Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1657312 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com Review
After charting his travels up High Sierran peaks and through the pipelines of Santa Cruz surf culture, Daniel Duane embarks on an adventurous new course with the novel Looking for Mo. This charming update of The Dharma Bums (minus the idealism) brings together an assortment of shaggy, recognizable characters who play out a late-20th-century California pastoral involving friendship, love, betrayal, and the redemptive qualities of the great outdoors. The action moves from San Francisco to the mountains, from "cedar-paneled sushi bars" to psilocybin-fueled Dead shows--with Yosemite continually beckoning in the background. Protagonist Ray Connelly, barely self-sufficient and scrounging around the Bay Area, is on the verge of serious romance when his old doppelganger Mo pops up, a drifter-climber who happens to have an enviable knack for storytelling. Enviable to Ray, that is. Since their last adventures, Ray has been borrowing generously from his friend's oral history and shopping around a collection of stories. When Mo discovers the theft, there's trouble. What better way to hash out their differences than getting back on El Capitan, the climber's mecca that foiled them in the past?

Once on the piton-scarred face of El Cap, Ray must come to grips with himself as much as with Mo, a task as daunting as the monolithic rock itself. "This was it--the inevitable moment between us, when Mo was willing to risk everything and when a voice inside me insisted that nothing was worth death. I absolutely ached to let go, to be as confident and careless as Mo, but I couldn't. I didn't want to tempt fate that way--I wanted the risks to be no more than the ones I'd signed up for." Though some readers might be put off by the dude-itude of the characters and their exploits, fans of outdoorsy literature (not to mention observers of California Nation) will thoroughly enjoy this scenic rappel into an American subculture. --Langdon Cook

From Publishers Weekly
Duane returns to the heights of his nonfiction Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains, in a shaggy first novel that will do much to justify the ways of crunchy young Bay Area Californians to their indoorsy contemporaries back East. Amateur rock-climber Ray Connelly is hanging out in San Francisco cafes, avoiding rejection slips for his first novel, scoping fellow slacker Fiona (an artist who works in the local supermarket) and missing his adored best friend, Mo Lehrman, who, with typical knight-of-faith gusto, has set out for Baja with a surfboard strapped to his bicycle. Then, all at once, Ray gets together with Fiona, Mo comes back to San Francisco?and Mo's father (a veteran climber with California publishing connections) blasts Ray for stealing his son's stories. The upshot: Ray follows his buddy to Yosemite National Park, where he tries to win back Mo's respect and trust by scaling the dreaded rock face known as El Capitan. Although the subplots never come within shouting distance of each other, the details carry us along like so much climbing tackle: Ray's fondness for Mo overshadows his attraction to Fiona, but the friendship between the two women is romantic enough in its own right. The virtuoso rock-climbing passages never pull their thematic weight but will be dizzying to acrophobic readers; the characters don't show much imagination but do seem unmistakably true to life. If the whole doesn't quite add up to a gripping novel, it does give us an entertaining glimpse at an intelligently Epicurean way of life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Take two parts Jack Kerouac, one part Jon Krakauer, and one part Jeff Spicoli, and you may end up with the narrator of this enjoyable first novel. Surf bum, writer, and climber Ray Connelly has appropriated his best friend Mo Lehrman's personal anecdotes for a book on the Sierra Nevada. Mo finds out and may be angry, so even meeting dream girl FionaAwhose new artistic outlet is sewingAdoesn't distract Ray from looking for Mo to explain. While searching, Ray careens through California's derivative culture, which comes in for hilarious lumps, from ubiquitous Hare Krishnas to faux-Buddhist rock climbers to a man who vents his grief by planting 1400 bonsai trees. This sweet novel of transition from postadolescence to further postadolescence finishes with a hair-raising adventure in a storm, as Ray and Mo scale El Capitan, an almost sheer rock face in Yosemite, where Ray recently chickened out when they were partway up. By then, it seems unsure whether this is a novel of carpe diem or adventure, but with so much fun going on, you don't care. A book for both the faint of heart and not and for literary collections, to be placed near Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.AHarold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

What did I miss?
A favorable review had me looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, the self absorbed narrator's fuzzy saga of a mixed-up friendship never seemed remotely real to me. Throw in plot devices to include a poorly explained antipathy from the father of the "best friend" plus an unconvincing infatuation with a new girlfriend and it all spells a novel in need of an editor or a rewrite. Luckily the late chapter climb sequence on El Cap redeems some of the early awkwardness. Still, I have to believe that Duane's next work will be more coherent and better overall.

Japhy & Ray do el cap?
More than Dharma Bums revisited--kind of Queequeg & Ishmael climb El Cap as written by Kerouac. After reading Duane's book, I went back and tried to re-read Dharma Bums--couldn't do it. Eastern mystical stuff too hard to wade through. The characters here are real--I know some of them (worse, I may even be one...). And, unlike a lot of Kerouac, this is fun.

As with both of Duane's other books, this is more than a good book, it's a true book.

enjoyable story of the big question
I enjoyed my first book of D.Duane's. It was "required" reading for our informal climbing club, although I'm not sure why. It was easy to relate to the narrator's search for fulfillment. The metaphors were entertaining and insightful and simple to digest. The narrator's struggle with relationships and where one fits in the bigger scheme of life fit well in the context of El Cap. However, I was left with a yearning of my own satisfaction or closure, perhaps a guide for my own quest for fulfillment. Regardless, I recommend this book and look forward to more from Duane.