“Love, Love, Lovin It” Says the Tree Canyon River Review

There exists now a book, a “funny” book and a funny book, of short stories and sketches, six years old and aging. It’s a first book by an author who has since made his modest reputation on offerings from larger small presses who better pay their cover designers. Which is not to say the cover of this collection is unrepresentative: In fact, the title and cover art taken together create a just joshin’ vibe that the book occasionally transcends but mostly earns.

The wit at work in most of the shorter pieces isn’t so much in the premises, which are familiar and are almost exclusively writer-insidery — fake lit mag contributor bios, blurbs for a fake novel, synopses of fake novels — but in how gamefully the author works within those premises, how they become a vehicle for his quick turns of sentence. “I know you recognize this hat,” the author seems to say, “but try and tell me it doesn’t look good on me.”

Little funny pieces seem to come easily to the author, and I wished, initially, that he would push them farther, turning them from sketches into stories. That is, I wanted to see what would happen when hw folded these jokes in on themselves — turning the pieces suddenly dark or tragic or political or three-dimensional or experimental, in some way pulling the rug from under me — instead of simply doing his trick and then leaving. But then when we get to the longer works collected here, the truth comes out: The author is uninterested in turns or complications or rug-pulling. He sets the nail where he wants it and hammers away. Long story or short, I’m saying, this is a book of gags.

The novella-length title story is narrated by a poor dumb schmuck whose ambition to write a historical of his nation gets scaled back to a history of his podunk town, which again gets scaled back to a history of his search for the history of the town. When the author lets the narrator really dig into absurd regionalism, the story begins to hum with folksy energy. It’s these flashes of earnest wanting that I suspect one blurber was thinking of when she praised the author’s heart for poor saps everywhere.

Mostly, though, the story follows the dude around as he gets adverbily accosted, arrested, and accidentally mixed up with some bad, bad guys. Think: Ernest Goes to Fargo.

Take the following passage our sap could well have narrated:

I had suddenly found myself in a “do or die” situation, which is perhaps what Ben Franklin meant when he expertly wrote “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” in the papery yellow margins of the Emancipation Proclamation. Suffice it to say this, readers… I was in a pickle!

The narrator’s tenuous command of language is the story’s chief export — a valid narrative tactic which, when it works, shines a light on each of our failing struggles to make ourselves understood. But this guy’s offered to us via the easiest dramatic irony of all: He doesn’t know he’s a dope. We do.

Ultimately, this “heart for poor saps” is the same heart an opportunistic middle schooler pretends to espouse when he befriends a loser only to report back to the cool kids all the dumb stuff the loser did and said.

That the other characters are as cartoony as our narrator flattens the whole thing out further, renders the plot who-cares, and turns the story into a vehicle for variations on the same flaccid joke. So if I’m on page five and I’ve already had my fun with the one thing the author does well, just what am I supposed to do with the rest of the book?

We readers ask the most of those authors who write in the genre we’re most naturally drawn to: Readers of spooky/sexy fiction may for instance ask their authors to develop and maintain a consistent vampiric folklore. I ask writers of comedic fiction to do something — anything — besides make me laugh.