Book Review: Naked Lunch (William S Burroughs)

Naked Lunch might be the most challenging book I've encountered.  Part of it is because of the book's namesake, which asks the reader to take a good long look at the end of the fork and see the lunch they're eating, fully exposed, for what it is.  Or, perhaps this is more accurately Burroughs himself looking at his own lunch, which had become defiled after ingesting massive quantities of opiates throughout his life.  Ultimately, that's really what this book is:  it's every random thing he jotted down while under the influence, and none of it is particularly pretty.

The other part of the challenge is that the book makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.  I couldn't tell you what the plot actually is; it's a haphazard concoction of many short pieces strung together continuously.  Most of the characters are nameless, identified only by vague designators like "The Mark," "The Vigilante," "The Exterminator," and so forth.  None of them stand out as anybody with definition or depth.  They all exist in a strange foreign place called the Interzone, which is home to both men and some weird creatures called Mugwumps.  Nearly every episode in this book involves extreme amounts of perverse sex, sadistic violence, and a rather distasteful penchant for endless discharges (or even consumption) of bodily wastes.  Sometimes all of these things are rolled together in one disturbing scene after another.  The sickening details seep through every line of the book, offering tales that are mean-spirited and vulgar.  Beyond the sheer shock value, I really couldn't tell what was going on with this book.  Especially during all its digressions, such as when the book repeatedly breaks into some kind of random courtroom scene, or turns into a movie set or something.  Seriously, what the f*!k is this bull$@&t?

The prose, however, is surprisingly lucid in its own right.  This is one of those books (perhaps one of the first even) that manages to combine words and phrases that shouldn't go together in ingenious ways to deliver abstract scenes with a remarkable level of texture.  The sentences flow well and are hardly ever dull.  Much of what's said may not make sense, but given the way it is said, it's hard to tell if Burroughs was a madman or a genius.

There was a South Park episode, where one of the kids wrote a book that was about nothing but defecation, and it became a renowned smash hit that everybody praised as a masterpiece.  I kinda wonder if that show was meant to parody the success of Naked Lunch, because it certainly feels like the book uses so much disgusting content to shock and repulse the reader, but it's hard to tell if there's really anything worth saying.  I got to admit that it's written in an interesting way, like a form of literary freestyling, which could push it into levels of artistic merit, but I feel the content is not only horrid, but also convoluted and messy.  Thus, I don't know if I should call it good or terrible literature, but its definitely distasteful.  I think I prefer David Cronenberg's film adaptation over this; at least it had a plot.

3/5 (Experience:  Extreme | Content:  Awful | Book:  Mixed)