Slow Fade

The story alternates between [Wesley] Hardin in Santa Fe, Mexico, and New York - shooting a last-stand Western until the producer blows the whistle and shuts off the funds, generating a cinema verite chronicle of his own life - and A.D. and Walker writing their script on the road, so that each movement in the present is complemented by an additional piece of the past uncovered. This narrative counterpoint allows Wurlitzer to pursue a satirical bent as he charts both fantasy trips, which becomes a contrast between the spiritual excesses of two generations: Yosemite Sam and Mr. Natural, each on a suicide mission.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you splice Rudy Wurlitzer's Slow Fade to his other four novels, they become a beautiful absurd quintet, never losing their miraculous beat.
- Robert Downey

Slow Fade comes out of the space between real life and the movies and closes it up for good. A great book: beautiful, funny, and dangerous.
- Michael Herr

Slow Fade may be the most traditional of Wurlitzer's novels, and the time-honored pleasures of the novel are here in abundance: a twisting and turning story about fathers and sons, power and poverty, violence and fate. Some may read it as a "roman a clef" about certain notorious Hollywood players, but that seems rather secondary to me. Wurlitzer has fashioned a rare and wonderful thing - a deeply spiritual novel, without one whiff of incense or candle wax.
- Scott Spencer


Genre: Literary Fiction