Excursion to Jennings Creek

"Slaughter's book is a novel of linguistic and conceptual richness. It is at once sensuous, paradoxical, harsh and beautiful, a beautiful surrender to unpardonable brutality, and an artistic rendering of it. Slaughter's development of ideas from the raw material of a rich and varied life, his epigrammatic delivery of strange wisdom, and his uncompromising fatalism, make this a challenging and yet rewarding read. The chief character is divided into three selves: Pee-Pee, Wee, and Ronny. These three persons in one, although representing different stages of the protagonist's life, are nevertheless simultaneously existing. Pee-Pee is so-named because of the attachment that others especially have to his particular physiological organ, and somewhat because of the connection of self to its very extension in the world, the beginning of personhood. Wee is not only the older Pee-Pee, but also, as the name seems to suggest, a collective identity comprising not only the character but also all of the book's characters, as well as the readers of the book, and everyone else in the world, whatever that may mean. But, as the name suggests, Wee also leaks. He is unable to prevent anything from penetrating, and invariably lets everything out. Ronny is the adult Pee-Pee and Wee, but also a character, who incorporates everything he has witnessed and that has been done by every other character in the book. He contains Pee-Pee, Wee, and the thinking and actions of others, only in somewhat an obdurate way, such that he becomes like a graveyard filled with the stones commemorating their lives. Yet he is charged with continuing as the witness who cannot forget." -- Michael Rectenwald, author of The Thief and Other Stories, The Eros of the Baby Boom Eras, and Breach