An American odyssey in miniature,Pike and Bloommaps the trajectories of three characters—Pike, Bloom, and Clytie—as they spiral through the serious blues of Indianapolis, attempting to construct meaning from the absurd.
Pike, a paranoiac everyman, lays confined in a hospital bed, convinced that the medical staff conspire against him. He flees into the city streets to seek the root of the plot, certain that he is followed. Meanwhile, the romantic, meandering Bloom attempts to make sense of his own conflicting impulses toward both chaos and order. Bloom’s wife Clytie, who suspects her husband of infidelity, follows him from their suburban farmhouse into the refracted, unified field of the city center.
Together, Pike, Bloom, and Clytie navigate the city’s circling and crisscrossing pathways in their attempts to find out what is real.
An American odyssey in miniature,Pike and Bloommaps the trajectories of three characters—Pike, Bloom, and Clytie—as they spiral through the serious blues of Indianapolis, attempting to construct meaning from the absurd.
Matthew Nye is the winner of the 2013-2014 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize for his novelPike and Bloom. Originally from Indiana, Nye is pursuing a PhD at the University of Georgia and is an editor forThe Bad Penny Review. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
Audacious, hilarious and stylish, in the way of Beckett, in the way of Joyce, Matthew Nye’sPike and Bloomnonetheless encapsulates 21st century anxiety, apprehension, shame and guilt. Nye’s obsessively thoughtful characters draw us into their souls, taking crazily smart note of the world in which they travel. Every sentence is a masterful surprise. —Karen Brennan, author ofThe Garden in Which I Walkandlittle dark
![Pike and Bloom [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/8/6/3/2_5217463.jpg "Pike and Bloom [Paperback]")