Andrew Braithwaite

Few characters in literature can hold a candle to the Devil. For all the bad press the guy gets, good writers can imbue the classic let's-make-a-deal man with a sadistic playfulness that makes the Spawn of All Evil nearly likeable. Romanian-born writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu's Beelzebub is even more tempting: a worn-out, Scotch-drinking soul sucker who's sick of the Underworld's petty bureaucracy, he cuts a pact with the title character in Codrescu's new comic novel "Wakefield," a chance to stay the lifeless demotivational speaker's own execution. Ostensibly suggesting Nathanial Hawthorne's "Wakefield," the eccentric character who, on a whim, leaves his life for twenty years to see if he would be missed, the book is at its best documenting perverse, obsessive modernity (see the "vampires" stalking through airport terminals, hunting feverishly for that two-slotted outlet that will supply a trickling stream to juice-up their precious laptops). Codrescu is capricious, absurd, and very funny on the page; hope that he's as dark and as sharp in the flesh.

Andrei Codrescu reads May 11 at 5:30pm at the Price Auditorium at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, (312)899-1229.

(2004-05-05)

Also by Andrew Braithwaite

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He's classic Chicago baseball: Jerry Pritikin attended his first Cubs game in 1945
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At the Chicago Park District's Egg-Stravaganza, everyone is here for one thing: sugar.
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You're tired
Clay Vogel is giving advice. "You only get one word, man," he says in his West Virginian drawl...
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My bonnie beer
It's only been a couple of weeks now since Smithwick's, first brewed in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1710, has been available in the Land of the Free
(2004-03-18)

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