Park is inspired, but I think my own favorites are the sequels to "Gone With the Wind" as they might have been written by Tama Janowitz, Erica Jong, Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Walker, and "Two Cities II: The Tale Continues," which begins "It was the best of guillotines, it was the worst of guillotines ..."
Much of the humor is bawdy; all of it is sharply barbed and irreverent. And if any sequel deserves another sequel, this is it.
by CNB