Celebration
Subtitle: a novel
By: Harry Crews.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
Subjects: Korean War, 1950-1953 -- Veterans -- Fiction.; Retirement communities -- Fiction.; Trailer camps -- Fiction.; Older people -- Fiction.; Florida -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: This is the story of Forever and Forever, a Florida trailer park for the over-sixty-five set that offers sun, no services, and all the dehumanization that waiting for death while maintaining your tan can offer. It's home to Johnson Meechum, the retired embezzler who starts each day by shooting the swamp out back. Johnson's wife, Mabel, can no longer even look at him. Their neighbor is Ted Johanson the lumberjack, who just wants to be left alone.

Stump, whose lost arm paid for Forever and Forever, believes that while he's in charge, and as long as everyone keeps quiet, everything will be all right. There are dozens more people here, forgotten wives and ruined men, all equally despairing.

But things are not going to stay quiet. This piece of hell on earth is visited by a walking bonfire of life energy who strolls into the dire little park determined to end both the silence and the despair. Her name is Too Much and that's exactly what she is. Too Much is a beautiful young bombshell who noisily awakens appetites that most of the folks in Forever and Forever were sure had died long ago. She demands that everybody here remember not just who they are but who and what they were and can be again.

Most of all, she reminds them that they are alive. Crews has written a black comedy that celebrates life and spits in the eye of the industry of the living dead that threatens to be the future of each and every one of us.