The Debtor Class: 'Amazing' novel 'with 'Howlingly Funny Dialogue ... Don't Let It Slip By' -- Booklist
Booklist May 15, 2015 starred review
The Debtor Class.
By Ivan G. Goldman.
Apr. 2015. 232p. Permanent
Press, $28 (9781579623890).
This amazing book is peopled by
the lowest of the low: crooked cops, embezzling assistants, jailhouse bullies,
bill collectors. It’s also one of the year’s funniest efforts, good-natured and
warmhearted, with the author displaying great verbal skills and characters
drawn from a remarkably fertile imagination. Bento is an ex-con who spent money
earned in the prison laundry on Anna Karenina. Liz, with her master’s in
library science, dances in a chicken suit. Philyaw, a dead ringer for Bogart,
owns an offbeat collection agency and employs this unlikely crew, jesting with
them and treating them well. Together they punish the wicked and reward the
good, and when everyday reality breaks through, it’s in the jolting stories of
the people they try to collect from: people who worked hard, but it didn’t do
any good. This is not one of those creepy crazy-is-sane novels; instead, it’s a
banjo act before a darkening sky, a little bit Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., with howlingly
funny dialogue. Don’t let it slip by; this one needs lots of word of mouth to
become the cult classic it deserves to be. —Don Crinklaw
The Debtor Class, set for release in April, will be available wherever 'cult classics' are sold.
