Need

February 2, 1997
Riffing pyrotechnically through the basic catalogue of New York City millennial malaise, British journalist Cohn's latest (following the nonfiction The Heart of the World) zeroes in on Wille D., Anna Crow, Kate Root and John Joe MaguireDfour hardbitten Manhattanites who converge in a pet store called Ferdousine's Zoo. Something really bad is in the offing, which is about all the impetus Cohn supplies. What's certain is that lives must entwine and destinies must eventually converge, a progression simplified by Wille's relationship with Anna and obsession with former carny gal Kate, who shares his fondness for knife-throwing. Though Anna fears Kate, she latches on to John Joe, a black Irishman, whose extended reveries on his youth provide the story with its most luminous writerly moments. Each character, however, gets to recount his or her tale. Anna has her Native American lineage and day job as a stripper; Willie goes on at amusing length about the glories of shoes; KateDby far the most interestingDdelivers the freakshow goods, making her mundanely philosophical existence as a caretaker of exotic birds and snakes all the more baffling. When the apocalypse finally descends, in the guise of a subterranean firefight, it's triggered by John Joe's engagement with a subway tunnel-dwelling cult called the Black Swans. Narrative briskness is often sacrificed for a verbal dazzle that betrays echoes of Joyce and Martin Amis, but notable coherence is not what will attract fans to the author's latest act of polyglot wonderment.

March 1, 1997
From British journalist Cohn (The Heart of the World (LJ 1/92) comes this apocalyptic, surrealistic novel set in contemporary New York City. The four extravagantly confused and existentially troubled main characters--Willie, who has a relationship with Anna but is obsessed with Kate, and Joe, to whom Anna becomes attached--meet at a pet store on the Upper West Side called Ferdousine's Zoo. The characters inhabit a world of hipsters, junkies, strippers, and down-and-out types, and disaster is clearly in the offing. This is an ambitious novel, and the author does his best to make something heroic of his characters' suffering and their search for meaningful human interaction. Ultimately, however, he is unsuccessful. Modernist in style, with lots of deliberate obfuscation and abrupt, dislocating shifts of time and perspective, Need makes for difficult and sometimes confusing reading. Fans of linguistic pyrotechnics may be attracted, but otherwise this is not recommended.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Technical Coll., Ct.

February 1, 1997
Born in London but an inveterate New Yorker, Cohn is jazzed by the city's maniacal, even apocalyptic energy. He illuminated some of Manhattan's darker corners in "The Heart of the World" (1992) and now charts a hallucinatory journey through the psyches of four urban eccentrics, beginning with Willie D, a trim, scheming Puerto Rican with a thing for fancy footwear. When Willie's at the wheel of this breakneck narrative, he is a real macho man, but he seems obsessive and inept through the seen-it-all, been-there-twice eyes of Kate Root, a fat, clairvoyant woman who spent her childhood dressed in feathers and strapped to a spinning wheel, playing target for her anything-for-a-buck, knife-throwing father. And Kate's not the only one with an unusual past. Anna Crow, an exotic dancer, spins some magical tales, and then there's the peculiar owner of Ferdousine's Zoo, a jungly pet store at the epicenter of this wildly careening and strangely exalted tale of improvised, end-of-the-millennium survival. ((Reviewed February 1, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)