'A Very Minor Prophet' by James Bernard Frost
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Synopsis: A Very Minor Prophet is the story of how Barth Flynn, a barista swimming upstream against purposelessness in Portland, Oregon, becomes the faithful scribe of Joseph Patrick Booker. Booker is a dwarf preacher who serves Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, and, while his congregation throws PBR cans at him, rants about George W. Bush during the height of the 2004 presidential election. Barth’s Portland is a world of bikes, zines, and cheap beer, but it’s also a confined world, full of the desperate search to find meaning. In this lonely setting, Barth passes time learning trivial details, like the dozens of Gaelic words for rain. During Barth’s quest for human connection, he meets the passionate Booker, who sees light in the gray world and strives to help people think and believe in something and to find connections with each other.
Barth’s fascination with Booker becomes a friendship that comes to define his life, as he discovers himself, his city, and his budding feelings for an enigmatic bike messenger who helps distribute Booker’s gospel in the form of zines.
A Very Minor Prophet is a comic novel, a gospel, an ode to great coffee, a story of great friendship, great love, and of a man waking up in Portland, Oregon, to realize his life and his story is just beginning.
About the Author: James Bernard Frost is the author of the novel World Leader Pretend, and the award-winning travel guide The Artichoke Trail. His fiction and nonfiction has been published in many places, including the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Wired. He lives in Oregon with the author Kerry Cohen, their four children, the rain, the freaks, and the trees. His bike is currently in disrepair.
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I've been hearing a lot of hype about this one. People keep telling me I have to read it. So I'm pretty excited to get to it.
Also James will be here discussing it with us. So it shoudl be a good time.
Get to reading!
The thing I love about this brilliant minor prophetry is the multi-media zine angle. Graphic Novel-zine fusion meshed with marvelous language and imagination; not to mention the acute sense of setting. Frost gives us Portland on every drug. Portland on a multitude of culturistic conundrums. Frost gives us religious atheism and blasphemous adoration of spirituality. And coffee. Frost gives us coffee and imagery to go with that frenzy.
The book really started out slow for me. I felt about it sort of how I feel about some hipsters. It was trying too hard to be different without actually being itself. The zine theme was awesome when it worked, but overkill other times. I enjoyed it when it helped us to get to know certain characters. For example, there is the Octagon Table Talk between Flynn and Mercyx. But by the end, I felt like the zine sections were just restating things we already knew.
Once the relationship between Flynn and Mercyx, as well as the relationship between Flynn and Booker, started developing, the book went a lot quicker for me. The religious zine stuff started becoming irritating towards the end. Yes, I get it, Jesus was a hipster. Can we get back to the actual story, please?
I did not like the decision by Flynn to sleep with Emerald, nor the decision by Booker or Mercyx to sleep with each other. It seemed necessary to the way that the story played out, but totally out of character. The only person it seemed remotely in character for was Booker. Mercyx is a virgin, yet inexplicably sleeps with Booker because Flynn breaks her heart and she's drunk? I didn't buy it. Surely, she has been drunk before. The same for Flynn taking Emerald home. I got him paying her because of his friendship with Booker. But I had to read that section twice to make sure there wasn't something more to it that I had missed.
And for the love of God, can someone please tell me why hipsters want to drink PBR? It is fucking awful. It doesn't make you cool to drink shitty beer, it makes you look like someone who will drink piss if someone says it is cool.
I actually liked the book, I'm not trying to make it seem like I didn't. Those were my problems with it, but I enjoyed the story quite a bit and I thought there were some fun characters and storylines. I enjoyed the ridiculousness of it all.
I think PBR is one of the only okay cheap beers in my opinion.. Yeah it taste like piss but our grandparents drank it and it doesn't taste better than say "Bush."
I really dig Booker's ideals. An alternative church that teaches (atheism and the real goals that the people in the bible had in mind?)
What was interesting to me, for better or worse was the tone of the narrative and the characters. It almost felt like a young adult novel. Which I don't think it could be with the drugs, sex, and booze of course.
I agree with Jack, the book was slow at first but when it picked up, it had a momentum to it that kept me turning the pages.
It took me a while to read the first half, but the 2nd half only took a couple days. I really got into it at the end there.
Have any of you ever read a zine?
There is this Orthodox Christian zine that I really like. When I first flipped through the book, I thought that this book looks a lot like a zine. Then once I started reading, it was obvious why. Haha. I loved the graphic aspects. They really brought a whole new level to the story.
For the most part I loved how everything was done. I thought it was pulled off nicely. But I do have one thing that annoyed that shit out of me. I understand why there were typos in the zine segments, but I feel they were really over done and showed the story down too much.
Yeah, the typo thing drove me absolutely nuts. Even zines don't have that many and it made it hard to read at times and like you said, they really slowed things down.
I've read a few zines. I've got a friend really in to the zine culture. I liked how it looked, but I thought it was overdone at times.