Up

UP is a novel about the circumstances, ideas and feelings that hold us in bondage — including our idea of what a novel is supposed to be. Its main character is the writer himself, Sukenick. But there is more than one Sukenick: There is the adolescent undergoing both academic and sexual torment in Brooklyn; there is the young man, a sometime English teacher who lives on the Lower East Side and tries to write; there is the witness who records the lives and conversations of his relatives; and there is the fantasist assuming various alter egos (not always friendly to him) that take on the mythic situations of modern life. (The most prominent of these fantasy Sukenicks is Strop Banallv, the All-American vulgarian, who is known in his world as the Einstein of the pornographic film.)