A fat and amazing masterpiece …

… Book Review of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess | Open Letters Monthly —an Arts and Literature  Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Earthly Powers is a meta-novel, then, an unexpected masterpiece by a mediocre novelist (I mean Toomey, of course), a postmodern collection of stories within stories about the brutality of the 20th century and the homeless wanderers who sifted through it, trying to make it into art. Unlike the works of the modernists, Earthly Powers is packed with that good old-fashioned boil & bang: plot.