William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is on the TIME 100, but I have to admit I’m hard-pressed to explain its presence there. I suppose it was highly influential in its day, judging by the number of band and book names I found within its pages (as well as the name of a defunct Massachusetts company, Thinking Machines). From my vantage point today, however, its intended window into drug addiction and the attendant delusions and paranoia seem overdone, and the violent sexual content that fill the middle third of the novel are just gratuitously disgusting while at the same time managing the unusual trick of being boring.

The book starts out as the disjointed narrative of a well-educated heroin addict who’s fleeing from something, although we don’t find out what until the book’s end. With no obvious transition, we’re shifted into the Interzone, a dystopian North African city populated by deviants, addicts, and at least one Josef Mengele-type doctor, leading to a barrage of stories about orgies and murders, often at the same time, all told in deliberately explicit language reminiscent of the way that kids curse when they’ve learned that certain words are bad and start inserting them at random throughout their speech. There’s an obvious anti-consumerist, anti-conformist message somewhere under the text, but it’s half-formed and is left on the floor under the bodily fluids Burroughs pours all over his text.

If Naked Lunch has a saving grace, it’s that Burroughs could spin a phrase, from the insightful witticism (“Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun”) to inspired silliness (“where they are referred to the We Don’t Want to Hear About It Department”). He was also capable of extending his humor over longer passages, such as the story within the story about a man whose anus learns to eat and then speak, after which it takes over the man’s body. The story implies a question of whether we as individuals are anything more than consumers (and waste producers) within the global ecosystem – reminding me of Robert Rankin’s references to humans as “meat” in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse– but it’s a floating island of sense within a larger sea of verbal sewage.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.