The Wild Boys (William S. Burroughs)

Might I dare to admit that the sex in this book borders on being gratuitous and even pornographic? But I guess that's one of the main arguments that Burroughs enemies have always clung to. Somehow I used to feel that the sex in his books was all very cold and clinical, even surreal sometimes, and in this book it felt a little bit too indulgent. Anyway, that's hardly a worthwhile criticism. I thought sections of this book were startlingly well written. I feel like some of the chapters are written like pieces of music and sometimes read like sonatas, in that they have a tendency to wrap around themselves. The cut up method, which I'm sure was used in this book, engages in a somewhat more abstract sensibility, and allows words and images to be treated as musical themes. Echoes of earlier phrases (only appearing later in scrambled or simply rearranged forms) usually lend a passage a poetically definitive quality. That is, the words become more important and begin to mean more. Really I think that this book, rather than a novel, is more of a multi-movement chamber symphony.