Into Hot Air: Another "Novel" by Chris Elliott

Another Elliott Bull's Eye   June 12, 2008
Into Hot Air, Chris Elliott's second "novel" is another dead-on parody of an adventure epic, packed with Elliott's unique brand of humor. The narrative is wildly inventive, the dialogue is cleaver, and Chris (as himself, the leading character) is at his irreverent best. This book is dense with humor, and you just smile and smile as you read. Let's hope he's working on another!

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Hysterical Novel from Beginning to End   March 22, 2008
I loved Chris Elliot in Get a Life. I didn't know he was also a talented and creative writer. This novel is just plain funny. Elliott takes a serious, introspective topic - ascending Mount Everest - and turns it into a laugh riot. The story, despite its outlandish plot, flows well. Every page made me laugh on some level of the laugh scale - from guffaw, to chortle, to laugh out loud. Elliott takes us from the genesis of his journey, when he discovers his great-uncle Percy'd diary, who presumably summitted Mouny Everest, through his gathering of a team to climb with him - including a mix of celebrities, each with their own particular role to play on the climb, especially as foils to each other, to the inevitable hazards encountered on the ascent, including some outrageous episodes that could only have been conceived by Elliot's mind. If you read the book now (March of 2008) there is an eerie sense of prophecy in some of the events that unfold. I don't want to give it away, but if you are keeping up with news about Tibet (where Mount Everest is located) you'll know what I mean. If you want to laugh consistently while reading a humor book, pick up (and read) Into Hot Air.

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Thwacker was better   January 29, 2008
the book is good. there was almost no instances that i was not laughing out loud while reading the shroud of the thwacker. this one not so much, but the story itself was pretty engaging. so just good. i hope he does a few more as funny as shroud of the thwacker. also more movies and a talk show. and another sitcom. okay, that's all.

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I never metanarrative I didn't like (1 of 2 Found this Helpful)   January 22, 2008
I hope Chris Elliott keeps pursuing fiction. Now that Mark Leyner seems to be making piles of money with popular medical books, Elliott seems to be leading the pack in works that satirize the idea of narrative and place the author at the center of the action.

In this book, Elliott organizes a group of celebrities in climbing Mount Everest, during which they encounter the most ridiculous of narrative plot points, from a quest for a "rhombus" to monster crabs. Ellott, as in "The Shroud of the Thwacker," puts himself front-and-center in the narrative, using the clueless, egotistical jerk persona he's adopted in his comedy, from "Late Night" sketches to his "FDR" spoof to "Get a Life" (in effect, he's borrowed his own character, which is pomo to the max). Underlying the narrative are references to, in the case of "Shroud," time-travel fiction (the great "Time and Again" in particular) and in "Hot Air" the rather obscure episode in which James Stewart thought he had found a Yeti bone. These references demonstrate Elliott's basic intelligence in building his satires.

But what I like most about "Hot Air," even if the humor is sometimes hit-and-miss, is the fact that Elliott takes a conceit and builds a metanarrative that keeps commenting on itself in a fairly sophisticated (at least for me) way. Toward the end, he even admits that he made some stuff up, then attempts to undo his statement to accommodate another plot point. The book uses a slew of post-modern "borrowings," from the familiar actors on the expedition (the actress whose first name is Lauren should be particularly flattered) to the CIA- and Dalai Lama-fueled plot twists at the end. Futhermore, Elliott pulls it all off with a dynamic prose style. I'd like to see him apply his talents to a "memoir."

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At once a novel and a parody (1 of 1 Found this Helpful)   January 9, 2008

At once a novel and a parody, INTO HOT AIR mocks epic literary adventure stories and comes from an award-winning comedian who presents the story of a great-uncle's journey and an anonymous package which indicates he might have been the first to climb Everest. High humor and tongue-in-cheek discovery will delight any who regularly read adventure nonfiction, particularly mountain-climbing books, making this an excellent general-interest collection recommendation.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

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