Glyph: A Novel

This book has a great premise and a hilarious start. Every page has funny scenes and brilliant snatches of prose. I laughed out loud many times and kept reading snippets aloud to my wife. If you read on Kindle, I highly recommend downloading the Sample and reading the early pages.It stays good throughout. Everett constructs beautiful sentences, and the plot and characters are interesting. However, it also bogs down into obtuse commentary on philosophy and literature, and the joke gets old. Probably more accurately, I don't get the joke anymore. The whole book is a takedown of deconstructionist literary criticism, and I suspect you might need to have spent time in a graduate English department to get it all. It's still funny, but it doesn't live up to that amazing beginning.

can someone borrow me this please

Good book. Originally bought this for a class. I haven't read it since but I like Percival Everett's other works as well.

Everett is fast becoming one of my favorite authors, though I get the feeling that between this one and his "Erasure" I've read all of his generally accessible stuff.The story is told by a baby that is born a genius and is almost immediately set upon by forces trying to capture him. With incredible wit and tons of intellectual property, so to speak. The baby has a wicked sense of humor.A bit heady, and not for the faint of intellect, but a great pay-off.

Glyph was a disappointing book. For one thing, it was not as represented. The "satirical" premise, narration by an infant prodigy, might have been sustainable in a short story, but extended to book length, it grew tiresome. It became an excuse for an ostentatious display of erudition. We former schild prodigies found it a sort of intellectual slur.

Awesome! Brilliant as banana

A baby genius: These three words describe the main character and all 208 pages of Percival Everett's novel, published by St. Paul's Graywolf Press. This may be the first book of all time that describes life from a baby's point of view, and Everett deserves kudos for that.A "glyph," according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a symbol--such as a stylized figure or arrow on a public sign--that imparts information nonverbally. A non-speaking baby is certainly a glyph, but what exactly it symbolizes is for the reader to determine.The main character is a complex and extremely intelligent baby named Ralph. He never cries like a normal baby, and his parents wonder if he has a learning disability, but they soon discover the reality is the opposite. His mom--whom he refers to as `Mo`--becomes his main supplier of books.Ralph's innocent crib-bound life does not last long before his talents are discovered by outsiders. Before he can walk or has ever been potty trained, he understands complex equations, writes stories and poems, and even has a photographic memory. These groundbreaking talents lead Ralph into trouble.After being kidnapped by his psychiatrist, Ralph is re-kidnapped several more times and ends up spying for a top-secret government agency, being rescued from a prison, and almost perishing at the hands of a crazy priest.After being kidnapped by his psychiatrist, Ralph is re-kidnapped several more times and ends up spying for a top-secret government agency, being rescued from a prison, and almost perishing at the hands of a crazy priest. "The fight was a messy and unsightly affair that spilled out from the chapel into the courtyard. Bloodied noses and lips curled in anger shown on every face...Father Chacon was cranked with rage, though emotion did not make him a better fighter."The story of Ralph is genius, but there are some features of the book that detract. For some reason--maybe irony?--there are an obscene number of footnotes. There's one on the bottom of almost every page. Everyone enjoys a good footnote, but hundreds of footnotes overcrowd a book this small.There is definitely some fun psychological banter in the book, but I think Everett could have backed off on that too. He is a teacher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and it is obvious he has extensive education in psychology--leaving the reader to wonder if he hopes to see his novel land on course reading lists.That said, Glyph is irresistible. It's hard to put down.

There is nothing better than great satire, especially a great satire of the literary criticism of the 1960s and 1970s - the kind of satire that has you laughing out loud at conversations between Bruneau and Thales (Bruneau: Would you like some water? Thales: Very funny.), God and Barthes, Wittgenstein and Russell, and many others.Glyph, according to its cover, is a novel, but the book is much more than that. There are tidbits of anatomically themed poetry, literary theory, and seemingly random dialogues wrapped around the central text, which are the memoirs of Ralph, age four, reminiscing about his infancy. Ralph is no ordinary child; he is gifted, although no one realizes it, since he will not talk. Then Ralph one day writes a note to his mother. He has a gift for language, which he displays through reading and writing, not speaking. Incidentally, the first book he read was not written by A. A. Milne - it was by Wittgenstein.Ralph has an interesting childhood - his father is a "postructuralist pretender" and his mother is an artist. With the best intentions, they take Ralph to see a psychologist, the evil Dr. Steimmel, and there his adventures begin. He is kidnapped, then kidnapped from the kidnappers. Along the way, Ralph tells the reader what he really thinks of "that Derrida guy" and a whole slew of other has-beens in academic circles, always with Barthes appearing in snippets of conversation, to say, among other things, "I am French, you know."One might assume that the plot plays second fiddle to Ralph's commentaries. On the contrary, the plot is engrossing. I laughed at the satire and cried for Ralph. It was quite an emotional roller coaster, and I reveled in every minute of it. Glyph takes literature to new horizons. I highly recommend it, even if the reader has no experience with literary criticism. Sifting through the jargon for the plot is worth the trouble.

Definitely not one of his best - self indulgence - not sure where he got the idea from but he shouldn't have bothered