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FictionSatire

Frenetic, genre-bending modern narrative

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Mark Leyner’s electrifying and theatrical fourth novel, Gone with the Mind, opens in the food court of a shopping mall during a book signing. While the title recalls Margaret Mitchell, that is only the first of many literary touchstones for this imaginative autobiographical novel, initially narrated by Mark’s mother to an audience of two proles on work break. As her monologue proceeds for pages without a paragraph break, one is reminded of the final chapter of Ulysses, in which Molly Bloom’s river of consciousness makes her seem more formidable with each breathless word. Mark then takes the stage, and in his casual concatenation of pop-culture references with science, philosophy and OED vocabulary, the reader enters the rarefied and rich territory charted by David Foster Wallace.

You never know what Mark is going on about, but you can’t stop listening. It’s like Saul Bellow without the plot, a three-hour-long therapy session in which you are the therapist and Mark is the patient. Or a more frenetic Notes from Underground, with prostate cancer replacing Dostoevsky’s liver disease.

To wit: Mark is a 58-year-old struggling Jewish writer recovering from prostate surgery. He is unusually close to his mother and lacks two shekels to rub together. Mark careens from rage to despond and back again, while the two service workers in his so-called audience remain glued to their smartphones. Mark is often hilarious, but usually in a manner calculated to shock. Life, he says, is “pretty much like Carrie’s prom,” referring to the vengeful Stephen King character.

Leyner launched his writing career in the 1990s, alongside Jonathan Franzen and Wallace, and has worked as a screenwriter. His novels, which are cult literary classics, have titles like My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. James Wood called this “hysterical realism,” a genre aspiring to approach in fiction the mania of contemporary life, to leave nothing out. Gone with the Mind could have been written only by someone coping with the overstimulation of today’s cyberspace. Leyner suggests that any other kind of fiction is lacking, and he may, to our detriment, be right.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mark Leyner’s electrifying and theatrical fourth novel, Gone with the Mind, opens in the food court of a shopping mall during a book signing. While the title recalls Margaret Mitchell, that is only the first of many literary touchstones for this imaginative autobiographical novel, initially narrated by Mark’s mother to an audience of two proles on work break.
FictionSatire

Whose novel is it, anyway?

Review by Melissa Brown

A literary conference might not seem like an obvious setting for mayhem and nonsense, but that’s just what’s on the agenda in Chris Belden’s enjoyable Shriver, in which a lonely man gets invited to a university conference thanks to a case of mistaken identity. Shriver—the wrong Shriver—RSVPs, thinking it a good practical joke, until he’s swept up in the sordid, confusing world of egomaniacal writers and those who adore them. 

The gathering’s broad theme of “reality-slash-illusion” is one that the novel does great work of confusing—it pretty much blurs the slash right out. Who is Shriver? The writer of a controversial novel—or the man mistaken for that man? What makes a writer, anyway? Literary culture’s penchant for superlatives and hero-worship is enjoyably skewered: The real Shriver is revered for a 20-year-old book most people haven’t even finished. 

Shriver is a semi-likable character with more than a couple neuroses, which makes him plausible to the conference-goers as the reclusive author of the same name. He considers himself the furthest thing from a writer; he’s a man of simple pursuits who loves his cat, Mr. Bojangles, and enjoys a one-sided correspondence with a local news anchor. But everyone seems willing to be convinced, especially Professor Simone Cleverly, the university’s conference coordinator, who ironically hates writers; Edsel Nixon, Shriver’s always-there-when-you-need-him handler; and the cowboy academician T. Wätzczesnam (pronounced “whatsisname”) who quotes poetry in every conversation. 

The wacky cast of characters, inane situations and a whodunit subplot brings to mind the 1980s cult classic movie Clue. At every turn in the satirical story, someone who could unmask our protagonist lurks. Meanwhile, Shriver juggles the investigation of a missing poet last seen in his hotel room, a bewildering plague of mosquitoes and a shadowy figure in black. Shriver’s fear of being outed as an impostor rings true for any writer—wannabe or bona fide—who’s ever doubted their abilities.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A literary conference might not seem like an obvious setting for mayhem and nonsense, but that’s just what’s on the agenda in Chris Belden’s enjoyable Shriver, in which a lonely man gets invited to a university conference thanks to a case of mistaken identity. Shriver—the wrong Shriver—RSVPs, thinking it a good practical joke, until he’s swept up in the sordid, confusing world of egomaniacal writers and those who adore them.
FictionSatireDebut Fiction

A dark side of data entry

Review by Haley Herfurth

After the struggle of extended unemployment, Josephine is finally hired by a large, aloof corporation that occupies a windowless building in a secluded part of town. Her job: Input seemingly random strings of numbers and names into a computer program known as The Database. Josephine’s co-workers—the few that she actually meets—are either standoffish, sinister or manic, and she wonders if the job will turn her like that, too.

Josephine’s relief at finding employment fades quickly, and after noticing connections between the names and numbers she inputs and local and national events, she struggles with the realization and new understanding of what her job might actually be. To add to her stress, she and her husband, Joseph, are evicted from their apartment, and forced to move from one slummy sublet to another.

The hours inch by and the stacks of files pile up at Josephine’s office, and she approaches each workday with increasing dread. After Joseph begins disappearing for days at a time and Josephine makes a poignant discovery regarding her own health, she sees a potential solution: Infiltrate the corporation, whose power, with every discovery, seems to grow and extend.

Brooklyn writer Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others, and The Beautiful Bureaucrat was inspired by her own data-entry job. Her surreal and entertaining debut is a concise, imaginative novel that explores life and death, work and home, personality and professionalism in an almost Orwellian fashion. Precisely chosen language and a fast-paced structure leave readers feeling Josephine’s fear along with her, and contemplating their own world.

 

This surreal and entertaining debut is a concise, imaginative novel that explores life and death, work and home, personality and professionalism in an almost Orwellian fashion.
FictionSatire

A chance to save a marriage

Review by Matthew Jackson

Canadian author Leah McLaren walks a fine line in A Better Man, and following along as she navigates it is part of what makes her novel worth reading. A Better Man is a deft blend of comedy, wisdom and character, and it’s one of the most entertaining books of its kind you’re likely to find.

Nick Wakefield, a successful man with a big house, a pretty wife and twins, wants out. He’s tired of the grind of married life, but his best friend—a divorce lawyer—warns him that the split could cost him. To preserve his financial future, he needs to spend time playing the perfect husband and father first. As Nick tries this tactic, he finds that he’s actually growing to enjoy married life again . . . at least, until his wife, Maya, learns his secret.

Though the overall premise would be right at home in a screwball comedy, A Better Man has an incisiveness that goes straight to the dark core of a troubled marriage. Key to this is McLaren’s mastery of character. We see it in Nick’s careful yet cavalier approach to flirtations with other women and in Maya’s pragmatic evaluation of her body. 

A Better Man is a gripping, intimate book that will thrill with its juicy plot and win you over with its powerful insight into relationships.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Canadian author Leah McLaren walks a fine line in A Better Man, and following along as she navigates it is part of what makes her novel worth reading. A Better Man is a deft blend of comedy, wisdom and character, and it’s one of the most entertaining books of its kind you’re likely to find.
FictionSatire

The ultimate pageant mom

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Power comes from being in the limelight. That’s the lesson Miranda Ford takes away from her second-runner-up win at the 18th annual Miss Daviess County Fair Pageant. As the winner and first-runner-up involuntarily step aside, Miranda becomes queen—a position she’s determined never to lose.

Two decades, a husband and three children later, Miranda Ford Miller wants her 9-year-old daughter, Bailey, to take center stage. Nothing will get in Miranda’s way—not Bailey’s growing disinterest in pageants, husband Ray’s hectic schedule with two full-time jobs or the expenses the family’s 14 credit cards can barely accommodate.

Or will it? In the rip-roaring Pretty Ugly, Emmy-nominated writer and producer Kirker Butler writes of the Southern child-pageant circuit with all the acerbic, snarky wit he’s brought to shows such as “Family Guy.”

Butler turns a gimlet eye to each family member’s motivation and conflict. Miranda pours everything into Bailey’s career, including purchasing a gym membership complete with private pole-dancing lessons. However, Bailey is ready to retire from the pageant circuit, and so she sabotages her mom’s efforts by binge-eating. Ray’s nursing and hospice jobs allow him easy access to all the pills he can pop, as well as a young mistress. Miranda’s mom, seventh-grade-educated Joan, homeschools the boys to save them from the horrors of public education. Miranda, meanwhile, is sure that the daughter she now carries will be the answer to everything.

Butler’s debut novel is a smart, sarcastic portrayal of a dysfunctional American family—one that’s sure to have readers eager for more.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Power comes from being in the limelight. That’s the lesson Miranda Ford takes away from her second-runner-up win at the 18th annual Miss Daviess County Fair Pageant. As the winner and first-runner-up involuntarily step aside, Miranda becomes queen—a position she’s determined never to lose.
FictionSatire

A fearless American satire

Review by Theodore Yurevitch

Paul Beatty is not afraid to push and shatter the boundaries of political correctness. Like many of his other works—including his acclaimed debut The White Boy Shuffle—The Sellout is unafraid to ask big questions about America. In this gorgeously eclectic novel, Beatty tells the story of a black man cast out from his hometown of Dickens, California—a man considered to be a sellout for everything from listening to Neil Young and reading Franz Kafka to growing and selling watermelon for a living. It doesn’t matter that these watermelons are the world’s best, or that he is the son of a maniacal psychologist bent on testing racial identity.

But when Dickens is removed from the map, the sellout comes up with an idea to not only bring back the neighborhood, but to remind everyone of what it means to be a community. With the help of Hominy Jenkins, a self-purported slave and local celebrity of “Little Rascals” fame, the narrator sets out to re-instate segregation—forcing the world, and the reader, to question how segregated this country already is.

It’s a dark but comic plot that shapes this angry satire, but Beatty is less interested in getting to the end as he is in exploring the myriad experiences of being black in America and an individual in a society. He does so with freewheeling prose that is electric with intelligence, and yet never above the reader’s head. In a single sentence he might reference obscure existentialist philosophers alongside string theory and bebop jazz, but it is all with respect for the reader’s ability and no distinction between highbrow or low.

At once hysteric and hysterical, angry and full of heart, The Sellout is a smart, funny and distinctly American novel.

Theodore Yurevitch is a writer and editor at the Nashville Review. 

In this gorgeously eclectic novel, Beatty tells the story of a black man cast out from his hometown of Dickens, California—a man considered to be a sellout for everything from listening to Neil Young and reading Franz Kafka to growing and selling watermelon for a living.
FictionSatire

Beauty is pain

Review by Maude McDaniel

Amanda Filipacchi’s fourth novel is a matchless satire that manages to make a point or two along with the fun. It follows a memorable cast of characters, led by Barb, a costume designer and world-class beauty with the kindest of hearts. Convinced of the sheer uselessness and even destructiveness of beauty after a spurned lover kills himself over her, Barb hides her looks under a fat suit.

By contrast, Barb’s best friend, Lily, is ugly but plays the piano like a dream, to the point where she can inspire listeners to see her as incredibly beautiful—as long as her music goes on. And there’s Penelope, whose pottery store is filled with merchandise designed to crack when lifted by a customer. (This brings in a steady income, thanks to the store’s “you break it, you buy it” policy.) The three are part of an artsy community, the Knights of Creation, where they help each other achieve their various creative goals.

The story is both daunting and haunting, as Lily and Barb face the deaths of friends (which one of their fellow Knights may be involved in) and the threats of needy fellow members.

Obviously, total realism is not Filipacchi’s specialty, but no reader would want it otherwise. A novel of deliberate contrariness, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty takes on some thorny issues and speaks to both the mind and heart at the same time. Not to mention the funny bone.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Amanda Filipacchi’s fourth novel is a matchless satire that manages to make a point or two along with the fun. It follows a memorable cast of characters, led by Barb, a costume designer and world-class beauty with the kindest of hearts. Convinced of the sheer uselessness and even destructiveness of beauty after a spurned lover kills himself over her, Barb hides her looks under a fat suit.
FictionSatire

Here we are now, entertain us

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It takes real talent to concoct a plot about our celebrity-obsessed culture that’s as outrageous as the stories we can consume every day with the click of a mouse or remote control. Following on his impressive fiction debut, the somber What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Christopher Beha has pivoted away from that novel's dark tone to create a wicked satire that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor in tackling serious moral issues.

It’s fairly obvious that private high school drama teacher and failed actor Eddie Hartley’s decision to sell the sex tape he made years earlier with his ex-girlfriend, Martha Martin, the star of a popular television medical drama, will turn out badly. That’s so despite his noble motive: to raise $10,000 to finance his wife Susan’s final attempt to conceive through in vitro fertilization. Eddie’s imprudent decision sets in motion a wild series of events when Susan becomes the star of a reality show and he recognizes, as it quickly becomes a hit, that his life has been irretrievably changed.

In his depiction of the “through the looking glass” world of reality television, Beha clearly has done his homework, exposing, with style and wit, the techniques these shows employ to create an impression of verisimilitude for what’s really a carefully crafted story arc.  Eddie watches with rising dismay as Susan becomes an object of mass sympathy, while he’s cast in the role of a home-wrecking villain, even as he plots an ingenious strategy to win her back. Beha wisely doesn’t confine himself to the machinations of the reality show plot, portraying alongside it Eddie’s sobering discovery that the gap between his early dreams of fame and success and the reality of adulthood can only be bridged in a way he never could have imagined.   

Our obsession with the lives of celebrities and our absorption in reality shows isn't likely to abate any time soon. Whether that pleases you or not, if you surrender for a few hours to the spell of Christopher Beha’s well-crafted novel, it's certain you’ll never view these phenomena with the same eyes again.

It takes real talent to concoct a plot about our celebrity-obsessed culture that’s as outrageous as the stories we can consume every day with the click of a mouse or remote control. Following on his impressive fiction debut, the somber What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Christopher Beha has pivoted away from that novel's dark tone to create a wicked satire that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor in tackling serious moral issues.
FictionSatire

Skewering the shortlist

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words is a breezy, yet biting satirical novel about the internecine intrigue that unfolds behind the scenes of a major book award that is clearly a thinly disguised version of the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, whose own novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for that honor, writes in the great pithy British tradition of David Lodge and Muriel Spark, infusing a deceptively lighthearted surface wit with more trenchant intent.

The committee for the prestigious Elysian Prize (funded by a multinational that, among its many controversies, genetically modifies crops by crossing vegetables with animals) is headed by Malcolm Craig, a backbench MP hoping to raise his public profile. The rather ragtag team of judges includes a popular newspaper columnist, an actor, an Oxbridge academic (who, no doubt rightly, believes she is the only member who knows anything about literature) and the ancient prize committee chairman’s erstwhile secretary/mistress, who now writes popular thrillers. None bothers to read more than a handful of the hundreds of books submitted, embracing titles to which they are already predisposed. The inevitable alliances form amid polite quarrels.

The proceedings reach a fever pitch, albeit in a restrained, polite English manner, as the longlist becomes the shortlist and the winner proves difficult to decide. No one is spared as St. Aubyn skewers the literary “elite” and aspirants alike. In one typically sly development, one of the presumed frontrunners, literary star Katherine Burns, is not even in the running. An editorial assistant mistakenly sent in the manuscript for a cookbook instead of Burns’ novel (the cookbook, viewed as a postmodern experiment in narrative, makes the list).

Delightfully entertaining, Lost for Words nonetheless casts a cold eye on the very nature of awards, and questions whether they in any way reflect the quality and permanence of the art they ostensibly celebrate.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words is a breezy, yet biting satirical novel about the internecine intrigue that unfolds behind the scenes of a major book award that is clearly a thinly disguised version of the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, whose own novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for that honor, writes in the great pithy British tradition of David Lodge and Muriel Spark, infusing a deceptively lighthearted surface wit with more trenchant intent.

FictionSatire

You’re allowed to hate this guy

Review by David W. Schweid

Worst. Person. Ever., Douglas Coupland’s new novel, is engaging, funny and a rocking good read. As the title implies, the main character, Raymond Gunt, is not a nice person. The book is written in the first person, in what is known as the “unreliable narrator” style. Ray Gunt is a highly unreliable narrator.

Ray’s ex-wife hires him as a cameraman to film a sequence of reality television in the South Pacific. On an odyssey that takes him from London to a small Pacific island nation, Ray manages to insult, denigrate and otherwise abuse absolutely everyone he encounters, beginning with airport security and ending with the grossly overweight man seated next to him on the plane, to whom he says, “by the looks of you, you’d best hope they have all of Noah’s Ark on the menu.” He keeps it up and so completely enrages the obese man that the poor guy has a heart attack and dies on board the plane. Ray expresses no remorse.

Not surprisingly, Ray often pays a price for his bad behavior, but the reader roots for him nonetheless, maybe partly because many of these encounters are laugh-out-loud funny. Equally enjoyable is the character of Neal, a homeless man whom Ray meets (read: insults) on the street in London and later recruits as his assistant/slave for the trip, and who provides an excellent foil for Ray’s stunts.

In addition to the humor, which is plentiful and uproarious (albeit colorfully expressed and, as in the example above, not always PC), the book is successful because of Ray’s me-first attitude and his willingness to express any nasty thought that comes to mind—things that the rest of us would like to say, were we a little less civilized. Readers will identify with Ray Gunt in spite of themselves, taking pleasure in his crazy antics.

Worst. Person. Ever., Douglas Coupland’s new novel, is engaging, funny and a rocking good read. As the title implies, the main character, Raymond Gunt, is not a nice person. The book is written in the first person, in what is known as the “unreliable narrator” style. Ray Gunt is a highly unreliable narrator.

FictionSatire

Lydia Millet

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

Though they often deal in dark themes—humanity’s rampant destruction of the earth is a common backdrop—Lydia Millet’s books are also, paradoxically, hilarious. Granted, it’s a grim humor, laced with sadness—but even so, it’s probably no surprise that the author in conversation is warm-voiced and inclined toward laughter.

Millet, who spoke to us from a parking lot outside an L.A. Fitness, and then from inside her car when it started to rain, sounds thoroughly non-gloomy on the phone. In her voice, there’s no sense of the looming apocalypse that in most of her books is a given.

“I tend to laugh out loud while writing,” Millet says, “which makes me seem insane because I usually write in public places. I laugh as I read, too.”

If this sounds unlikely, it’s only because you haven’t read Millet’s new novel, Mermaids in Paradise. Not LOLing while doing so is a bit of a challenge. Probably her flat-out funniest book yet, it’s part satire, part social commentary and part rollicking adventure.

The story is set mostly on a tropical island and is narrated by a woman named Deb, who’s on her honeymoon with her new husband, Chip. Chip’s extreme gregariousness leads the couple to befriend a marine biologist, who soon makes a startling discovery: a bunch of actual mermaids hanging out near the coral reef.

The revelation of the mermaid colony prompts an ugly three-way battle between the forces of exploitation, preservation and religious hysteria that—despite the element of fantasy at its core—is plausible enough to feel like documentary. And like the best comedy, it’s kind of depressing.

Deb, our saucy narrator, sounds like what you’d hear if the Internet had a collective voice. She speaks in a hyper-caffeinated pastiche of received language and piercingly vivid detail; she’s obviously brilliant, but she is also a creature of this world, the world of status updates and marketing-speak. There is an art to the precision deployment of the well-worn phrase in the service of comedy, and Deb has mastered it. When she trots out “literally” or “quite a bit” or “so that was the situation there,” it’s hilarious rather than annoying, because she wields these phrases like weapons.

“I love judgmental women, their voices,” Millet says. “I enjoyed writing her. This book and another I wrote together are kind of a matched set. I wrote them both as sort of laugh machines for myself while I worked on something that was difficult.” (The second book is called The Palms of Bora-Bora; when it might appear is not yet decided, Millet says.)

It wasn’t a struggle to find Deb’s voice, says Millet; in fact, it’s usually a strong voice that starts a novel off. “The struggle is to remain within the voice as things happen,” she explains. “There needs to be change and transformation”—other characters necessarily arrive and do things, the plot develops—“and that’s when it’s harder to sustain the voice.”

Deb’s best friend, Gina, has an even more cutting tone and is equally uproarious. She’s a dedicated ironist and devastatingly observant. Millet says she’s known people like this since college, who are “just so committed to irony.”

Chip, on the other hand, provides a sweet-natured counterpoint to the acidic humor of Deb and Gina. “Chip is my ideal man in a certain way,” Millet says. “He’s so friendly and a geek and also kind of hot, maybe not that bright, but—like a Labrador.”

In the book, Deb refers at one point to Chip’s “golden-retriever light” having dimmed after a conversation. “Golden retriever, that’s kind of harsh,” Millet says now, laughing. “He’s more of a Lab.”

Though any novel with mermaids in it is arguably going to be a bit outlandish, Millet plays those elements fairly straight. She says she hopes the book does not come across as wacky. “Wacky and quirky are adjectives I strive to avoid,” she says, “now that I’m 45.”

“Wacky and quirky are adjectives I strive to avoid,” she says, “now that I’m 45.”

She does find it easier to work with plot when there’s also humor—but adds that going for laughs is a bit of a gamble.

“You really want people to laugh,” she says. “It’s not going to be rewarded in any other way,” since funny books are often not taken seriously as literature.

“We should pay attention to humor and satire,” she says. “It’s wrong that they’re sort of second-class citizens in the world of literary prestige—and especially if they’re written by women, I’m guessing.”

One advantage of couching serious ideas inside a humorously told story is that it tends to increase receptivity. “It makes us more . . . I don’t want to say more open, but it makes us rawer in a given moment,” Millet says.

This certainly holds true for Mermaids in Paradise. Spiked throughout the book are a handful of gut-punch moments, and their impact is greater because of the overall relaxed tone of the novel; the combination leaves you exposed, rather than on the defensive as you might otherwise be when reading a book whose subject is our plundering of the natural world. This is doubly true of the ending, which contains a twist that puts everything that came before in a new light.

In addition to these two comic novels and the more serious project she wrote them to escape from, Millet also published a young adult novel earlier this year with Akashic Books and works 30 hours a week as a staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson. She’s also raising two kids: a girl, 10, and boy, 6. How does she balance her various responsibilities?

“There hasn’t been a balance,” she says. She gives herself three hours of writing time on weekends and can sometimes eke out half an hour on a weekday. “I’m definitely writing at a slower pace than I used to,” she says. But she loves the work she does at the Center, and it obviously ties in with her fiction-writing interests. “I wouldn’t want to give it up, even if I could financially.”

Still, she says, “I wouldn’t mind just 10 more hours [in] a week.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Though they often deal in dark themes—humanity’s rampant destruction of the earth is a common backdrop—Lydia Millet’s books are also, paradoxically, hilarious. Granted, it’s a grim humor, laced with sadness—but even so, it’s probably no surprise that the author in conversation is warm-voiced and inclined toward laughter.
FictionSatireDebut Fiction

Julia Elliot

Interview by Lily McLemore

Julia Elliott’s debut novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, zips between various genres, from Southern gothic to sci-fi satire, in a clever, wildly imaginative romp through the landscape of the South and the neural pathways of one man’s brain. At times heartbreaking and at times hilarious, The New and Improved Romie Futch announces Elliott as an undeniably original voice.

Romie Futch is a sensitive, deeply lonely taxidermist in South Carolina, and his life consists of pining for his ex-wife, drinking (a lot of) beers and talking about metal bands with a few buddies while sinking into debt. When he offers himself up as a test subject for an intelligence enhancement study, he doesn’t quite know what he’s getting into. He emerges from the neurocenter with a brain housing the rough equivalent of the Library of Congress, splitting headaches and the desire to make some truly beautiful, bizarre taxidermy.

I sat down with Elliott while she was in Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books, and we talked about hog hunting, the tall tales of the South, meat-eating plants and more. 

This is a pretty wildly creative plot for a novel. Where did it come from?
Well actually, it started as a short story, and it was just insanely too complicated for a short story. I was teaching a sophomore literature class at University of South Carolina, and we were reading some dystopian stuff. I would have this game that we played everyday: which fact is fake which one is real. So I would always have to find things that were outrageous that were actually happening. I came upon all this research on brain download procedures. And it’s still in the experimental phases, of course. People had different theories about how it would be done. Some quite horrifying, like that bioengineered nanobiotic creatures would rearrange your neurons to create knowledge. I mean, it sounds pretty ridiculous.

I started thinking about how absurd that was, and the idea of a tech student from South Carolina who never went to college getting a “brain download.” I tried it in a short story, and it was way too short. I didn’t even introduce the neurocenter at all. It was just, suddenly he can evoke fancy diction. I sent it to maybe one or two places, and they were like, “Wow this is pretty crazy, but kind of out of control as a short story.”

Five or six years later, I read my cousin Carl [Elliot]’s piece in The New Yorker called “Guinea-pigging.” It’s about test research subjects who do it for a living. They go from one facility to another, taking all kinds of crazy drugs, and that’s how they live. It’s even such a weird subculture that there’s a zine and stuff. So that was truly fascinating, and that inspired me to return to the story to flesh out the neurocenter and create more of a novel-length work. 

I started thinking about how absurd that was, and the idea of a tech student from South Carolina who never went to college getting a “brain download.” 

Romie is really transformed. He’s a supreme genius, but in the beginning he’s just a regular guy. Is Romie still Romie after the tests, or is he essentially two different characters? How did you write that?
One thing I wanted to convey was that he was a complex and smart character before he gets the brain downloads. That just gave him a certain vocabulary and conceptual framework through which he could analyze the state of being and maybe gain a little more agency because of that—critique the world a little bit more. 

And part of it was investigating what effect does [knowledge] have on you. I grew up in a small, rural Southern town, and my dad was an elementary school principal, so education was important, but I wasn’t from a really sophisticated cultural background. Then I went to grad school all the way up to the Ph.D. level. [The novel] is sort of a way to make sense of all of the cultural realms that I inhabited. 

This novel is about awful things that humans do to each other and the terrifying ramifications of science, but there’s also a lot of humor to it. Was that intentional? 
I just couldn’t help it. In my short story collection [The Wilds], some of the stories are very funny, and then some of them have this kind of dreamy, magic realist quality. So I kind of have two modes I can go into. It’s pretty over-the-top satirical, but I wanted it to have a heart also. The situation is just so absurd, and it was really fun playing around with it. [Romie’s] voice was really fun to create.

Your short stories, like this novel, take place in the South, as well. What about the setting of the South really inspires you?
It’s almost ecological, because I’m tormented by the summers. In several interviews I’ve described them as psychedelic summers. The cicadas are shrieking, and it’s really hot, and you feel kind of delirious, and it seems like it’s never going to end. I do feel very inspired by that exuberance, and the low country is a very jungle-y place. There are even species of meat-eating plants—the Venus fly trap and the pitcher plant.

Are you serious?
Yeah, they’re in certain parts of the coastal plain. The pitcher plant’s really weird, because frogs fall in, and it has these digestive enzymes. There’s this kind of brutality, there’s this beauty. I’m really inspired by the ecology and also the absurd grotesquery.

I feel like also my family has this tradition of telling ridiculous stories, and teasing children a lot with ridiculous stories. Trying to scare them with stories of ghosts, whereas nowadays, childrearing has certain rules about protecting the tender beings. I actually have a toddler, and do I tease her a lot. I play around with the boundaries of what kinds of things are OK to introduce. Because I feel like the things I was introduced to—especially the humor and the teasing—creates a certain form of resilience and humor. 

 There’s this kind of brutality, there’s this beauty. I’m really inspired by the ecology and also the absurd grotesquery.

Do you think that’s just a Southern thing?
Probably not, but it does seem like, compared to say, people I know from the Midwest—they seem more stoical. In Maine, I read a story about some girls who went to a slumber party, and this Jesus-freak granny comes downstairs and starts ranting about the Book of Revelation, and it’s got all this graphic grotesque imagery and lots of humor, and then she levitates briefly. They all stared at me with not one crack of a smile. I asked my host, “What’s up? Wasn’t that story kind of funny? No one laughed.” And he was like, “They were all raised on farms, and life was harsh, and it snows for eight months of the year.” So maybe there’s something in the delirium of the South that creates this kind of thing. You know, the tall tale is very Southern.

There are so many literary and mythological, philosophical and medical references throughout the novel—not to mention hog hunting. Did you just pore over research? 
The academic stuff was already there, so I just made use of it. Most of it was still in there, floating around. To be honest, I’d always considered much of it useless, and so finally it’s put to use. The brain download stuff I had to research. It's all very theoretical, so it was easy to invent. Just throw in nanobots and people are set.

With the hoghunting, the best sites for that were message boards, where they were just talking about stuff in their own voice. I was bowled over by their lyricism and wit. I even stole some of their lines, like, “Hogs take a heap of killing.” They’re very hard to kill, a heap of killing!

OK, can you really make eyes blink in taxidermy?
No, I don’t think so. But we’re close! I mean there’s rogue taxidermy, with weirdo artists doing stuff. I went to taxidermy shows, and all Southern taxidermists that I saw created these life-like mountings with their Disney-esque little scenes. I didn’t see anything humorous—except there was a line of sportsman squirrels playing golf, shooting hoops. But in rogue taxidermy, they’ll add wings to monkeys, that sort of thing. So then I thought, why not make an animatronic hog, almost like an Elizabethan masque, this elaborate crazy diorama. It’d be hard to do, but it was easy to pretend to do it in a fictional work!

The book is also kind of a mock epic, and an epic is a masculine dominant genre. That was fun to spoof.

The Wilds was almost completely focused on the feminine and the feminine voice, but Romie Futch is completely focused on the masculine. What was it like to switch voices? 
Well, a short story collection doesn’t necessarily represent everything you’ve done over a certain period, just the best stories. There are a couple of stories that didn’t make it in that have male narrators. I do teach women and gender studies, so there are definitely feminist themes everywhere, but it’s almost like my macho, "hesher" inner-warrior was dying to get out. What’s even more ironic is that I was pregnant when I wrote the first draft—with a female. So my body had more estrogen in it than it ever had. A female baby was steeping, and out pops this masculine character—but he’s also very vulnerable. The book is also kind of a mock epic, and an epic is a masculine dominant genre. That was fun to spoof.

Romie comes out of the experiment with a new brain, and he’s got all this knowledge, but he chooses to focus on this very cave-man-like task of hunting a hog. No matter how much technology there is, are humans just going to be humans?
Some people believe that! Evolutionary biologists think that we’re all cave people trapped in a technologically advanced place. But one thing that was interesting was that hunting can be quite complex, and it’s very technological these days. You can get all kinds of target-illuminated feeders and weird tracking lights and digital topography maps. Hunters can get seriously into that kind of technology. On the other hand, he’s becoming obsessed with the beast, and having an epic beast theme was a good way to make the plot move a little bit, with the tongue-in-cheek Moby Dick thing. But also, the reason he wants the pig is because he wants to put it in the most ass-kicking diorama in the history of taxidermy, and it is also a mutagenic recombinant DNA freak from a biotech lab. So it’s not your regular hog hunt.

I was wondering about the theme of youth in your work. Romie is continually harking back to youth and the beauty of young women and men. I was wondering why he’s so focused on youth.
Because he’s reached a middle-age crisis. Mostly you think about women in their 40s getting hung up on that, but I’ve applied all those things to a male character, which I think is just as true, but you don’t see explored in fiction as much. Usually male writers explore it in a different way, I suppose. A lot of male writers might explore that by having a male character have an affair with a younger woman. And there might be some anxiety and some feelings of doom, but for the most part, it’ll also be about reinvigorating themselves through the affair. In reality, it doesn’t quite seem to always work that way. Romie does have one encounter with a young woman, in yet another absurd sex scene. I love to write ridiculous sex scenes. I don’t think I could write an erotic one.

The reason he wants the pig is because he wants to put it in the most ass-kicking diorama in the history of taxidermy.

Do you think there’s a future for these brain downloads?
If you look on the internet, they’re always saying, "It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when." There are computers made with biological components already, from leech neurons and things. But they’re not hooked up to human brains. A lot of the stuff that they’re doing, they’ll do something to a stroke victims brain so they can move their arm, and that’s the very basic beginning of it. So thought would be the next step, I suppose. I hope I’ll be dead before that happens.

There’s so many authors references in this novel, like Nabokov and Karen Russell, whom you’ve been compared to. I was wondering what authors you admire and really enjoy reading.
That’s such a hard question because I read so much, and I love so many things. I love magic realism like Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. I also love weirdos like Angela Carter, Karen Russell and Kafka. But I also love many realists, like Jonathan Franzen.

But there are certain books that create a turning point for you. When I was younger, the first one was Nabokov, and it was the language that did it. The second was Angela Carter, and I thought, “Oh my God! She’s rewriting fairy tales from a female perspective. There’s so much that can be done with this! I can have weird magical moments!” And later George Saunders and Karen Russell, definitely. With Saunders it was like, you can use cheesy genre things in a literary way, and with Russell it was like, yeah, the stories are wacked out, but its really her language that appeals to me, because it’s so beautiful and rich and poetic. All of those were inspiring, but there’s so much. Jonathan Latham. Sam Lipsyte. I need to name more female writers! Kelly Link . . . I just read the Amelia Grey collection, and I loved that. 

It’s OK, I won’t pressure you for more.
I feel like when people ask that, it’s like OK, here’s my alphabetized list. It’s five pages long.

(Author photo by JS Dennis)

 

 

Julia Elliott’s debut novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, zips between various genres, from Southern gothic to sci-fi satire, in a clever, wildly imaginative romp through the landscape of the South and the neural pathways of one man’s brain. At times heartbreaking and at other times hilarious, The New and Improved Romie Futch announces Elliott as an undeniably original voice.
FictionSatire

Carl Hiaasen

Interview by Jay MacDonald

It’s been 30 years since homegrown Florida farceur Carl Hiaasen sucker-punched us with Tourist Season, his cockeyed beach-read salute to a state far weirder and funnier than we were led to believe by the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or John D. MacDonald.

In the years since, the Miami Herald columnist has turned out a dozen equally deranged satires, establishing his own sunbaked, bestselling subgenre with truth-in-publishing titles like Strip Tease, Sick Puppy, Basket Case and Skinny Dip. He also managed to share his skewed view of the world with kids, launching Hoot in 2002 (the Jimmy Buffett-produced film version followed in 2006). That series continued with Flush, Scat, Chomp and Skink—No Surrender.

Off-page, he played guitar—badly—with fellow authors Stephen King and Dave Barry in the Rock Bottom Remainders, wrote songs with Warren Zevon and saw Strip Tease transformed into a blockbuster film starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds.

In his latest novel, Razor Girl, Hiaasen returns to Key West for another twisted tale featuring ex-detective Andrew Yancy (Bad Monkey), who’s been demoted to island restaurant inspector. Warning: You may not get past page one without a spit-take at the set up for this ribald tale involving staged accidents, mob-backed beach renourishment, a “Duck Dynasty”-like reality TV star run amok—and something called a Gambian pouched rat.

Did you vet that first scene in Razor Girl with your wife, Fenia, and the family?
It was based on an actual accident that had happened in the Keys a few years ago. My oldest son had emailed me the newspaper article about a woman who was shaving her “bikini area” and crashing a car. It elicited some wonderfully bewildered comments from the State Highway Patrolman who had to work the accident. Anyway, I’d filed it away and kept wondering, how do I work something like this into the book somehow? So I finally decided to hell with it, I’ll just start the book with it and see what happens from there, because there’s no subtle way to ease into a scene like that.

Florida being an epicenter of staged accident fraud . . .
Yeah, it’s a big deal down there. We have such insurance fraud in general and Medicare in particular, so there’s no shortage of manpower if you want to launch a scam like [the title character Merry does]; we have plenty of volunteers. It’s amazing what people will do, the amount of enterprise that goes into a crime. If only they could have redirected that energy to something productive.

For the first time in years, you’re no longer a Keys resident, right?
Yeah, we just closed on our place in Islamorada, as a matter of fact. It was painful, but we weren’t spending very much time down there. We lived there for quite a while, then we moved and got down there whenever we could, but it wasn’t enough. And the kids are basically grown at this point; our youngest is starting his junior year in high school, and that’s a pretty consuming year. Our recent family vacation trips are numbered and you fit in the college search, so. We still go down there; we just stay in a hotel like normal people.

The best part of the closing was, the buyers had the walk-through and we have a North American crocodile that lives down there. You don’t see them that much; they’re very skittish, not like alligators. They really stay away from people. So it’s very cool when you see one. So they did the walk through with their Realtor and there was the croc sprawled out on our beach. They signed the papers right away, so it didn’t scare them off. Florida is one of the few places where you have to worry about something like that screwing up your real estate deal. I was pleased that he put in an appearance.

"Florida is one of the few places where you have to worry about [a crocodile] screwing up your real estate deal."

You’re a master at weaving in all manner of Florida exotica into your novels, but readers may not have heard of Razor Girl’s resident rodent, the Gambian pouched rat. Is there such a beast?
Yeah, yeah, they’re real. I’ve never laid eyes on one; I wish I had. I’ve been reading news stories for years about these in the Marathon area, so I started to research these things and they’re exactly as I describe them in the book. Nowadays you can go online and see images of them, and the very first one I pulled up to look at showed some guy in Senegal holding one up on a pitchfork, and they’re huge. In others, people made pets out of them and were walking them like poodles on little harnesses. I just became intrigued that these would make a great foe for Yancy as a restaurant inspector. It feeds all of my perverse literary instincts.

Floridians do tend to underestimate the breeding potential of nonnative wild animals, as witnessed by the python population in the Everglades.
Yeah, these would be perfect python food. The pythons might take care of them, but then what takes care of the python?

Yancy made his debut in your last adult novel, Bad Monkey. Are we talking series here?
I like him. I’ve never had the same protagonist in two successive novels, but I like him. I’m fond of the guy and I felt bad for him. He was a good cop and I wanted to see him press on his case to get back on the police force, so I decided to give him a try to get his badge back.

Yancy’s restaurant-inspector purgatory does have its warped appeal, however.
I do enjoy the restaurant inspection stuff. In Florida, all the restaurant inspections are a matter of public record and you can go online and call up your favorite or least favorite restaurant and read with either glee or chagrin what was discovered in the last rodent feces and pestilence. They count them, even. It was fascinating, so I had a bunch of those files I used. And when I met my wife, she was managing a restaurant down in the Keys, so I certainly had some insight in that sense, and it just seemed like an interesting kind of job to go to from being a cop. At the same time, you still need some cop skills. Some of those kitchens look like crime scenes! If you’ve read Anthony Bourdain’s early books, he just went nuts!

Speaking of nuts, Yancy’s romance with our razor girl Merry is hardly beach-read material.
(Laughs) No; sometimes people are attracted to the wrong kind of people for the right kind of reasons, if that makes sense. I like the character of Merry quite a bit from the very first page on. She had a good energy and kept everyone off-balance, which is something you look for in a character because that happens in real life. You meet people like that. Yes, she’s involved in this scam, but she does have morals and lines she doesn’t cross. Plus, she’s smarter than most of the guys she meets, which is also true in real life for the most part. She’s resourceful and doesn’t let herself get pushed around. I like women characters who are always a step or two ahead of the male characters. Those type of characters end up surprising you as you’re writing them, and that’s great fun.

"Sometimes people are attracted to the wrong kind of people for the right kind of reasons, if that makes sense."

You managed to keep the “Duck Dynasty”-inspired Buck Nance subplot comfortably offstage for the most part. Was that intentional?
Oh God, yeah; especially now. I was writing and some of this was set pre-Trump.

Speaking of Trump, did you sign the anti-Trump petition along with your Rock-Bottom Remainder comrade Stephen King and hundreds of other authors?
I haven’t even seen it, but I’ve been in Montana for several months. I’ve had him in my columns so my position is pretty clear on him.

I take it you won’t be checking the Donald’s ballot box this fall?
Yeah. Selfishly, part of me would want to, just because of the column material I would have. I’ve met him twice; once at a movie premiere in New York, the other at an Everglades Foundation conference at Mar-a-Lago. I’ll look up Stephen’s petition, but suffice to say I’m not going to get invited back to Mar-a-Lago.

It’s been 30 years since your breakthrough novel, Tourist Season. Since then, you’ve had bestselling films made of your books, Jimmy Buffett songs written about your characters and a rock band of literary musicians to occupy your spare time.
It’s mindboggling. Almost impossible to think about that. I haven’t been on stage with the Remainders or touched a guitar in 10 years. I don’t really have an excuse for that. Since my buddy Warren Zevon passed away a few years ago, I haven’t felt the mood to pick up the six or seven chords that I actually knew.

One of your nonfiction books that has earned its own rabid following is The Downhill Lie, about your futile attempt to master the game of golf. Do you still play, if only in vain?
No. I messed up my back and had surgery about two-and-a-half years ago, and they assured me I would be back on the golf course inside of three months, but that’s not the case. I do go back and try, but I get about seven holes and it hurts. Tiger Woods has had the same surgery several times, but it only took one time to put me out of action. It does get to me. I could probably still play a little, but all it would take in my case is one bad shot and I would be back on the operating table. I still love to follow it on television very avidly, but when you have that kind of pain, you don’t need to be asked twice to take a seat.           

Is there a book you’ve always wanted to write? Your great white whale?
No. I have to say, and this is going to sound very unambitious, but it’s always the next book. I do alternate between the kids’ books and the grownup books now, so as soon as I’ve finished one, I’m already fixating on the next one. I think it’s sort of a newspaper mentality: What’s the next story? What’s the next book? I love fly-fishing, but so many great writers have written about fly-fishing that I have no great desire to weigh in on that; it’s been done better than I could do it.

What writers excite you today?
There’s a really great young fiction writer out in Montana named Callan Wink, who just had a book of short stories out (In Hindsight). You read his stuff and you hear echoes of Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison. I think he’s going to be a big talent; he really is a sharp kid.

Will we be seeing Skink again?
I don’t know. I never am sure. They’ve got to be books in which he fits; where it’s logical for him to sort of pop up. The story may come to me. Right now, I’m focused on a new kid’s book, and Skink appeared in the last one of those, but this one is different. My characters go all over the map and it’s like herding kittens to try to keep them confined. I get so wrapped up in that that I don’t think very far down the road. I know some writers who can tell you what their next three books will be, but I can’t tell you what my next three paragraphs will be. That’s just the way I’ve always done it. And all the time, keeping one eye on the news because I’m still doing the Herald column once a week when I’m not traveling. And in political years, that always claims a lot of my attention.

Prediction time: Who’s going to win the presidential election this November?
I think Hillary is going to win. It’s going to be difficult for Trump to carry Florida because of the Hispanics and African Americans. And women; women voters are not fond of him down there. Those are key groups. That’s why Obama won Florida in 2008 and 2012. But our hope and prayer is that it doesn’t come down to Florida; let it be Ohio or Pennsylvania. We’ve had our share of the spotlight.

As if!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Razor Girl.

 Author photo by Quinn Hiaasen.

It’s been 30 years since homegrown Florida farceur Carl Hiaasen sucker-punched us with Tourist Season, his cockeyed beach-read salute to a state far weirder and funnier than we were led to believe by the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or John D. MacDonald. He's back with a new madcap adventure set in the Florida Keys.

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