A lively but profane comic tale.
A well-endowed dilettante seeks to turn around his train-wreck life in this debut picaresque novel.
Painter Puchy Mushkin’s identity is entangled with his prodigious phallus (“Big Puchy”). “Truth is, my penis is the perfect metaphor for my talent,” he explains early in the story. “I was born with too much of it and have been dragging it along like a box of rocks ever since.” He’s an artist who doesn’t believe in sharing his art with the world, which is why he works a “straight” job as a caterer. When his wife leaves him as a result of his myriad anti-social qualities, the bisexual Puchy decides to date men for a while, beginning with an ill-fated courtship with a handyman named Robby. That relationship ends with Robby crucifying Puchy to a wall using a power drill and three-inch screws. The resulting scandal leaves Puchy a laughingstock, disowned by his parents, and without any reasonable way to make a living. In response to his state of failure, Puchy decides his problem is that he’s been trying too hard to succeed. He needs to start quashing his own desire so as to never be disappointed. After Robby attempts to murder Puchy in the hospital, the hero flees to Los Angeles to crash at the home of his former college roommate Shane Addams, hoping to lay low until he can testify against the handyman in court. LA is a hard place to forsake desire, it turns out, especially since Shane wants to make a movie about Puchy’s life, and every woman he meets wants to take his famous appendage for a spin. As he dips his toes in the city’s seedier corners—including the mayoral race—will Puchy be able to kill that oppressive tyrant, desire? Or will his appetites lead to the destruction of everyone around him?
The energetic novel presents a wide variety of adventures starring Puchy. But the tale rests somewhere on the more offensive end of fratire, and Shallman seems eager to challenge readers’ senses of decency whenever possible. Puchy has few redeeming qualities, and he narrates his story as though he’s deliberately trying to be as off-putting as possible. Here, he describes being recorded by strangers while having sex with one of his co-workers at a rave: “When Gretchen noticed we were being filmed, she immediately decoupled and ran off screaming, like the little Vietnamese girl in the painting, leaving me alone in the cabana with Big Puchy. This is not good, I thought to myself, scanning the crowd, hoping someone might take the hint and finish him off.” Despite the initial graphic description of sex with Robby, the vast majority of Puchy’s escapades are with women, running the gamut in terms of fetishes and transgressions. Beyond a kind of sophomoric ribaldry, the author’s artistic aims are unclear. There are a lot of jokes about Judaism, some jabs at electoral politics, and an unexpectedly violent third act, but readers are left without much of a sense of what any of it was for.
A lively but profane comic tale.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9863548-0-4
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Flying Bed Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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