Overview
Taylor Powell, the hero of Everyone and No One, is, by virtue of his beautiful and irresistible face, the greatest lover in Hollywood history. But self-absorbed as he is, he is sick of being The Face, sick of dispensing his own particular brand of sexual healing. There are so many women to make happy, but he's only one guy, after all, and the pressures are enormous. It would be a relief to be someone else, anyone else. But when he is granted a new countenance that can save the world, he gets far more than he bargained for. After miraculously surviving a plane crash in which he is presumed dead, Taylor engages a strange, enigmatic plastic surgeon to make him unrecognizable. Freed of his fabulous looks, he becomes absolutely ordinary: everyone and no one. However, Taylor soon finds out that while he has been rescued from one kind of fame, his new face is anything but common. His features have been imbued with mysterious powers that have thrust him into the eternal battle between Good and Evil. In fact, when mankind is threatened with destruction, the only hope for its survival is the unremarkable face of Taylor Powell.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Esquire music columnist Jacobson's boisterous second novel (after Gojiro) takes a baffling but imaginative trip from the soul to outer space and back. Narrator Taylor ("the Face") Powell, is a movie star fed up with his great looks and irresistible sex appeal. He wants to be ordinaryeveryone and no oneand he gets his chance when he's presumed dead in a plane crash. But he has survivedand, now that the Hollywood orgies have ended, the allegorical weirdness begins. Rebuilt in the South American jungle by reclusive, Frankensteinian plastic surgeon Vincent Parry, the newly resistible Powell (now drifting along the Texas coast under the pseudonym Dean Taylor) develops a strange power that eventually pits him against the forces of Evilwho happen, in this very peculiar case, to take the form of a gang called Los Muchachos, led by an immortal Darth Vader type named Arana. In the meantime, Dean finds domestic bliss with a devout Christian named Mary. An abrupt 15 years after his plane crash, Dean is improving everyone and everything he touchesexcept their son, Dyson, who has begun to betray his handsome parentage and holds the key to staving off a comet that threatens life on Earth. All of this is told with such good humorspiced with such cartoonish sex, violence and religionthat one suspects a spoof, and yet it's never clear just what Jacobson means to ridicule. Although the novel shows no complexity, no care for plot or plausibility, no characters to speak of and no discernible message behind its allegorical face, it is, at the same time, undeniably curious: imagine a chastened William Burroughs in the service of Jehovah's Witnesses. (Aug.)Library Journal
Author of the popular Gojiro (LJ 2/15/91), Jacobson is back with a quirky gem: Kurt Vonnegut meets Tom Robbins. Hop aboard for a fast read as gorgeous Taylor Powell, Hollywood's "The Face," acquires an unremarkable new face, identity, and family and a chance to save Earth from a comet. While Taylor/Dean is battling evil, we experience along with him the conflicts inherent in father-son relationships, masculinity, the complicated burdens of beauty, and our relationship to each other and to God. Jacobson's absurdist/surreal style lets him tackle these topics without being wordy or overly philosophical. The powers of Taylor's/ Dean's new face are wonderfully explored in a quixotic novel that is refreshingly hopeful amidst postmodern disasters. For most popular collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/97.]Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland HeightsKirkus Reviews
Journalist and novelist Jacobson (Gorijo, 1991) again ventures into Tom Robbins's territory for a seriocomic fiction that purports to be a profound commentary on America's obsession with appearance, tricked up with all sorts of anthro-religious jive.The narrator is one Taylor Powell, a Tom Cruiselike superstar known simply as "The Face." Along with best friend and Oscar co- winner Jimmy Dime ("a character actor with attitude"), Taylor enjoys an endless supply of the opposite sex. But the pressures of satisfying most of the country's female population are starting to weigh heavily. So when his private jet crashes, and he alone survives, he seizes the opportunity to remake himself. In Mexico, he seeks out the mysterious Dr. Parry, a former Hollywood plastic surgeon now engaged in a higher cause, who turns Taylor Powell into Dean Taylor, a nobody with a face that nevertheless has its unique features—and a kind of mystical resonance. (He is, it seems, now a kind of proletarian Everyman.) In Mexico, Dean also meets for the first time the mythic ARANA, a strange band of violent crazies who are evil personified, and with whom he becomes locked in permanent struggle: Even in remote Florida, where Dean eventually becomes a carpenter, marries, and settles down, ARANA rears its ugly head. But the real problem emerges when Dean and his wife have a son, who, not surprisingly, resembles "The Face" and acts out against his mysterious father without a past. The plot hurtles through time with the speed of the comet that's threatening the Earth—a looming disaster in which Dean recognizes the hand of ARANA. Dean plays a crucial role in dispersing the comet, thwarting ARANA once again, and then, his mission apparently accomplished, disappearing again, taking on yet another identity.
Jacobson's one-note humor wears thin very quickly, and his ad- hoc metaphysics simply annoy.