Snakebite Sonnet

by Max Phillips

Book Overview

Snakebite Sonnet begins with the unbridled attraction 10-year-old Nicky Wertheim feels toward 19-year-old Julia Turrell. So begins a long on-again-off-again relationship based mostly on lust.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349108064
• ISBN13: 9780349108063
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Time Warner Books UK
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Worth Looking For

It boggles the mind (well, my mind) that this book is out of print while so much lousy writing and so many trite stories clutter the shelves. This man can write. And the story is alive and real and touching and funny and sexy and moving. Won't add another plot summary here -- just had to say this is one of the best things I happened to pick up all year, and I did so only because of the quote ads on the back of his recent book, The Artist's Wife. Snakebite Sonnet won't disappoint. Trot over to your local library and find a copy.

An evocative first novel about love and lust, mostly lust

Nicky Wertheim is 10 years old in Silver Crest, N.J., when he first sees a blond 19-year-old goddess named Julia and is smitten with a crush that endures beyond the summer. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asks her. "Several. Do you want to be my boyfriend? "Yes." "Well, maybe later," she says. After Julia leaves town, Nicky is unable to shake the key event of that fateful summer - and of his life: While hiking, Julia is bitten by a snake; Nicky rushes to make the proper knife incision and suck out the poison. The snake turns out to be harmless, but Nicky's swallowed "mouthful of girl blood" promises to haunt him forever: "I had a little of Julia's blood in me now, and with luck that bit of Julia would stay with me forever."As Nick grows to adulthood and beyond, he holds out hope that Julia will eventually be his. But *maybe later* moves further and further away: "I'd chosen as my heart's desire the queen of the inaccessible," he says. Unaware of her continuing hold on Nick's heart, Julia flits in and out of the rest of Max Phillips's accomplished debut novel, which strings us along - through three decades! - in the hopes that she and Nick (the book's narrator) will finally consummate their sporadically torrid relationship. And even though "Snakebite Sonnet" begins to fade about halfway through, we never stop caring about these characters, or about Nick's struggle to reconcile each new romantic liaison with the unfulfilled promise of Julia's blood."Snakebite Sonnet" is marvelous in tracing the young Nick's immature thoughts and feelings. Phillips perfectly captures the appealingly peculiar Wertheim family, headed by eccentric pre-hippie parents who insist Nicky and his twin sister Del call them by their first names (instead of their "societal roles"). "I called our folks Mom and Dad, against their wishes, because I loved them and wanted them to act like parents," he tells us. "Del called them Saul and Suzanne because she hated them and had given up." Describing his parents' going about the house ! nearly nude, and his experimental necking with his sister, Nicky notes: "I didn't know what the routine was in other families, but I figured it wasn't like this." There's also a ton of (non-familial) sex in "Snakebite Sonnet," to the extent that it seems a bit out of proportion to the rest of Nick's life. On the other hand, Phillips writes a great sex scene, so we don't mind that this story about thwarted passion is so erotically charged. The novel is frequently very funny, as when Nick and a girlfriend tearfully break up: "After that, we went through a phase where we dated all the time, and then a phase where we went to bed occasionally and tried to see ourselves as friends, and finally a phase where she married a forty-two-year-old public relations consultant."After a while - about the point when Nick turns 23 and moves to Manhattan's East Village, working/killing time as a bike messenger - the humor, and everything else, turns a bit desperate. As a full

read the first page

Knowing nothing about this book,I picked it up and read the first page. It is love novel. It's hard not to laugh. This is a novel that should recieve serious attention. Well done Mr Phillips, keep writing and I'll keep reading.

Poetic and sexy and fun

Phillips is a poet? I believe it. His prose is so sensual and original and sharp and clear it's almost tangible; his descriptions of women's bodies in particular are brilliantly tactile, detailed to the max (ha ha), which seemed absolutely right for his obsessive narrator to do. Each character is 3-D and totally alive; the dialogue is crackling, witty, sophisticated, urban. Loved the parents, Del, the Dutch girlfriend, the black girlfriend. Wow. I couldn't put this book down, stayed up way too late finishing it. Maybe that's why the ending felt a tad anticlimactic and too long in coming... I was disappointed, because this guy can really write.

Snakebite Sonnet: A Delicious Read

From his first glimpse of Julia Turrell, the brilliant, bratty, baggage-laden redhead nearly a decade his senior, little Nicky "The Nose" Wertheim believes he knows the meaning of the word 'destiny.' Nick immediately appoints Julia as his muse for life. She is brilliant and playful; a Goddess of lush curls, pale skin and a small, rounded belly. She is experienced, sexy, sophisticated and needy. She is hard to hold onto. She is uncontrollable. Nick's voice takes off with your mind in tow, leading those brave enough to follow on an odyssey of love and lust unsatiated, an odyssey through the sensitive youth of a lonely artist; sweet, sensory, and lost. Raised in a two room shack by ex-hippie parents, Nick grows up in a rich neighborhood, where people don't understand poverty, Judaism, or the sweet plague that leads him back and back again to Julia. Nick is left to find his own way through an idealistic childhood, to a Gen-Xish bohemian adolesence, to that first whipcrack of rebellion that leads him finally, slowly, into adulthood. Snakebite Sonnet is a delight in every sense; a delight _for_ every sense, from the first sight of the radiant Julia to the tang of the curry with which Nick and his twin sister have supplemented all of their recipes since teaching themselves to cook. You will not understand love when you're done feasting with Nick on the wonder and terror of growing up in a thrill of passionate dreams set against a humming monochrome of reality. You will not understand fate, but maybe you will accept it. What is certain, though, is that you will feel the warm gulleys and cool edges of adolescence once again surfacing within you. That you will see yourself, somewhere, through Nick Wertheim's restless eyes.