Inner Tube

Inner Tube is a darkly comic, hallucinatory novel about one man's descent through grief, cultural detritus, and the electromagnetic haze of late 20th century America. After his mother kills herself by ramming her head through the family television, the narrator quits his job cataloging old TV shows and embarks on a surreal, unmoored journey westward. Through a landscape of rundown motels, desert isolation, and fleeting encounters, he strips away the trappings of civilization, regressing into a feral, posthuman state. The book is both a savage critique of media-saturated culture and a philosophical meditation on alienation and survival, written with poetic precision and biting wit.

Inner Tube was completed under extraordinary circumstances. After undergoing spinal surgery that left him paralyzed from the neck down, Hob Broun wrote the novel using a breath activated computer system-a device that converted puffs of air into keystrokes. He finished the book just before his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 37.

First published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985, and reprinted in 1987 by McGraw-Hill, Inner Tube has been out of print ever since.

"Hob Broun is a 1960s child carrying out a 1980s rebellion. The revolution over, politics dismissed as a necessary evil, the oppressors, this time, come from within. [...] Regression in this book is a form of progress. The accouterments of civilization may delude us into believing that we have reached nobler goals, but we are in fact simply surviving."

-Los Angeles Times

"Broun is one of those writers who, when you first discover him, you can't believe isn't a literary celebrity, a goddamn legend."-Tin House

"Hob Broun's second novel, Inner Tube, is written in the voice of a beat Philip Marlowe, a dazed Sam Spade, who have spiked their drinks with MTV, Nathanael West and Joan Didion. The novel appears to have been written as an antidote to the Reagan for President commercials. The American dream has been cut into a rerun of ''Leave It to Beaver'' and ''My Little Margie''; the laugh track is still there, but now it is laughing at us. "-The New York Times