Nine Kinds of Naked

August 4, 2008
Fans of Vigorito’s originally self-published 2007 cult hit Just a Couple of Days
will have a ball with this hyperactive, zany novel. Twenty-year-old drifter Diablo spies on Bridget Snapdragon, the pagan wife of a Normal, Ill., actuary, skinny dipping in her backyard creek. He is soon arrested, and while in jail, flips a playing card onto the back of a bee, setting in motion an atmospheric disturbance that begets the storm of the century. Meanwhile, a select group of misfits are unknowingly thrown into the storm’s path. There’s J.J. Speed, a priest turned special agent after becoming “insane from celibacy”; Elizabeth Wildhack, Bridget’s stripper daughter; Billy Pronto, a man who speaks in terms of the here and now only; and Clovis, a ninth-century serf, who, with the aid of gnomes, time-travels to Normal. Vigorito has no trouble stringing together words and writes goofball fiction as well as anyone, but the book’s time shifts, innumerable eccentricities, chaotic narrative and 400 pages are enough to wear a reader out.

September 1, 2008
Chaos theory says that a tiny, almost imperceptible event can have large, even catastrophic coincidences: a butterfly flapping its wings in North America leadsto a hurricane on another continent, for example. In this fictional take on chaos theory, several offbeat characters arelinked by a single event that expands through time, sweeping them up in it and changing their lives. A traveler works a nifty trick with a playing card, and a tornado strikes a small Illinois town; a woman is born during the tornado and later meets the man who set it in motion; 1,200 years earlier, a man who is supposed to be stoned to death discovers he has an uncanny knack for surviving; and, back in the present day, another man speaks only in the present tense. Comparisons of this novel to the works of Tom Robbins are both obvious and appropriate: the story meanders around in an entertaining manner, never getting too serious about itself; the characters are splendidly loopy, close to caricature but never quite reaching it, and the situations in which they find themselves are comic, dramatic, and everything in between.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)