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Titus North
Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat
reviewed by Gary Levinson

Titus North in his Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat presents us with a novel that touches on youth problems, navy life, exotic travel description, the experience of learning a foreign language, unbridled power, and morality.

This conspiracy narrative is complex in nature, comparable to works by Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with a dark-humor side à la Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Although similar to these modern day authors, North’s work is maybe most like Voltaire’s Candide: although the events and situations may seem at times funny to us, they are definitely not to the characters in the story.

North’s freshman novel, Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat, is the story of a young man, Joe Retard, and his search for an identity and personality. Although attempting to direct his own life, he gets caught up in the repressive intricacies of this “best of all possible worlds”.

The book is enthralling, and riveting: at times I didn’t want to put it down, and when I had to go, I would first skip forward a few pages to find out how the situation-in-question turned out.

This novel is especially well suited for high-school students or developing young adults, with Joe being a very moral hero, and its warning about the creeping suffocation of personal liberty by authorities, making it ideal for the reading list at high-schools and universities.

Although there may be a few minor inconsistencies, and at places the prose seems to me a bit contrived, in others the writing is among the best I’ve read. In this his first novel, Titus North gives us a masterpiece that takes us traveling to distant countries, keeps us riveted to our reading, and best of all – while presenting important moral issues - makes us laugh. With its youthful themes, and the hero’s disregard for authority, this book is sure to become cult reading for young adults.

Reviewed by Gary Levinson
IndieMusicReview.NET

review © 2009 Levinson

publisher:
http://enlightened-pyramid.com/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.