Vaudeville! - 2nd Edition by Gaetan Soucy (Paperback)

About the Book

Gaetan Soucy sets this acclaimed novel in a parallel-universe New York, just before the great stock market crash of 1929. Xavier X. Mortanse is an apprentice demolition worker who believes he's an immigrant from Hungary. By the time Xavier finds a singing frog in a miniature coffin, tries his luck on the vaudeville stage, and upsets a grandmaster chess match, Soucy has seduced readers into a netherworld of unforgettable eccentrics that riffs on chaos, corruption, and the surprising light of the human spirit.

Book Synopsis

New York, at the end of the 1920s. Xavier X. Mortanse, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man, who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary, falls into a hole -- the beginning of myriad bizarre humiliations he suffers, only to be shown mercy by a hairdresser named Peggy Sue who will later suffer a grotesque fate.

When Xavier loses his job, he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show, where freakish and sordid acts attempt to outdo each other. Violence and ugliness blend cartoonishly with comedy and music as Gaetan Soucy dares us to look into the darkest sides of human experience. No one in this fascinating tableau is who he or she appears including Xavier himself, who is, as his mother says, too many people and no one.