Ambitious...dazzling...Melo is a great spinner of yarns through polyphonic hearsay
Publishers Weekly Often one finds surprises in a novel, but it is rare to find a novel that is a surprise. Richard Melo's Happy Talk is just that. It is like a collision of William Gaddis, MASH and The Beguiled. It is a Haiti I could never have imagined and will ... Read morenot soon forget. These nurses are crazy and I wish I knew them.
Percival Everett Happy Talk is a ribald and fantastic act of literary derring-do. Richard Melo has written a delightful throwback, an absurdist romp in the tradition of Terry Southern, that is sure to challenge and reward its readers.
Jonathan Evison To read Happy Talk is to crash a party as vivid and surreal as Fellini's 81/2. It's the business of show business, the American dream, told by a chorus of Americans locked just outside of that dream, outside of the United States, relegated to expatriate status on the shores of Haiti. Melo paints a version of Haiti that's an interior landscape perhaps even more than an external place. This Haiti is a plan, a memory, a morphine-drip fueled dream out to bond its inhabitants forever.
Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl "Melo has the rhythm and grab-bag ambition of Tom Robbins."
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