Word: townshend
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...Townshend meets a woman at a bar, he writes. She asks him if he believes in reincarnation...
...Townshend also frames a story called "Pancho and the Baron" with a similar kind of dull shlock. This is pretty mean of ol' Pete, since he knows that all his readers really want is juicy anecdotes about...
More accurately, Townshend's search seems to be not for the beautiful but for the esoteric. In his overtly Freudian sketch "Horses," Pete presents one of the many dreamlike situations offered by the book: "Confronting the white horse I put out my hand and brushed hard down the flank as if to smooth away the mark of a girth strap. As I did so, the skin fell away, and the dry white bones of the rib cage appeared. Beneath the ribs, living within the body of the horse, moved a massive snake. Its skin shone green and blue...
...case Pete's sentiments and strangely convoluted prose forays don't convince people that he knows a lot about Life's Important Questions, Townshend peppers his stories with a bibliography of the Very Impressive Writers he knows about. He refers to Proust and Joyce. He lists Conrad, Burgess, Bashevis Singer and Balzac as writers he's keen on, as well as P.G. Wodehouse and H.E. Bates: "I read fairly heavy stuff. To mention all the authors might make me sound pretentious...
Despite his declared identification with the literati and his scorn for the "layers upon layers of cheap nightclub hypocrisy," Townshend writes more about cheap sex and drinking bouts than about great ideas or great thinkers...