In David Polonoff’s rollicking novel WannaBeat, a twentysomething named Philip Polarov tries to become a writer in 1970s San Francisco. Philip is middle-class and downwardly mobile; he went to an elite, unnamed college and the novel strongly implies he could find more gainful employment than dishwashing or sandwich-making. But for Philip, money is secondary to art—he wants to write his Great Book, which ranges, at points, from an incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness novel to a psychedelic Western of Pynchonian vintage.
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