Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Rating:
Summary: Send one to the president
Review: An excellent and important book--don't let the title alarm you. This is not something schlocky or exploitative. If you're thinking about picking it up, you should. If I had written this, I'd be sending copies of it to every politician I could.

Rating:
Summary: One of the 10 best books of the 20th century !!!!
Review: I first read this book back in '95 when I was an employee at Tower books in Seattle. I'd read the back and the inside flap and was skeptical that I'd like it. The format of 1st person and diary form are two things I normally don't care for. I could not have been more wrong. It's 6 years later and I am still raving about this brilliant and horrifying tale, I have a signed 1st edition copy and a reading copy to loan out to everyone I can.The disarming narrative of 12 year old Lola Hart lulls you into her adolescent world of friends and budding sexuality only to turn her world and Manhattan upside down with sadistic entusiasm. This story is not for the faint of heart. The transformation of Lola after her family circumstances turn from prosperous to dire is sheer literary genius in it's insidious simplicity. Not only is Lola's character so compelling but Womack never misses an opportunity to saterize society with sharp painful jabs of scathing observation and wit. This book works on so many LEVELS!!!!
You cannot put it down and after you've read it you will never forget it. The last sentence (and don't you dare skip ahead and read it) knocked the wind out of me. I stared at it for a long time. This book is on par with such classics as Perfume, Johhny Got His Gun, Catcher in the Rye, and A Clockwork Orange. I even named my dog after Lola. Everyone should read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Random Act's Of Senseless Violence will leave you sweating!
Review: I had to read this excellent book for a SciFi English/Cultural Studies course I am taking in university. It left me with the feeling that the world Womack creates on the mean streets of poverty strickin New York is a frighting echo from our not to distent future. I was left with the feeling that the harsh realities of Womack's world are a very plausible near-future for not only those in the States, but the world in general. Womack is truly a writer in touch with the darker side of the street and his use of language is a staggering triumph of brillence! I recomend this book to anyone who has ever wondered what the world in the late 90's and early 21 century would be like...This is it!

Rating:
Summary: Best of Series?
Review: I'd heard the name 'Jack Womack' beaten around as one of those Sci-Fi writers who goes beyond the genre to tell a genuinely good story. So I decided to check him out, but Random Acts of Senseless Violence was the only Womack book [that the local store hadd]. So I read it, despite the fact that it was mid-series.

And I loved it. Sure, there's plenty of dystopia writing out there already, and it's all been said before, and blah blah blah. But it's a good story, so forget the fact that it's probably been said before. It's very engaging, and it feels real enough that it's actually pretty horrifying.

I liked it enough that I'm now working my way through the rest of the Ambient series, chronologically (not that it really seems to matter which order you read them in). They're good, but they're just basic sci-fi (not that I'm knocking that)--techy gadgets, a new dialect (this is one of the funnest dialects I've read), a dirty and crumbly setting, and lots of mean people.

But the basic sci-fi of the rest of the series (so far, anyway--I still haven't finished the whole series) isn't what I would've expected after having started out with Random Acts. Which is disappointing in a way, but oh well. They're still good reads.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting and heartbreaking
Review: In this amazing novel, Jack Womack creates an unforgettable and heartbreaking character in Lola, a twelve-year-old girl who receives a diary as a gift and in it chronicles her own descent into barbarism as her family moves down the social ladder in some future, hellish version of New York City. While the colorful invented slang is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, for me, on another level, the novel brought back memories of Lord of the Flies. As the adults around her try to cope with the chaos and depression in their lives and recede into the background of her life, Lola finds herself increasingly on her own. She and her friends band together in order to survive in a hostile environment, and bit by bit, Lola sacrifices her humanity to her need to make it through another day. In the end, no matter how cultured she is, no matter how well educated she is, she surrenders to the beast within in order to stay alive. This is a tragic novel in the truest sense.

Rating:
Summary: Hypnotic and Terrifying
Review: Kudos to Womack. Random Acts is as creepy a book as I've read in some time, Kathy Acker's Don Q. notwithstanding. I may be somewhat biased as I was living on the corner of Park & 86th when I read Random Acts...Lola's purported address. Perhaps that contributed to the realism for me, whereas other readers felt that some aspects of the book were hard to swallow. This of course begs the question: why must fiction be utterly believable? But I digress...

Womack's greatest accomplishment in this book is his use of language and it's all about paradox: hypnotic but jarring, intimate yet dislocated and above all, terribly genuine while being principally concerned with often disingenuous roles we are forced to assume in order to cope with our world.

Big ole thumbs up.

Rating:
Summary: No Kate Wilhelm here
Review: This book was just awful. Mr. Womack has nothing new to say about how bad life is or how to deal with it. And I am just plain tired of seeing girls raped as a coming of age experience. If you really want to read this kind of story, go read Kate Wilhelm or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. They did it better years ago and then they moved on.

Rating:
Summary: Impossible to put down, too easy to pick up time after time
Review: This is one of the finest novels of near-future America ever written. That may sound like a sweeping statement, but Womack's terrifying vision of the final years of a 20th century where an adolescent army exerts a brutal discipline on New York, global warming and pollution have turned summers into poisonous nightmares and the country's economy is disintegrating almost as fast as accepted social values has no sharper, keener rival in contemporary fiction.
I first read this book in 1995 after being sucked into Womack's twisted universe through Elvissey, still one of my favourite sci-fi novels. And though the science fiction genre has broadened vastly since the days of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, Random Acts still defies simple categorisation. There's no doubt it has sci-fi elements, but Like Orwell's 1984, I feel that Womack has tried not only to illustrate a nightmare portrayal of the near-future, but grasp the zeitgeist of mid-90s American society and break it down into its basest elements, shaping it and containing it in the most ideal setting in which to maximise its sense of claustrophobia, paranoia and arrogance - Manhattan Island.
The rapid urban decay of a world where presidents are assassinated like flies, police and soldiers wield their power like medieval tyrants, poorer neighbourhoods have reverted to tribal warzones and an inherent culture of hate, fear and anger permeate daily life is presented superbly through the diary of 12-year-old Lola. Womack's keen sense of Lola's pre-adolescent mind coming to terms not only with the crumbling world around her but also deeper, personal issues such as the disintegration of her family network and her own blossoming sexuality always remains evocative and concise. The first-person narrative moves flawlessly, and the decay of the world around Lola is mirrored brilliantly with her descent from conservative, middle-class comfort to an immersion in the angry and violent street life of Manhattan.
The most impressive vehicle Womack uses to describe this descent is the rapidly mutating form of Lola's narrative - in her first diary entries, the language she uses is that of a sheltered and innocent young, white Anglo-Saxon; by the story's end, it has transformed into the bizarre, poetic concoction of Latino, ghetto slang and bastardised English that constitutes gang dialect. Womack further develops his concept of future-speak in Elvissey, Ambient and his other novels with astounding creativity, and his linguistic capabilities are equally as clever as Burgess in A Clockwork Orange or anything by William Gibson.
It's a frightening microcosm that Womack depicts in Random Acts, and only the precursor to a world that grows more warped and hostile through the five other novels that succeed it chronologically. If you've never read Womack's work before, start here, and get ready for the ride of your life.

Rating:
Summary: A Disturbing Masterpiece
Review: While I have only read one other Womack novel (Ambient), reading Random Acts of Senseless Violence was an incredible experience. Not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination, this book dealt with the all to real political, moral and societal decay in the near future. The way in which Womack told his story was beautiful and heartbreaking, through the eyes of a 12 year-old girl. As her environment changed, so did her language and attitudes. Womack truly has a gift for getting inside the minds of his characters, becoming them. His no-holds-barred writing style and commentary is disturbing but he can only be praised for writing with such brilliance.

Rating:
Summary: Random Acts of Perversity
Review: Womack's book is truly inspiring! After reading this book and then realizing that this trite tale of the downward spiral of American civilization as told through the eyes of a 12 year old Manhattanite's diary entries was actually published, I am inspired to write. Hell, if this could get published so can I! Even the editors of this book could not finish this book as evidenced by a lack of punctuation, quotation marks and intelligible narrative in the latter half of the book. Maybe for my book I will take a page, or rather several pages from Jack Womack and relate the adventures of young 11-13 year old girls' sexuality by having them undress and wrestle while I describe their sweaty bodies and then thinly veil my titillation as character development in a declining world. Or perhaps I will have 3 out of 5 of the 11-13 year old girls raped as a rite of passage--two by their fathers. Random Acts of Senseless Violence is nothing short of an erotic teenage boy video game complete with bombings, cops, military men, guns, violence and of course hot little girl on little girl action.