Author: Jenny Lawson

2012, Putnam

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir, Humor

Find it on Goodreads

Jenny Lawson is an insane person. It’s a wonder her husband hasn’t drowned himself. Of course, when you’re talking about a memoir by someone who has zero historical impact on the world, insane is good, because insane is entertaining.

Here’s the plot of Lawson’s book: she grew up, went to college, got married, had a kid. She and her husband both work from home in Texas. And occasionally she’ll do weird things like buy a giant metal rooster welded together from oil drums. She’s got a thing for taxidermy (note the dead rat Hamlet on the cover). There aren’t any lessons to be learned from her, or deep insight to be gleaned. Luckily, she is very funny. Lines that seem to come out of left field are plentiful, like this:

I just bought a fifty-year-old Cuban alligator dressed as a pirate.

Lawson’s humor is right up my alley, it’s acerbic and sarcastic. Moreover, lines like that alligator bit in fact play smoothly into the subject at hand. Many of the episodes described in this book are awkward situations she bumbles or word-vomits her way into due to severe social anxiety. She does an excellent job of laying out her weird logic as she retells it, making each vignette compelling and entertaining.

On more than one occasion my panicked rumblings were so horrific that everyone was rendered speechless, and the silence got more and more palpable, and in desperation I just blurted out my credit card number and ran to the bathroom. I did this both because I hoped yelling random numbers would make baffled spectators suspect that I must be one of those eccentric mathematical geniuses who is just too brilliant for them to understand, and also because I felt a bit guilty for making them have to listen to the whole “I may or may not swallow needles” story, and if they wanted to charge their wasted time to my credit card then they now had that option.

I found this book pretty hilarious from start to finish, even if the earlier chapters outshine the balance of the book. The story of Stanley the Magic Squirrel in the third chapter, which recounts a time as a young girl when her taxidermist father woke up Lawson and her sister with a talking squirrel in a cracker box, is never exceeded. (The squirrel turned out to be a piece of roadkill her dad rigged into a grotesque puppet.)

As the memoir goes on, topic matter gets a bit more serious–miscarriages for one–but the strength of Lawson’s storytelling keeps the mood in check. If you like the sort of nonfiction that David Sedaris is known for, or enjoy things like The Moth, you’ll find this book fits in nicely with your preferences. Similarly if you’ve ever felt yourself feeling like an outsider in what ought to be fairly commonplace situations, Lawson’s perspective will certainly make you smile.

Similar Reads: Open-Eyed Sneeze (Martin), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Sedaris), Running with Scissors (Burroughs)

Author: John Connolly

2011 Atria Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror

Find it on Goodreads.

A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.

After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.

Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.

Mrs. Abernathy’s shot goes awry though—she hits Samuel and his dog, but also two policemen, an ice cream man, and a van full of drunken midgets who travel around reenacting fairytales in shopping malls. At first, these drunken midgets (Angry, Jolly, Dozy, and Mumbles–known collectively as “Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs”), threaten to steal the show. It’s not often I find myself laughing out loud when I read, but these crass little characters did the trick.

As the characters traipse across the sprawling and desolate underworld in search of a way home, however, the spotlight is shared. Samuel’s timid bravery, the demon Nurd’s newly found humanity, along with a large cast of inventive and often funny support characters each have truly great moments from which the story draws strength. Indeed, what sets this book apart from lots of other YA is Connolly’s balanced and skillful writing. He’s a captivating storyteller, and moreover he’s developed a real knack for breathing life into his world through a sharp yet subtle wit.

As with its predecessor, Infernals is littered with footnotes. These are often informative, explaining, for instance, a certain lineage of popes, what the Higgs boson is, or the definition of the word “truculent.” Yet they are all filled with jokes, jokes usually just juvenile enough to be silly but not so infantile as to be unworthy of your time. Though the narrator is not named, and has no plot of his own, his constant presence and sense of humor is crucial to the experience.

Here’s the ending to a footnote explaining Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs:

This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”

On top of it though, he manages to sneak in clever, even insightful lines:

the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Then, occasionally, it dips into downright good advice, revealing a motive on the part of the narrator that touches on endearing.

Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.

It really is that simple.

And that hard.

(That was a footnote to a line about two reformed demons brewing cheap ale in the basement of a chemical weapons plant.)

These footnotes and asides build upon each other to give the book a sense of character and purpose that’s pretty rare in YA books lately. And beneath it all is still a charming adventure that strikes a perfect balance between childish fun and maturity of theme and emotion. If you haven’t read The Gates, give it a read first. But be sure to have this book at the ready; you’ll probably want to try and read them both in one sitting.

Similar Reads: The Gates (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart), pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett.

Author: Mark Leyner

2012, Hachette

Filed Under: Literary, Humor

Find it on Goodreads.

Where to even begin with this book? This novel, if you want to call it that, is brilliant, perplexing, uproarious, and a little bit sad. One thing is certain: this is a superb bit of writing, and example of a writer at the top of his game, whose abilities with the written word put many of his contemporaries to shame. The rest is pretty much up for interpretation. If you want to glean more than just pretty bits of style from this book, come in prepared to to use parts of your brain you probably haven’t exercised in a while.

Leyner’s book is the sort of fictive work I used to read in grad-school literature classes. It is obtuse nearly to the point of being cryptic, but there is a method to the madness. If you’re willing to put in the time, you’ll find it worth your while. This is because, while there is not too much plot to speak of (I’ll get to that shortly), the book is bursting at the seams with substance. Structurally it’s a bit like a spiritual cousin to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is an epic poem that isn’t a poem. It flips between genres and writing styles like channels before a bored couch surfer blankly clicking a remote. Some sections are stream of conscious prose, but there are also lists, book blurbs, sing-songy rhymes, tabloid grab lines, text message interchanges, and more. Through a combination of the expert writing I already mentioned and a savage wit, Leyner makes each varying piece work for the whole like a perfectly calibrated tourbillon. Out of context though, it probably just seems mental, like these “Excerpts from Eulogies”:

“This was just the aristocratic, autoerotic attitude of those whose hot buttocks were the pure products of the imagination of the Gods who’d invented the platitude.”

“Ike—marionette, umbilicated to his Goddesses, murmuring in a language garnished with umlauts.”

“His birth as an object of divine desire, and his death—the Goddesses sated—supine and on fire, hated by his neighbors.”

“This shit’s retarded. It’s The Ballad of the Severed Heads. ‘It’s not toasted, it’s Pop-Tarted,’ Ike boasted to all his drug-addled, big-dick bards (the Upper Penis Committee) from the Upper Peninsula and Jersey City…”

The basic gist is that Ike Karton is going to die today. He’s going to eat breakfast, then get shot later on, probably either suicide-by-cop or gunned down by a Mossad agent. This is going to happen because he is a plaything of the gods. What gods? you may ask. Well, the book opens with a long, more or less insane introduction of a pantheon of gods and demigods who reside above the Burj Khalifa. They are created in the mold of the Greek and Roman deities, but these gods rule over every zany thing from balloon angioplasty and the movie Maria Full of Grace to, well, nutsacks. These gods, in particular XOXO (also known as El Cucho or Kid Coma, the god of head trauma, concussions, dementia, alcoholic blackouts, and about a zillion other things), are messing with the book as it is being told/written. The entire narrative is structured in this hyper-meta way: everything is being relayed through various styles and by choruses and characters and different narrators simultaneously before, while, and after it occurs.

I’m not sure I can describe it any better than that. Leyner pretty much lays out as solid description of the structure as you can get as part of his “What Makes Ike a Hero?” list:

G. Ike is the hero of the epic who simultaneously recites and reacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to Ike as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.

This book is very funny, very stimulating, and completely ludicrous. It isn’t a book for everyone. If you’re looking to pass the time on a train ride, look elsewhere. But if you are up for some dense and experimental fiction firing on all cylinders, you will love this book.

Similar Reads: Palafox (Chevillard), Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Ulysses (Joyce)

[A review copy was provided.]

Author:

2010, Random House

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.

I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is  stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.

For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy.

Lenny and Eunice first meet at a party in Rome right before Lenny returns to the States. They spend the night together, an event which he considers a religious experience, but which she sees as a “lesser evil” than going home with another older guy at the party. Lenny invites her to live with him in New York that same night. Eunice accepts only after this other thing she has going with a guy in Rome falls apart, so why not move in with an almost stranger who worships her rather than returning to her abusive father and cowed mother in Fort Lee?

It’s not the most promising beginning in the history of romance, except that it turns out to be exactly what they both want. Eunice tries to explain her decision to a friend:

When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too?… I think of him going down on me until he could barely breathe, the poor thing, and the way I could just close my eyes and pretend we were both other people.

Eunice wants to believe that people can change, and Lenny wants to be changed. He wants her to grant him some of her apparent ease in a world out of which he is rapidly aging; he wants her to make him “less of a dork.” His willingness to give himself to her transforms desperation into heroism, because in his heart he believes he can save her too.

On the morning Eunice arrives from Rome, Lenny gives himself a little pep talk:

Lenny, I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn… if you show her that adult love can over come childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom.

The exchange between Lenny’s openness and Eunice’s guardedness drives the novel through personal and geopolitical disasters, and the possibility that two terribly matched people could find solace in each other (even a doomed solace) amidst a crumbling world is the novel’s most powerful statement. Many of the other characters you could’ve set on fire, and I might not have noticed. (In fact, some of them do go up in flames.) But Lenny and Eunice create something between themselves that I won’t soon forget.

Similar reads: Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

2011, Seedpod Publishing

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.

Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.

Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.

After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along.

Don’t get me wrong: Scattershot doesn’t have much to offer before the story gets to Las Vegas either. Wicker has a few misadventures hitchhiking. Edna goes shopping. Andrew commutes in rush hour traffic. Nothing significant happens. It’s just that until that point, at least one of the main characters has a singular drive that gives the novel a sense of semi-coherence: Wicker needs to win some money to buy his few earthly possessions out of hock, including a wooden box holding his mother’s ashes.

It might almost be enough to make Wicker likable, or at least pitiable, if he ever actually seemed to care about his stuff, not to mention his mother’s remains. Instead, Wicker wins the money he needs, then loses it, then arranges to borrow it from Edna, then finally has a chance to make some money of his own, and (spoiler alert) he still never follows through on the plan to buy back his belongings. It turns out his stuff is just important enough to get him to go to Vegas to do some gambling; after that, he makes a few phone calls and forgets the whole thing.

So Edna doesn’t really care where she goes, and Wicker stops caring halfway through. What about Andrew? He seems intent on finding his mother, but that doesn’t stop him from taking time out from the search to ruin his marriage and cruise the strip in a rented Mustang convertible, sad and angry. He also contacts the police and hires a private detective, though nothing ever happens as a result of either, and Andrew’s too distracted with his marital problems to worry about whether or not the authorities are doing their job.

I might have been less frustrated by this book if I didn’t think there was a good idea buried somewhere beneath all the extraneous plot elements. When Edna first picked up Wicker, I felt a glimmer of hope. I saw how different they were and how desperate, and I thought maybe this could work. I still think it could, but as a 10-20 page short story. Right now, Scattershot is a 260 page collection of characters without motivation and incidents without plot. The closest the novel comes to a saving grace is the writing, which isn’t good but inoffensive; it never impresses but rarely grates the nerves either. Until Goodwin and his editors decide to take a chainsaw to the manuscript, and then run it through a dozen more rewrites, you can definitely pass on this one.

.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Patton Oswalt

2011, Scribner

Filed under: Memoir, Humor

Get it at Powell’s

Anybody familiar with Patton Oswalt’s stand-up comedy career knows the man can spin a good yarn. His act is peppered with seemingly unrehearsed tangents, thoughtful wordplay, and absurdist ramblings that could be cobbled together and written down to form, at the very least, a collection of cracked-out short stories.

Oswalt’s success as a comedian relies on his ability to acutely observe the human condition and his willingness to root around in his own neurotic life, but it’s always a question whether the funnyman’s gift can function within the confines of a page as well as atop the stage in a dimly lit club. Oswalt answers well: the man can write, and his debut book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is hopefully the first of many more to come.

A word of warning: those expecting a light-hearted, funnyman’s romp may want to browse further along in the humor section of their local bookstore. Make no mistake, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a very funny book, but like Oswalt’s stand-up, the laughs come from a dark and truthful place. The book is a series of autobiographical essays, broken up from time to time by less serious “filler” material (a satirical wine tasting menu, punch-up notes on a fictional, idiotic comedy, etc). The essays detail Oswalt’s childhood and adolescence in the Washington D.C. suburb of Sterling, Virginia, his rocky road to a successful stand-up career, and his life in the entertainment-biz bubble of Los Angeles.

Nowhere in the book’s criminally short 192 pages does Oswalt forget that he’s a comedian. However, couched within tales of suburban wage-slave woe lurks a clear agenda. These memoirs are written with the express warning that our lives are miserably short, and becoming inert or satisfied with mediocrity is a criminally self-destructive act. Oswalt unflinchingly exposes his feelings towards those middling souls he has encountered on his journey to artistic fulfillment (equal parts contempt and heartache), but Zombie Spaceship Wasteland never feels angry or didactic.

In a chapter titled “Peter Renfola,” Oswalt discusses his complicated relationship with a mentally unhinged uncle, who, despite his own personal failings (or perhaps because of them), helped the author see past the neighborhoods he was born into. In a pivotal scene, Uncle Peter reads young Patton “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe:

…he read it like a little kid discovering it, making a poem about adult regret and loneliness seem like the greatest thing to a kid who thought coolness acted like the Fonz, sounded like Kiss, and rode a motorcycle like Evil Knievel.

It’s through passages like these that Oswalt brings new life to common coming-of-age memoir tropes. He continues:

Uncle Pete was the first one ever to heave open the gates that sealed ancient pages and make me suspect there were worlds within and without the world I was in. That there were worlds outside of the time I was living in. All of this he carried against his will, in his head. But unlike the other adults, with their resentments and their anxiousness or anger, he seemed eternally, uncontrollably entertained. I really envied him.

As the chapter concludes, the disparity in potential between the worlds raging in Uncle Pete’s head and his own insubstantial lot in life grows, affecting the young Oswalt most profoundly when he is informed of his favorite relative’s demise.

At this point in my life, I’d traveled over a fourth of the planet…I was still hungry to travel and move and create and connect—and I always will be—but I’ve got to admit something. There’s a little bit of Pete in me…I still don’t agree with spending a life the way Pete did, but I understand it and respect it. Who knows how many lives have been saved and villains vanquished by those who sat still?

Simultaneously conversational and elegant, Oswalt’s voice engages at a level that’s both persuasive and informative. Describing one of many revelations that led to his exodus from Virginia, Oswalt writes:

It’s only now, as I write it, on another coast, that I see what the time in the echo chamber of the ticket booth did. There were future musicians standing at the back of Fugazi shows, watching the band and the crowd and drinking in the pulsing thrum. They galvanized their identities while, at the same time, they bled faceless into the crowd, the band, the walls, and the memory of the evening. The book and the cassette tape—they did the same thing for me. People will find transformation and transcendence in a McDonald’s hash brown if it’s all they’ve got.

Encapsulated in these sentences is the overriding theme of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: inspiration comes for us in the smallest of ways, and we have the power to self-start and improve our situation beyond our meager beginnings. While the memoir trope of “if I did it, so can you!” is as tried and true as they come, Oswalt’s examination feels fresh and encouraging, and in uncertain economic times, fledgling creative minds may find solace, and yes, inspiration, in the author’s words.

Similar reads: On Writing, by Steven King; Fargo Rock City, by Chuck Klosterman

Author: Patrick Somerville

2010, Featherproof Books

Filed under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi, Short Stories

Get a copy at Powell’s.

I know the pain of reading a book that’s been called “funny” because it offers nothing else, and I know how genuine comedy needs nothing else to captivate. And so I take it very seriously when I say that Patrick Somerville’s story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, is hilarious.

And while there’s a lot more to this collection, the nature and tone and quality of its humor is what makes it great. Unlike the straining, jesterly comedy of “comic novels” like The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Somerville’s humor doesn’t compromise the writing or the story, but only ever adds to it. For example, this passage, from the perspective of a young exisentialist trying to understand the world, who decides to go to church:

Suddenly there I am, sitting in a pew. Everyone stands up and sings from the book and I stand up with the book and move my mouth and pretend. I can feel the waxy lipstick smeared on my lips. So many sounds come out of us. We try to use our magic and tear open a portal that leads up to the center of the universe. We are attempting to speak to its core. We try for a few minutes, then sit down.

That’s not just a funny line, it’s an aching character looking for salvation where she should be looking for it, wanting it desperately, and being denied. Denial is a big part of the comedy here. Somerville doesn’t let anyone—not even himself—get away with anything. Like this moment, when the title of the collection comes up, and gets undercut immediately:

“I make models of little boys and sometimes their fathers making models of the solar system.”

…

“So you make the universe in miniature in miniature, then,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I make the solar system in miniature in miniature. But that’s close.”

When the young church-going woman from above talks to the priest after the service, he leaves her with this:

He nods, then squints across the room. “Not all those who wander are lost,” he says. He’s still squinting. I wonder if he’s practiced this squint—a squint-stare off into the metaphysical distance. I’m realizing he’s kind of handsome. But then again, it might just be that he cares about something.

“What is that?” I ask. “Did Jesus Christ say that?”

“No,” he says. “Bilbo Baggins said that.”

This humor comes not from a desire to entertain others, but from a need to relieve pain. Somerville’s characters are desperate and often facing down death or at least, as one character says, “a key moment in all lives—when the optimism of your dreams becomes stupid.”

It’s clear that Somerville has ambitious goals for this collection. In his acknowledgments, he says, “This book is an attempt at answering a handful of worrisome questions.” While there are a few quick stories that seem more like jokes—like the one about the alien spaceship captain who hits a wrong button and accidentally blows up the planet he was assigned to make contact with—the majority of these pieces use far-fetched premises and satirical characters in order to drill down into the deepest layers of human insecurity.

And so the awkward conversations a businessman has with his colleagues, with a waiter, with everyone—they are not awkward and funny to amuse us readers, they are awkward and funny because that’s the by-product of the businessman trying to stifle his aching loneliness any way he can. Because it’s that or get furious at the world, and his anger has already cost him his wife and son.

Here’s a passage from a story called “Hair University,” about a pair of balding friends:

“I’m a Norwood Six, Danny. Six.” He sips his soda dramatically. “Don’t talk to me about dangerous.”

He’s recently explained the Norwood Scale to me. Basically—and I’m assuming this was all thought up by a man named Norwood—there are varying degrees of baldness, and along the continuum are Norwoods 1 through 8. There’s even a 3A, which denotes, I believe, a very specific pattern of hairline-regression combined with crown-thinning. Different enough from Norwood 3 to get its own subcategory. Not unlike how you might measure cancer. What are you? I’m a Norwood 4. I don’t know whether this Norwood hung, shot, or drowned himself.

These two are not clowns, their lives are not comedies. The narrator jokes because he takes it so very seriously, and the prognosis is so very grim. One of these men is literally about to risk his life by undergoing a dangerous procedure because he just can’t stand being bald. It’s deeply comic and deeply tragic at the same time.

Interestingly, the last story, “The Machine For Understanding Other People,” is Universe’s least funny and its longest, at nearly 70 pages, but also quite possibly the best story of the collection. It’s a story about a weird contraption—like an old-timey diving helmet attached to a dowsing rod—that allows the wearer to understand other people on a deeply personal level (thus the title). It features the weakest Somerville joke by far (“says the messenger, whose name is (unfortunately) Dick Ball”), and yet it’s captivating in a way that none of the other stories can match.

Partly, it’s so good because its length allows its characters to develop more complexities, and partly because Somerville does not allow any of these stories to spin out a literary wishy-washy nothingness—they all drive hard toward the horizon. For instance, this last story features a woman who inherits billions of dollars and the assignment to make the world a better place; she starts by dumping 200 million dollars in gold bullion into the ocean, to create jobs for treasure hunters.

Beyond the frequently bizarre details, the universal throughline here is that Somerville’s fiction grows from characters. When those characters are funny (and even when they aren’t), it works because he never cracks jokes just to get laughs. In Universe, the characters are experiencing the most important, exhausting, nerve-wracking moments of their lives, and when they’re funny, that humor comes from the teetering precipice of the abyss.

Turns out the edge of the abyss can be pretty hilarious.

Similar Reads: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders; Museum of the Weird, by Amelia Gray; The Knife Thrower, by Steven Millhauser

1997, Riverhead

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary, Humor

George Saunders has one of the most recognizable writing styles today: zany, staccato, silly-serious. He is a well-known contemporary author, a regular with The New Yorker and a recipient of the MacArthur genius grant. There are some really great stories in here, emblematic of his work as a writer, and it’s awesomely entertaining to boot.

On the surface, Saunders’s stories seem downright wacky. In this collection you’ll find a 440-lb man picked on by his boss at a raccoon-disposal service, a historical reenactment village stalked by a murderous caretaker, and a post-apocalyptic picaresque novella. It would be easy to confuse the bizarre scenarios with allegory, and indeed, his stories are highly satirical. But rather than attempt to convey a lesson about obesity, corporate responsibility, or civil rights (respectively), etc., as could be easily inferred, the stories poke fun at us (Americans, mostly) through the tone and delivery.

Here’s a nice example of the world Saunders’s characters inhabit:

The Gleasons are regulars. They’ve got a tidy nest egg that allows them to patronize us three times a year. Mr. Gleason’s an undertaker. When the first wave of mass death swept over the Northeast he got rich by inventing the Mobile Embalmer. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of chemistry could preserve a loved one on the spot, and for a fraction of the cost associated with traditional methods.

The problem that arises in reading a collection of Saunders stories–this is true of all three–is that things begin to feel a bit repetitive. Namely, many or most of his stories take place in mundane-cum-absurd businesses overrun by anarchy. Things get out of control and a semi-likable doofus narrator tries to navigate the world Saunders tears down around him. They are endlessly imaginative and entertaining stories that he creates, yet they lose their freshness quicker than those of Saunders’s many contemporaries.

Still, the writing can be excellent:

We ran. We ran to the train tracks and lay on our backs, sick in our guts as the guiltless stars wheeled by. After no dance would we look up at them happily now. Norris’s soul whizzed through the highgrass. Chills broke out on my arms.

I strongly recommend any fan of short stories who hasn’t read Saunders pick up one of his collections immediately and jump right in. You’ll love it; Saunders really is a genius. I would also recommend taking your time with it. Taken on their own, almost any of these stories would indicate this book as a candidate for a Great Read, yet the collection as a whole I did not designate as such. His stories are best taken one at a time, rather than piled into a collection.

Similar Reads: Pastoralia (Saunders), In Persuasion Nation (Saunders), Welcome to the Monkey House (Vonnegut) 40 Stories (Barthelme), The Museum of the Weird (Gray)

2010, Quirk Classics

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Humor

At least one of the following statements is true: 1) The “literary mash-up” genre had its flash-in-the-pan moment with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and is no longer interesting. 2) Ben H. Winters isn’t very good at writing literary mash-ups. I’m pretty sure the second is true, but I wouldn’t fight very hard if you argued for the first or both.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies worked because it altered and made grotesque a beloved classic. It read like the original, with some additions and alterations applied. This book, much like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, is a full rewrite, and feels like one written in a hurried, formulaic manner. In a lot of ways they remind me of those abridged classics they sold at Scholastic book fairs for $5 when I was in elementary school but with robots, or sea monsters included. This would have been awesome then. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the author of PaPaZ didn’t stick around to write more. I don’t have it on any authority, but I’m guessing he realized Quirk looked a lot more like people going to cash in than a legitimate publisher.

Basically, the plot is a love story with some robot jokes tossed in. Anna Karenina and her android, Android Karenina, leave their life with Anna’s stodgy cyborg husband and begin a love affair with the dashing Count Vronksy. In addition to the original love and betrayal, there are plenty of robotic distractions, such as the rather confusing nomenclature:

…a Roman numeral for class type, a function-designation, and an indication of model. Hence the I/Samovar/1(8) is a Class I device, designed to steep and serve tea, model number 1(8).

The whole thing feels so cookie cutter. Nothing creative and fresh is added. Instead Winters just swaps things for other things with robot-sounding names. At least in SaSaSM there were some epic sea creature battles which were at times used in humorous juxtaposition with the dry, romancing conversations. Here things are blander and less original. In SaSaSM, going to London for the social season was replaced with a trip to the undersea station. Here, going to St. Petersburg for the social season is replaced with a trip to the space station. Frankly, the routine is stale.

I recently read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of PaPaZ. And while not a great book, it did a solid job of remaining interesting by pastiching styles–in this case horror/action and historical biography. That same creative blending of genres was exactly what shined in PaPaZ. This lacks that; it’s a retelling of the basic plot and characters, just dumbed down and altered without being improved. This is why I choose option 2 from earlier. PaPaZ kept intimate with its source material: it was written to be a send-up. This is a tired rehash.

There’s a new one of these coming out in May, The Meowmorphosis, which I wrote about yesterday. I shouldn’t have read this; I won’t be reading that. Instead of a bug, Gregor Samsa will turn into a cat. Ugh. Talk about babytown frolics.

Similar Reads: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith) is good. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Winters) not so much.

2010, Grand Central Publishing

Filed Under: Historical, Horror, Humor

Seth Grahame-Smith is the same guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it shows. This is a good thing, PPZ was excellent–a great mix of classic literature and zombie mayhem. The transition from “literary mash-up” to fake biography was a wise move–the Quirk books after PPZ have been disappointing. I lamented that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (review) wasn’t as good because it was too inventive, and not true enough to its source. But basically I figured that Winters just wasn’t as good as Grahame-Smith. I’m currently about halfway through Android Karenina, also by Winters, and while it’s not all that good either, I’m realizing it’s not so much the author’s lack of talent but lack of novelty: a truly good horror/literary mash-up probably will only work once.

This book is not a drastic departure from its predecessor but it manages to feel fresh. ALVH is made of the same essence; I’d call it respectful parody. This novel is written in the manner of a biography, as if Lincoln’s secret journals fell into Grahame-Smith’s lap. It works well. (He said in an author interview he was inspired to write this because he found it curious seeing a bunch of Abe Lincoln bios sitting beside Twilight on a bookstore bestseller shelf.)

Here’s the basic gist of the story. Young Abe learns of vampires from his drunk father, whose own father was sucked dry by a vampire. Later, his first love is killed by one of the superhuman bloodsuckers. The years go on and Abe commits his life to the eradication of vampires. His motivations are explained further, and incorporate actual historical events and characters, but I won’t spoil them. His work in law and politics provides him plenty of cover for nighttime vampire hunts, whether traveling with a circuit court, campaigning, etc., he always finds some time to hunt out the blight. He mostly uses his father’s trusty axe. In short this book is actually what it purports to be, a story about an Abe Lincoln who is pretty badass.

He’s also kind of a dick, but, interestingly enough, a just one. I found this interesting mostly because it’s kind of the impression I already had of the real Lincoln. (I’ve never read a Lincoln bio, so my knowledge is basically a mix of Discovery Channel documentaries and remnants of 5th grade social studies class). There’s a good reason Lincoln biographies are so popular: even on the surface, actual Lincoln seems like a multifaceted character. He’s tender (namely from the stories of his, er, close relations with fellow soldiers), a hero emancipator, a calculating military leader, and gentle and down-to-earth Honest Abe. When you add to that a determination to rid the world of a race of maneaters one ax hack at a time, you’ve got yourself a complex character.

Then, of course, there’s the Civil War. Real life politics are twisted and threaded into the book’s vampire plot with a fairly skillfully. In Grahame-Smith’s history, the rich whites down of the South wanted slavery to remain primarily as part of a bargain with the vampires (to eat the slaves and spare the wealthy whites). This works pretty well for a plot. I had a bit of a problem in that it trivialized a bit for me the emanipation of slaves. Granted, a large part of the real emancipation was motivated politically and economically and not a moment solely motivated by human rights. But the added vampire plot changes this balance even more. Abe’s much more interested in removing the vampires than saving their food, no matter the skin color. I thought it could have been done better, but this is work of humor, not historical reportage.

So while it’s humor and not the type of book you’d pick up for great literary depth, the writing is good.  It reads convincingly enough like a professional biography. The action and horror scenes, as I’m sure you’re dying to know, are pleasingly gruesome and campy. If you read PPZ or you think it sounds awesome, you’ll like this book. If you read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter in my post title and we’re intrigued at all, then you’ll like this book. It’s quick and fun and bloody, plus maybe you’ll learn something about our 16th president and his undead-slaying prowess.

[The review is of the unabridged audiobook version.]

Similar Reads: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Winter), The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Ackroyd)