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    Any Day Now: A Novel
    Any Day Now: A Novel
    Any Day Now: A Novel
    Ebook332 pages4 hours

    Any Day Now: A Novel

    By Terry Bisson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “An unsettling, funny, freaky reimagining of America, impeccably written, by one of our most . . . interesting transgressors of literary boundaries.” —Michael Chabon, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

    Written in a voice that is warmhearted and hauntingly original, Any Day Now is the story of Clay, a small-town boy searching for his place in the new America—and hoping desperately to forget what happened back East with the girl he loved.

    This poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from Kentucky to New York City is a road movie of a novel. Beginning as a fifties coming-of-age story and ending in an isolated hippy commune under threat of revolution, Any Day Now provides a transcendent commentary on America, and the perils of growing up, then and now.

    “He writes like a man who invented language . . . Treat yourself to this book.” —Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall

    “Bisson just wrote his personal masterpiece, a book which will drop you through the floor of your assumptions about coming of age inside the politics and counterculture of the Vietnam era and into a fresh new-old world.” —Jonathan Lethem, National Book Award winning and New York Times–bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude

    “Highly recommended for its literary quality and creativity of vision.” —Library Journal

    “[An] unsettling but always interesting alternate-history novel, which offers much subversive commentary on contemporary society [with] jazz-like prose.” —Booklist

    “The story has a thrumming momentum, a sense of slangy sass and jive, light-hearted yet soulful.” —The Washington Post

    “Thoroughly enthralling . . . a truly unique reading experience.” —San Francisco Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 1, 2012
    ISBN9781468300079
    Any Day Now: A Novel
    Author

    Terry Bisson

    Terry Bisson (1942-2024) was the American science fiction and fantasy author of the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning short story "Bears Discover Fire," as well as the widely-reprinted, all-dialogue short story "They're Made Out of Meat." His many novels include Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, Pirates of the Universe, and The Pickup Artist. He also published several volumes of short fiction, including Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories, Greetings, and TVA Baby and Other Stories.

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    Reviews for Any Day Now

    3.5/5

    13 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      There is a key phrase in this novel which sums it all up - 'dismantling uptopia'. Clay grows up in the early 60s in rural America. Race is an issue but no one goes without. Clay gets a girlfriend and looks set set go to college and get a good job when....something happens. He starts to grow his hair and wants to be a poet. He drops out and goes tp New York. He meets a poet called Ginsberg, and even bumps into the real Ginsberg. He also meets the love of his life, EmCee, who lives off her father's cheques in a rent free flat, owned by a relative. Clay and his crowd live in a utopia but want to disown it. But things fall apart and utopia is lost.The science fiction element of this novel is slight. Clay lives in an alternate America, where the timeline diverges quite drastically from our own. Later events in this time lime take some believing. Clay reads the occasional SF novel and fixes cars almost magically. Things continue to decline mostly offstage as Clay settles down to life in a commune, still funded by parental cheques. The writing, especially dialogue involving Clay, is crisp and witty throughout. But the would-be poet ends the novel by returning home when the money runs out...
    • 5/5
      So. I loved this book, but I'm not sure yet whether I can call it a "great" book or add it to my all-time favorites list; but that's not exactly damning with faint praise or a backhanded compliment. The novel is a joy to read, full of language and time and humanity and mess and poetry and music and love and cars and war and politics and more humanity on top, presented in (sometimes very) short scenes. Read this book! But there are some sections I might need to re-read, or at least think about -- let me see if I can explain at all: (NOTE: AFTER HERE LIE MINOR SPOILERS FOR TWO OF BISSON'S BOOKS, SO, BE YE WARNED.)

      So in alternate history, the two big joys for me are:

      1. being knowledgeable enough of the actual history to know where and how history diverges
      2. watching a very small change dovetail into larger changes, without overly stretching credulity

      In Bisson's absolute classic of alternate history, Fire on the Mountain, both of these obtain. One must only accept one change -- that John Brown delayed his attack on Harper's Ferry until Harriet Tubman's illness passed, and his later attack was successful -- and, while the ensuing events range from the mundane to spaceflight, there isn't a major series of events which strains credulity.

      Here, I'm not entirely sure about a few things. I absolutely loved the delicious, delicious way the micro level changes are introduced, and even the combining two of them into one of the most amazing moments in the history of alternate history on stage at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But things get a bit messy in that a half-dozen (at least) significant events pop up all over the globe, leading to a mild muddling of cause and effect. But this is absolutely a minor, minor quibble on the whole; it's an alternate history novel, so who cares if a half-dozen events all change, or just one or two? The consistency of the resulting world is what matters.

      And it is here where I'm just not sure yet, though the more I really sit and think about it the less unsure I am. Perhaps it is just hard for me, here in 2010 and having grown up under the ramping-up military of Reagan, to understand why the US government is so impotent in the face of absolutely massive (yet not exactly highly militarized?) chaos within its borders in the late 1960s; how a few deserting regiments lead to such complete fragmentation. (And such a powerful UN?) Hm. Was the state of the US really on this much of a precipice in the turmoil of Vietnam?

      Anyway. Read this book. It's lovely.
    • 1/5
      I just could not get into this novel. It had little plot development and what was there was very chaotic and increasingly bizarre. There were far too many characters for any reader to keep track of or to ever understand their motivations. Unbelievable coincidences abound. I finished it but it was a real slog. A lot of writers that I admire wrote positive blurbs for the novel, but I found it hard to sympathize with their glowing recommendations. The re-imagining of an alternative outcome to the sixties seemed far-fetched and unlikely, as well as quite hard to follow.

    Book preview

    Any Day Now - Terry Bisson

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