Out is a novel of immense energy. Sukenick’s characters flash into and out of presence; episodes impel themselves so strongly that they are self-obliterating. This is an experiment in narrative and language; at the same time it is an extremely accurate, persistently funny portrayal of the psychic overload we all reached at the end of the sixties. Sukenick engages the full range of contemporary fantasy--revolution, conspiracy, pastoral nostalgia, Indian wisdom, demonic secret societies, and sexual extravaganza. These do not merely occur in the narrative but occupy it. Singly and in various rapid combinations, they add their manic energies to the book’s acceleration.

Out begins in New York City, in full urban congestion. Its first characters are moving across a ledge with sticks of dynamite in their mouths--members of the total conspiracy. (“You’re either a part of the plot or the counterplot. Everybody’s got to be one or the other.”) They move towards meets--occasions when they’ll bundle their individual dynamites together and blow something up. The central character begins the novel as an arranger of these meets, conspirator and novelist. The novel moves out of New York and across the country toward the Pacific. The first moves occur with narrative furniture and transitional cardboard boxes, but as the book gathers speed and distance, these fall away.

Out moves across the white space of its own pages, as well as across the country. The blank space expands until, at the edge of the ocean, the language disappears in blank space.

Ronald Sukenick’s first novel, Up, is still used as a model for innovative fiction, as is his second book of fiction, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. Sukenick lives in California. Sections from Out have appeared in Chicago Review and Partisan Review.


“Out makes new rules for the forms of fiction. Like Sukenick’s earlier writing, the book breaks away from what we’re taught are the requirements of narrative only to show us how story really works.” --Carolyn Rand Herron, Partisan Review

“Sukenick, or do I mean the character of the same name? is an urban, literary Jewish Don Quixote of our time...” --The New York Times Book Review

“And now, here comes the virtuoso of the season, Ronald Sukenick, a young man who can do just about anything with words.” --Harper’s

“Sukenick is an important writer not because he experiments, but because he writes out of our real situation. He knows the salient fact of our era--that all systems are fakes. This goes for aesthetic no less than political systems, and means that the writer is free to choose his own stance before reality, to tell his own story.” --Book Week