Various people were kind enough to road test The Perfect Fool for me. Here’s what they said.
“The kind of satisfaction the book gave did cause me to reminisce: A Confederacy of Dunces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers, The Mysterious Stranger. In particular, a book I hadn’t thought about in many years came to mind, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Farina. It is a tale whose issues thread back to Don Quixote, but freshly told. The faith (often portrayed as addled) that my generation had in coincidence, synchronicity, extreme decadence, and a vision nourished by a mystical buffet is vindicated.”
ABNER BURNETT

“When you pick up books by stand up comedians, you usually expect roughly the same sort of thing – a first person romp which tries to balance the stand up instinct for gag after gag with the author’s ambition to produce a proper literary work. It’s a delicate balancing act and one that’s pretty hard to pull off successfully. Few succeed. In the case of Perfect Fool, I started reading the book expecting this sort of thing. Halfway through the first chapter I realised I was going to have to go back and start again, shedding my preconceptions along the way. It’s a complex and subtle novel written with a love of language and a baffling blend of plot lines. The characters are warm and rich, whether appearing as cameos or protagonists, and the humour is always present but never gets in the way of the story. It’s a proper novel and an excellent read.”

STEVEN ARMSTRONG

“It’s as though the bastard off-spring of the X-Files collided with a distant cousin of Nick Hornby in a road movie directed by Wim Wenders to a soundtrack by Roky Erickson in a plot financed by Freemasons. Smashing. Great. Ineluctable.”

JOHN DOWIE DOGMAN, THE JOSEPH STORY, WHY I GAVE UP BEING A STAND-UP COMEDIAN

“I slid down a tall metal frame on this book. It’s a real rollercoaster of a novel. Except smaller and made out of paper.”

THE ACTOR KEVIN ELDON BIG TRAIN, JAM

“Stewart Lee comes on with … a lending eye for detail and the verbal swagger of a fish tailing jack rabbit.”

HOWE GELB GIANT SAND

“.. gives life and intelligence to people who are usually just shapeless forms in the background of more deserving types – hopeless rock ‘n’roll dreamers and street people. The squares wouldn’t get it but the hipsters will. Lets hope they don’t all steal the book.”

DAVE GRANEY THE DAVE GRANEY SHOW, THE CORAL SNAKES, THE MOODISTS, THE SPUTNIKS, IT IS WRITTEN

“Hopi Indian beliefs, Freemasonry, fundamentalist Christian comic books, and the seedy side of life in Balham. And no lame jokes where the narrator sets up a gag and the punchline in the same sentence. Yes it’s true – Stewart Lee is not the new Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.”

DAVE GREEN NEED TO KNOW http://www.access.org.uk/green.html

“Stewart Lee’s first novel is a startling work full of vigor and verve, interweaving the philosophical insights of a whizzened professor as he looks aghast at modern society with the cinemascope sized imagination of the most enthusiastic and daring film maker.”
“The Perfect Fool is the perfect start to the formal writing career of media renaissance man Stewart Lee, last seeing wowing ’em with one liners on the BBC, and charts a new course for both him and his well-sketched characters as they whirl away in their imperfect worlds in a true confederacy of dunces.”
“Quite possibly as ground breaking as Fever Pitch the initial novel from Stewart Lee, entitled The Perfect Fool, is a perfectly fine introduction to the insane world of south London losers, murderous American desert rats, idiot urban astronauts and polite pot heads Mr. Lee’s pen conjures authentically and believably out of thin air.”

“Destined to go down as one of the most daring debuts of all time Stewart Lee’s novel The Perfect Fool will no doubt one day be a daring and darling motion picture but by all means read it now while the ink is still wet and the neighbors haven’t given the plot away.”

SID GRIFFIN  LONG RYDERS COAL PORTERS WESTERN ELECTRIC

“Lee’s characters bridge some kind of metaphysical Grand Canyon between London and Arizona. His writing is precise, weird, dark and wondrous. Comic moments appear at the most un-comical of moments. This book is mighty fine.”

RICH HALL  AKA OTIS LEE CRENSHAW

“Like High Fidelity … on acid!’

Richard Herring COMEDIAN & PLAYWRIGHT

“At last! Proof emphatic that our lives are bound not by fate but by bestial porn, space cadets, complete chance and the late Robert Calvert of Hawkwind fame…”

DAVID KEREKES  HEADPRESS MAGAZINE,

“KILLING FOR CULTURE: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF DEATH FILM”
“SEX, MURDER, ART: FILMS OF JORG BUTGEREIT”
“CRITICAL VISION: RANDOM ESSAYS & TRACTS CONCERNING SEX, RELIGION, DEATH.”

“An absurd allegorical tale incorporating love, lust, madness, obsession and brilliantly observed melancholy in equal doses, reveals Lee to have not only enough creative wit to maintain the pace across an entire novel, but a distinctively original writing style – and one incorporating enough rock’n’roll nouse to give Mr Hornby pause for thought…”

PHIL MCMULLEN PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE MAGAZINE

“The Perfect Fool is the sort of book you take to the lavatory and don’t come out until it’s finished, and then with a triumphant flush, you re-enter the world invigorated.”

SIMON MUNNERY THE LEAGUE AGAINST TEDIUM “ATTENTION SCUM”

“Lee has successfully pulled off an impressively erudite debut, charting the high-concept hi-jinks of a raggle-taggle of metaphysical misfits with tenderness and charm. Their Odyssey from Balham to the badlands is joyously funny and also strangely affecting.”

GWEDOLINE RILEY (Manchester) CITY LIFE

“Quite an achievement in its complex melding of the mundane with the fantastic. On one level we find a story concerning the various (mis)adventures of a disparate dramatis personae of misfits. We meet a pair of washed-up London musicians, a suspected serial killer, a native American indian, an English mental patient who believes he was once an astronaut, a forgotten psychedelic rock star, a bible toting wild west sheriff, a hippie/tramp who accidentally torched a Ladbroke Grove crashpad, and an unpleasant quartet of murderous priests and freemasons. On another level we are presented with a parable based around the search for our individual Holy Grail (symbolic or real, either applies here), in which seemingly unrelated but parallel threads are skilfully drawn together at a junkyard Camelot in the Arizona desert. Lee seems to understand how co-incidence can be pre-destined just as pre-destiny can be purely co-incidental, how the inconsequential can be squeezed up against moments of staggering significance, and, greatest of all, how the futility of life (yes, I really said that), is marked out by its very purpose.

Stewart Lee has created an uncomfortable, yet frighteningly familiar world, populated by characters we must all recognise. He has a sharp sense of the absurdity and obsession with which its people occupy themselves. Make no mistake, though, despite the plentiful wry observations, this is one comedian’s novel which is by no means a comedy. Whether or not it will modify the public’s perception of the author is an altogether different matter. Celebrity, it seems, must be perpetually clad in the mantle in which it first appeared. Maybe, just maybe, Comedian Stewart Lee will become known as Novelist Stewart Lee, he certainly deserves to, but I fear that his will be the recurring epitaph of the stranger that reads, ‘Go on then, tell us a joke.’. And though this is a tale in which dreams are realised and burdens are shed, there is an amused world weariness about it that makes me suspect Comedian/Novelist Stewart Lee would have it no other way.”

NICK SALOMAN  BEVIS FROND

“Best known for the educated juvenilia of Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, Stewart Lee eschews the standard matey prose of a comic turned author to pen a novel that’s short on laughs but high in imagination and invention. Lee’s personal love for obscure psychedelic rock and religious obsessives comes to the fore, as he follows separate groups of damaged nobodies unwittingly embroiled in a quest for the Holy Grail. There are touches of Armistead Maupin in the use of synchronicity, and the writing, while dense at times, is always bold and poetic. A superior debut.”

IAN WATSON NME MELODY MAKER  PLASTIC BAG ARCHIVIST

“I haven’t read the book. I read the bit about the woman who claims to be a serial killer and scares off the bloke with the hat. That’s all. So here’s an appropriate quote. Stick my name under it. “If Stewart Lee was fatter, shorter, uglier, posher and really, really, really boring, The Perfect Fool would be a sure-fire Whitbread contender.”

STEVEN WELLS  NME

“Stewart Lee’s The Perfect Fool is that rare thing, a more than decent novel written by a comedian. The root of his success in this is precisely that he doesn’t strain to make the reader laugh but rather allows the absurd scenarios he spins to follow their own logic and lets the reader interpret them on whatever level he or she chooses. A scattered collection of unfortunates and derelicts all reaching crisis point in seemingly disparate unenlightened lives gradually come together in Arizona as a consequence of their various half-understood quests. It’s a mixture of paranoid occult conspiracy, obsessive rock’n’roll fandom, and deluded detective work. The stories entwine without contrivance and though the relationships eventually seem obvious the skilful construction ensures the joins never show, and nothing is crassly telegraphed. From the rock’n’roller’s point of view the lives of Sid and Danny, trapped in their Dire Straits tribute band, hitching up their threadbare dignity, posts a dreadful warning. There but for fortune… The musical components ring true mainly because they are true, and though Luther Peyote turns out not to quite be Roky Erickson the initial sense of recognition is particularly warming.”

NICK WEST Bucketful Of Brains