Grist

The Journal for Writers

Pathos, Wry Wit, and a Yellow Mustard Penis: Renee Simms’ Debut Story Collection Meet Behind Mars | Reviewed by Jody Hobbs Hesler

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Renee Simms’ outstanding debut collection, Meet Behind Mars from Wayne State University Press, captivates with fully-imagined characters who are writers, parents, adopted children, rocket scientists, pawn clerks, poets, professors, and children and spouses of Motown stars. They face fatal illnesses, crash-testing monkeys, “The Yellow Mustard Penis Incident,” as well as unsympathetic writing workshops, high school reunion planning committees, and post-Katrina PTSD.

The cornerstone of the collection may well be its eponymous selection. Every story sparkles for its own reasons, but “Meet Behind Mars” channels all the various types of excellence into a single story. We have finely tuned sentences, wry humor, deeply poignant moments, along with fresh and sharp observations of African-American families living in predominantly white communities in America today.

Told in epistolary form of emails and voice mail transcriptions, “Meet Behind Mars” builds a case in defense of Gloria Clark’s son, drawing from communications she has exchanged with an array of school administrators over the course of his schooling. “Dear Dr. Lutz,” the story begins, “You’ve requested that I write a statement to the school board about ‘The Night of the Yellow Mustard Penis,’ and I’ve tried to pull together all of the evidence that I have.” This evidence documents the relentless and increasingly ridiculous barrage of accusations teachers and students have levied against her son since he was small.

Her reports of these lead-up incidents make, then hammer home, the case that Ms. Clark and her son are treated as novelties, at best, and threats, at worst, within their community purely because they are black in a mostly white world:

“When I remember these incidents, Dr. Lutz, I recall what my sister said when I told her that I was moving to [their mutual neighborhood of] Durant. ‘Why you moving out to Mars?’ she asked. ‘There aren’t a lot of people who look like us out there.’ And I defended this place to my sister. I didn’t tell her that Durant wasn’t Mars, because most days it feels like a foreign planet. But I told her that I had a right to sail across the universe if I wanted, and to meet behind Mars with my beloveds like Cheryl Lynn sang in 1978 when we were twelve and fourteen years old and listening to her song on our mother’s car radio.”

To underline the breadth of time and experience she covers in her appeal to Dr. Lutz, Ms. Clark says, “I feel like I can’t tell one story about a giant mustard penis because it’s not about a mustard penis only, but about all of these incidents together, in context, and through time. It’s also about education and the fact that I’m a black woman who lives alone with her son.” The punch of this conclusion adds danger to the playful sound of throws the absurdity of the notion of “The Night of the Yellow Mustard Penis”. During the “Night of the Yellow Mustard Penis,” several white 9th-grade girls draw a giant penis out of mustard on the front walk, get as far as “fuck y” on the garage door before the mustard runs out, and throw a watermelon and Kool-Aid jammers onto the scene. Inside, Clark says, “[m]y son was having a birthday sleepover …. Jesse’s guests were 9th grade black boys who also go to the school.” The crude racially-motivated meanness of the mustard-penis-related acts doesn’t surprise after we’ve read the catalog of other hateful incidents that have shaped Jesse’s school years. What surprises is Ms. Clark’s humor. “As punishment,” she writes, “I would like these girls to stand in front of the watermelon and mustard penis and perform an interpretive dance.”

The abject silliness of interpretative dance as punishment hits perfect pitch here. In solidarity with this frustrated mother, we, too, want someone held accountable and forced to expend energy and creativity to atone for years of her son’s mistreatment. Ms. Clark’s sarcasm sums up our ongoing American Tragedy: Systems of power in our country continue to refuse to recognize their own failures and so cannot begin to make amends for them.

“Meet Behind Mars” wraps up this collection, but each story before it sticks its landing, too. In “Dive,” Alex returns home to Tiny Oaks, Michigan, for her adoptive father’s 70th birthday party. While there, she announces her plans to find her birth parents, inspired by her own pregnancy and an accompanying desire to better understand medical and other less tangible histories. Her adoptive mother is Jewish, her adoptive father African-American, and neither have preserved meaningful relationships with their families of origin, leaving Alex “with what I liked to call my Trifecta of Absence. I had no ancestral information as an African-American. As an adoptee before adoptees had rights, I had no knowledge of my biological family. And I had sparse knowledge about [my adoptive parents], the kind but unemotional people who’d raised me up.” Alex’s drive to connect to a solid past conflicts with her family’s code: “They’d raised me to believe my personal history didn’t matter, that I could make it without knowing my past because I was strong. For too many years of my life, I nearly killed myself in service of that belief.” The story plumbs these complex family relationships as the narrator strives to map her emotional homeland.

In “High Country,” writer Hattie Vernon receives stilted feedback from a workshop led by a “celebrity author” at a conference: “It isn’t Romance. It lacks drugs, sex, hip-hop, guns. Believability! Black kids blissed-out on German disco? What was this, magical realism?” Hattie’s critiquers effectively articulate some of the suffocating biases as prevalent in the publishing world as in the world of writing conferences. In a clever renouncement of these oppressive expectations, the story spins gradually and satisfyingly into magic realism. Hattie’s husband Jervis failed to secure his parents’ help babysitting for their vacation after the conference, so Hattie will not have time to write as she had expected. At the start of their vacation, their car crashes into a cow somewhere outside Sedona, and Hattie wakes up in a truck among a group of Native Americans who turn out to be characters wanting her to write their stories. When she asks what happened to her family, “‘They’re gone,’ [one of the women] says. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted, sugar? For them to be gone so that you could write?’”

None of Simms’ stories perpetuate the stereotypes that Hattie Vernon’s fictional workshop-mates expect and demand. As readers, we should rejoice that these stories, and this collection, survived those gauntlets unscathed.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her book reviews and author interviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, [PANK], Change Seven, Buffalo Almanack, and elsewhere, and her fiction has appeared in Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, Sequestrum, Streetlight Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Prime Number, and other places. She holds an MFA from Lesley University and teaches at Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia.

How to Renew the People and the Land: Stephanie Anderson’s One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture| Review by John Nichols

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Stephanie Anderson’s One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture forwards an old idea repurposed for a century of people wondering what to do to create sustainable food sources. The non-fiction work blends memoir, scholarly argumentation, and interviews to demonstrate that in the face of widespread ecosystem destruction caused, in part, by highly technological practices of consumption, we need a better way of doing argiculture. The idea is a holistic process of farming that privileges the health of the soil, the local economy, and the creation/growth of new life, which Anderson calls regenerative agriculture.

It represents a turn back, a turn towards an integrated way of living that cannot accept globalism’s emphasis on the large and the total. Also unacceptable is the unbarred consumption of food or technological and mundane goods that mark our contemporary society. Regenerative agriculture is a way of living-by-doing, as traditionalist as it is radical to the modern consciousness—conditioned as that consciousness has been by liberalism’s drive toward so-called “liberation” from all possible restraints, an emphasis on bigger instead of better, and a default of centralization instead of decentralization. Anderson critiques this consciousness, thinking through bioregionalist tendencies, and labeling the politics of her work a one-size-fits-none approach to living and farming.

As the farm girl of the book’s subtitle, Anderson reflects on both her experiences growing up on a South Dakota ranch as well as on her interviews with famers and ranchers in Florida and South Dakota. Anderson structures her book dialectically; balancing narrative interviews with her own analysis of the state of agriculture in the United States and the world, she demonstrates through hyper-local examples how “[r]egenerative agriculture…creates new life and resources—and it is already leading the next wave of green food production” (xiii). She argues for moving beyond notions of sustainability, which have themselves become so fraught with sustainability and mainstream hipness that they no longer are (and never were, as Anderson shows) enough to restore the land or defend against the eventual desertification of our environment.

Rather, Anderson demonstrates by traveling to several farms that model her idea of regenerative agriculture that our focus needs to shift to a more holistic theory of land management, one that accounts for the entirety of a local ecosystem. From the soil to the plants to the animals to the humans (habitation, labor, economy), a holistic or regenerative theory of land management would, according to Anderson, lead to a set of practices that attends to all of the individual parts that makes up an ecosystem before making decisions regarding the health of that ecosystem. It would also lead to factoring those individuals holistically into the larger ecosystems of which theirs is a part. Isolating anything, Anderson argues, echoing Allan Savory’s Holistic Management (1999), would be to act both without meaning and without an understanding of the vast complexity of local (not to mention global) ecosystems.

This theory of land management is reminiscent of Albert Schweitzer’s oft-quoted idea from his Philosophy of Civilization (1923), “True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live” (156). The embeddedness of beings in the midst of other beings reflects what would later become Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, wherein an act is right when it preserves the integrity and stability of the biotic community, an ethic Leopold developed in the eponymous essay, “The Land Ethic” (1949). Clear from both Schweitzer and Leopold is the emphasis on local ecologies, a scale in which an individual’s behavior can have a real effect on their dwelling places and something to which Anderson returns throughout her work. Anderson shows this kind of attention to stability of the biotic community within local ecologies in her chapters covering the need to end CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). In their place, we ought to structure ranches and animal farms like the Great Plains Buffalo ranch, in which the animals are able to roam and graze as they naturally would (without human intervention). This process in turn enlivens the grass and other plants, allowing for healthier animals, healthier land, and healthier botanical life. Additionally, depending on where one farms in the country, this process likely would look different due to the differing bioregions which make up the United States.

Essential, then, to her book is the idea that “[t]here is no one-size-fits-all approach in practicing [regenerative agriculture]” (xiii) and that instead of imposing policies on ecosystems from far away, we should rather work from the literal soil upwards in order to determine how we should act towards and in concert with the land. Consumption would have to take a second seat, and economies that prioritize fast and convenient access to goods would have to reorganize. “Big Argiculture” would have to be dismantled; notions of bigness and the agricultural standard of “get big or get out” would have to be rigorously defended against by local policies and an insistence on local rather than national government of agricultural policy. Each ecosystem, Anderson argues as evidence for her one-size-fits-none-thesis, “will have unique needs and thus provide different crops and livestock” (264). This fact is relatively obvious if we consider that a fruit like oranges can’t or won’t grow in an ecosystem like that of the Pacific Temperate Rainforests, but they will in a Humid Subtropical ecosystem, like that of Florida.

For Anderson, this allows us to avoid the fallacy of composition (wherein one erroneously believes that something is true of the whole because it is true of a part) when we approach policy and interacting with people in different and diverse ecosystems. “Diversity,” she writes, “will make our food system stronger and better equipped to handle, crop failures, market collapses, and climate change” (264). In other words, we shouldn’t all try to serve the same “niche markets” because we simply can’t—not if we hope to preserve the integrity and stability of local ecosystems (not to mention enabling their regeneration).

While this persuasive and essentially conservative (read: conservation- and stability-oriented) idea about agriculture and land ethics is presented with clear and interesting examples, One Size Fits None could use more and diverse kinds of research to balance the hyper-local examples on which Anderson structures her book. Additionally, a clearer elucidation of who exactly her audience is would assist Anderson in strengthening the argument for a regenerative agriculture to be widely adopted. As an initial illustration of what regenerative agriculture could and does look like in practice, One Size Fits None is an invaluable resource, a step in the right direction of imagining alternative way of doing and organizing life around the soil and farming.



One Size Fits None

by Stephanie Anderson

University of Nebraska Press

$21.95, pp.321

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John C. Nichols is Graduate Teaching Associate and PhD Candidate at the University of Tennessee, where he specializes in ecocriticism and American literature as well as theories of place, regionalism, and landscape ethnoecology. While he was the John Hurt Fisher research fellow at Tennessee, he assisted with the development of the Literary Knox website and walking tour. He is currently writing a dissertation on landscape agency, ecosystemic ethics, and regional American literature. He has published a brief essay on the dialectics of control in Sergio de la Pava’s 2008 novel A Naked Singularity at The Curator.

How to Survive the Rest of Your Life: Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions | Review by Samantha Edmonds

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Several weeks after finishing Vanessa Blakeslee’s Perfect Conditions (Curbside Splendor, 2018), I still feel these stories overflowing in my head, the way salt lingers on skin after an ocean swim. An apt comparison—of the ten stories in Blakeslee’s collection, six are water-based, set in coastal regions (particularly, but not exclusively, Latin American countries) and depicting ocean towns where people try living Jimmy-Buffett-style to surf their blues away. Do you think it’s always warm there and people are happier? Do you think the water washes away your troubles and you rise from the waves of your salty baptism into a new life?

If you do, you’d have that in common with many of Blakeslee’s characters. And like them, you’d be wrong.

This collection takes readers to paradise—perhaps in search of these so-called “perfect conditions”—and very quickly reveals the truth about perfection and paradise: People ruin everything for themselves everywhere. In the title story—which first appeared in Grist—Jack, living out his retirement in Costa Rica, is visited by his adult son Sebastian for the first time in several years, only to find this is not the son he remembers. In the horror-filled “Stand by to Disembark,” a young man on a sailing rig experiences claustrophobia and paranoia as he learns the captain has no plans to let him off. Two young surfers in “Splitting the Peak” fall in love on the beaches of Australia during a competition, only to be torn apart by reality when the trip ends. A forty-six-year-old gets testicular cancer in “Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins,” but is unable to go to the doctor until he finds health insurance for fear of getting a “pre-existing condition.” Paradise is not to be found in these places. But I promise, you still want to come along for the trip: Oscillating as it does between hilarity, heart-warmth, and terror—and sometimes all three at once—Blakeslee’s collection is not one to miss.

It’s not all beaches and ocean waves, either. Several stories cross genres, featuring aliens and doomsday preppers and post-apocalyptic police states where art is illegal and people don’t even own their own bodies. But “the invisible snap of magic” connecting all these stories, regardless of genre, are the people and relationships (162).

Perhaps the most important story in the collection to me is “Sustainable Practices.” Nina and Clint are on their honeymoon in Tahiti, chosen because Nina wants to visit the Tahitian aquifer portrayed on the label of her favorite bottled water. Upon arrival at the resort, Nina finds the island as idyllic as her dreams, but it’s not long before the people around her force her to reevaluate her understanding, such as when she snaps a picture after a bus ride of “her pedicure still intact from the wedding (#perfectpedi #honeymoon #daytrip #lovinglife)” and then notices “the long hard toenails in cracked, nameless plastic thongs” of the local woman next to her who makes this journey every day, and silently, ashamed, Nina “puts away her phone” (42). Nina discovers a more sinister truth than the “artesian aquifer” from the water bottle: a familiar story of economic disparity and capitalism and colonialization in these so-called “paradise places.” That it is told through the perspective of a #ArmchairActivist, who forgets the trouble immediately the moment she is on a plane ride home, would make it funny (and it is, actually) if it weren’t also so true. In a collection that uses these real places as settings for fictional stories, “Sustainable Practices” is a vital addition, one that manages to critique the very real, very damaging effect of the colonialization of these places in service of the white outsider even as the book tells stories about those very kinds of visitors.

And at its heart, this is a collection full of outsiders, characters that are both apart of and a part from their worlds, hoping desperately to find a place that feels like theirs. In “Jesus Surfs,” Eduardo refers to “a deep loneliness that had forever driven him to pick up and go,” then, upon arriving in each new place, finds himself asking, “Why come here at all? Was here actually better than anywhere else?” (37; 31). The narrator in “Clìnica Tikal,” a Guatemalan American from New York City visiting her “parents’ homeland,” feels a similar sense of outsider-dom, explaining that, “the way I walked, my salon-treated hair and nails, my Ralph Lauren jeans—it all told this world I was an outsider” despite that she was surrounded by family (122). These are characters that are “both inside the world and shut out of it” (33).

Perfect Conditions is, above all, about not belonging—not just in the place you’re in, but even and especially in your own skin. Many protagonists are preoccupied with getting older and worried about their aging bodies, whether that means a woman wondering what good her life is after a divorce (“Perfect Pantry”), the pain and nostalgia of meeting a school-days love as an adult (“Splitting the Peak”), or finding a mysterious lump on your body (“Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins”). For these characters, growing old came as a surprise—“This was how aging happened,” Jack thinks, “in little blips of decline, like a motor sputtering out” (99)—and they are unsure what to do with themselves and their lives now that it’s happened.

If Blakeslee offers an antidote to these fears of aging and not belonging, it is this: people. In the opener to the collection, a post-apocalyptic story called “Traps,” the narrator spends days listening to her doomsday uncle explaining that people are their biggest threat. But when the narrator’s sister arrives she tells a different story: she and the other homeless travelers “helped each other out: shared food, carried each other’s belongs when someone got too tired, built fires, sang songs… She couldn’t have made the journey alone” (8). This theme is repeated throughout the collection: People in isolation—sometimes literally, as with the characters in “Traps,” and sometimes metaphorically—constantly discover that what they really need to survive are other people.

Though it is only Martha in “Perfect Pantry” who asks directly, “Who am I, without this person?”, everyone in Perfect Conditions is searching for the answer (60). Sometimes that means going on a literal quest—“a real one,” as George calls it in “Arthur and George: The Voyage Begins”—and sometimes the journey is more spiritual, but either way, the characters always arrive at the same destination/realization: “Surviving for yourself—wasn’t that rather pointless?” (78).

Eclectic in genre but consistent in theme, these are stories out to prove that life is not at all where you make it, but with whom. Whether they’re post-apocalyptic or simply disillusioned, these stories—international, sinister, idyllic—are the perfect guide for How to Survive the Rest of Your Life when the world as you know it—literally and figuratively—comes to an end.

 

Perfect Conditions

by Vanessa Blakeslee

Curbside Splendor, 2018

 

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Samantha Edmonds’ fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Day One, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Elite Daily, Ravishly, and more. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com

The Death of Empathy: Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love | Review by Amy Lee Lillard

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Something has happened to Eleanor, the thirty-nine-year-old teacher and writer at the center of Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel. This thing permeates Eleanor’s daily routine of teaching, reading, and wandering her Brooklyn neighborhood. This thing also haunts Eleanor when she breaks her routine to track down her computer thief, take drugs with a commune in upstate New York, and finally move to Ethiopia to work in a Rimbaud museum.

But this thing, the “thing that happened—that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening” is never named.

A few pages in to the novel, I assumed that “it” would eventually be named rape. When one is female and reading of female trauma, especially one tinged with guilt and self-blame, that’s perhaps our go-to response.

But Moschovakis resists and questions this reaction, and she does it with a bit of structural play that’s exciting and shocking. Interspersed with the third-person narration of Eleanor, Moschovakis adds an unexpected first-person voice: the writer behind Eleanor.

This writer details her revision process with her novel about Eleanor. She grapples with the critics: her own inner voice of self-doubt, and a male critic who questions her choices. This male critic assumes that Eleanor is a stand in for the writer, and demands simplicity and clear motivations of the characters; he wants the “thing that happened” to be named.

In some ways, the critic may serve as the voice of the reader who wants things to be explained and resolved. But at the same time, the critic is a certain kind of male that women know well, especially women writers. The critic dominates all their conversations, first with overly negative feedback on the work, and then with his own neuroses. He uses Eleanor as a therapist, an object of seduction, and an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. The writer recognizes what he’s doing, knowing he’s:

“one of those men…who speak only in subordinated sentences, developed theories…whatever insight emerged was of an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and rehearsal before a mirror.”

Perhaps by giving this man the lines and demands that readers might also have, Moschovakis encourages us to examine how we view female stories.

That’s what I did. As Eleanor thinks of the “thing that happened” again and again, and the critic demands the writer name this thing, I started to think about how we react to female trauma in particular. If the thing that happened to Eleanor was rape, for instance, readers might pity her, while quietly (and perhaps unconsciously) poking holes into her account. If the thing was a parent’s death, we might feel sad for her, but may also want her to deal with it quickly and move on. If it’s divorce, or a miscarriage, or a lost job, or a meltdown, we might have more ready-made responses prepared.

And maybe we’ve developed these gut reactions because of the sheer volume of stories in the world. We see Eleanor herself may even do this: every day she shifts from social media to news feeds to books to films, consuming hundreds of stories in giant chunks. Most of these stories, on their own, could be deeply emotional, important, life-changing. But she reads and moves on. We’ve all had to learn to do this with the daily firehose of story, to read, digest, and move on to the next. When they’re stories of trauma, as they often are, we’ve learned practiced reactions to help us do that.

This may be the ultimate power of Moschovakis’ novel. Eleanor, and the male critic, and we readers, may no longer be able to feel real empathy, the book suggests. Detachment may be the new human state.

Eleanor for one recognizes this in herself, and tries to make herself feel something, anything. She tries sex, masturbation, drugs; she tries thinking deeply on the thing that happened. But time passes, as Moschovakis repeats again and again, and Eleanor “takes note” of events, and her reactions to them, from a distance. We may assume that this is the effect of her trauma. But really, this is life. This is Eleanor’s life, and this is ours.

Moschovakis’ book is a stunner, showing how we are detached, separated from our bodies, from empathy, from the world and its horrendous events, from time. We’re acting out patterns to cope, and in that way we make no progress.

But we still try. Eleanor does, ultimately moving to another country to simplify her life. She may still find a way to live in this world. Maybe we can too.

 

Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
By Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press, August 2018
Paperback, 224 pp. $16.95

 

 

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Amy Lee Lillard was named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her fiction and non-fiction also appear in Atlas and Alice, Off Assignment, Gertrude, and Entropy. She holds an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and an MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European Program at Cedar Crest College.

Avuncularly Pynchonian: Joe Ponepinto’s Mr. Neutron | Review by David A. Southard

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You have heard it before: you are the lead in the running film or the voluminous Proustian saga that is your life. This is what you tell yourself, whether as a result of confidence, privilege, evolutionary machinations, or sheer tyranny of will. It gets you through the day. In all likelihood, however, you, if you are anything, are the background actor moving his or her lips, standing naturally at your mark, engaged in silent conversation with another body as backdrop. You are a minor character, a friend of a friend at a party, a relative, or an ex—discarded in a throw-away line of dialogue. You are much closer to how Gray Davenport sees himself:  “a fraction of an atom, taking up an area of space so insignificant that it [is] no surprise to be regularly ignored,” and, like Gray, you want something different, you have ambition, you desire a function. Mr. Neutron, the new novel by Ponepinto, follows Gray as he transitions from backdrop to accidental lead, from weightless, charge-less neutron into something with presence, someone with a purpose. This novel—satiric, comic, slapstick, surreal—follows this floundering fool as he quests to change himself and the city he has so often failed.

Not only is Gray Davenport a loser, but he also works for one—Bob, mayoral candidate and small time thinker who serves as a perpetual candidate and joke to residents of the dumpy coastal city of Grand River. Gray serves as a “political consultant, but [is] not really political. Not republican, not Democrat, but not independent enough even to be an Independent.” Bob—stuffed with corn nuts and regurgitated phrases on crime and taxes—is just the perfect blank mass to reflect such mediocre indifference. Bob’s second in command is Patsy, a woman rarely, if ever, seen off of her rubber stability ball. Patsy, too, has contented herself to her permanent runner-up position and keeps Bob as hollow and superficial as possible.

Gray begins shedding his indifference, however, when the gigantic, hypnotic, and dimwitted Reason Wilder arrives, announcing his candidacy for mayor. Reason comes from nowhere, an “unknown Pied Piper . . . without a platform or a slogan” who speaks in simplicities and magically transfixes people across (and off) the political spectrum.

Gray, un-hypnotized by the naïve charm of the giant, smells something rotten from Reason, both literally and figuratively, and from there the novel unrolls in plot, characterization, and quirks like something from an avuncular Pynchon (sans elaborate formal stylings): there’s a mad-scientist huckster, conspiratorial underpinnings, a porn star turned political operative, corruption, reanimation, characters with suitable aptonyms, the stink of pollution, and enough losers to fill the leaky hot-tub of a deserted motel at the edge of town. The novel is avuncular in both its friendliness to readers as entertainment and in its comedic stylings, which surround a journey of misery and defeat for our titular neutron.

Do not misunderstand this as your typical hero’s journey, however, though many of the tropes and stages appear as the novel progresses. Heroes eventually heed the call to adventure, reveal strength in their road of trials, and experience clarity in apotheosis. In Mr. Neutron, Gray Davenport moves through his journey in a perpetual state of near capitulation to the permanent mediocrity to which he has been relegated. He remains lost, in fantasy and from success.

Heroes, though flawed, also tend to be more likeable. Gray Davenport is a sad, pessimistic, weak, sex-crazed, occasionally misogynistic, often irritating, but nonetheless engaging enough observer of his little mad world to carry the reader along. This makes him a difficult character in which to ask readers to invest time and emotion. Some readers may give up on Gray, while others will recognize themselves in, or at least respect, his persistence and determination.

Early in the novel Gray, imaging himself as the subatomic particle, thinks “Perhaps neutrons were necessary. Perhaps there was a higher calling for them . . . He just had to deduce what that purpose was.” The purpose finally comes for Gray, when a charge transforms this neutron, and a new(ish) life emerges. The change in the final parts of the novel is as absurd and funny as it is unexpected by both protagonist and reader.

Finally, though this novel is satirical, it is not overtly political. The fun it pokes at politics—corruption, collusion, amorality, idiocy, and gullibility—is universal. This may bother some readers who demand outright resistance or compliance to the current situation of America. Instead the reader gets something fun, something light, a reprieve from the static of screaming heads that fill every page and every screen. Sometimes that is what we need from a book: entertainment.

 

 

 

Mr. Neutron

by Joe Ponepinto

7.13 Books, March 2018

Paperback, 300pp., $15.99

 

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David A. Southard is a writer, musician, and teacher. His novella K. at Liberation will be published by BOSS Underground Press in the summer of 2018. He creates music under the moniker Building a Building. You can find him @davidsouthard.