Sister City Revolution

Bay Area author Matt Stewart has turned loose a bright, peppery, infectious, debut novel, The French Revolution, an irreverent literacy farce that entertains for most of its cheerfully eccentric path. It’s fresh, funny, and bright, qualities seldom found in our overly earnest literature, when low-rent genre novels like Twilight are written with earnestness reminiscent of John Steinbeck and Eugene O’Neill.

Though it alludes indirectly to the traumatic events of 1789, The French Revolution is a contemporary novel and a mock family saga. Its arching tone strongly reminds me of another modern comic classic, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces—a picaresque tale populated by broadly drawn characters enraptured by delusions that range from petty to grand. It’s a comedy about family, food, lust, the quest for power and influence and—maybe less successfully—modern San Francisco politics.

Set in a circus-like world of modern San Francisco, the novel follows the history of the Van Twinkle family from 1989 (two hundred years after the titular event) to 2019. Esmerelda Van Twinkle is a brilliant but failed pastry chef who has retreated into the confines of an Upper Market Street copy shop where, garrulous and gargantuan, she rules with efficient iron hand as she balloons to a weight that forcibly attaches her to numerous modes of special transportation, including a walker. Most of her life seems dedicated to keeping her feet off the ground at all times.

Esmerelda seems no man’s idea of a hot romance. But most everyone’s attractive to someone  and so Esmerelda’s Special Someone is a lovable, coupon distributor named Jasper Winslow to whom Esmie looks “better than a pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner.”  Jasper’s not just making sport of a fat woman. His sap runs so high that one afternoon, he slips Esmerelda a confectionery mickey and steers her into the blue water bed of a sex club swimming pool where, despite all fleshly obstacles, he leaves her with child.

Two childs to be precise, who pop out precisely on Bastille Day, July 14,  in a gas station bathroom, one of many happy grotesqueries that decorate the story. In tribute to this festive historical day, Esmerelda names the girl Robespierre and Marat, after two of the original revolution’s most prominent movers. We follow this new family home to their dictatorial grandmother and, from there, into the wider, ruthless world.

By tying, however remotely, the French Revolution to a family saga of misfits in San Francisco (the Paris of the West), the book seems to be conveying the idea that the same passions that drove that historic event are mirrored everywhere, even in the family dynamics of colorful outsiders. This not the place to argue whether or not this is true. The real pleasure—as in all novels, dramatic and comic—is in the telling and there’s plenty of that here.

However, events do sag somewhat toward the end. A parallel story following the murderous antics of a teenage East Coast sociopath starts out with great promise, but by the time his bloody path crosses the Van Twinkles’, he’s become less interesting and essential to the story. Robespierre’s entry into local politics doesn’t ping true either. U.S. foreign policy misadventures feel shoehorned in here to little effect, I think. The novel, at this point, loses its savvy as it seems to forget an essential truism, one equally ripe for satire—that all politics is local. As a result, the action flags and the novel stumbles to a whirlwindy but somewhat forgettable ending.

Still, Matt Stewart writes in a refreshing, entertaining voice that dances and sings at happily skewed pitch. I'd look forward to more, if I were you.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield's original comic screenplay Whackers will make its debut on Scrib'd on July 5, 2011, also from Ambler House. Other material can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. And if you're still not tired of him, he can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

The Exciting Secret Adventures of Naked Man

Author John-Ivan Palmer’s long colorful career in American show business gives him a lens able to focus on corners far removed from the experience of most writers.

Since the 1960s, the peripatetic Palmer, has roamed the country, first as a magician and, later as a popular stage hypnotist and mentalist. Along the way, he's written a huge number of of distinctive, often brilliant, articles on the often-treacherous ins-and-outs of the fading world of traveling show business folk. He is, in his words, "the only known literary author who is a stage hypnotist."

In his long overdue first novel, the farcical, roughly charming and racy picaresque Motels of Burning Madness (The Drill Press, 195 pp; available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.), he takes willing readers on a fast, entertaining, bawdy, no-holds-barred voyage into the musky backwater swamp of male strippers and other remote bizarries of live entertainment in America.

Though very explicit, Motels is not a sex novel at all of the type found in Borders’ erotica section. Instead, it's a picaresque novel, a traditional form stretching back to Ancient Rome and Petronious' Satyricon. Set in the early 1980s Rome of Los Angeles, its protagonist is Huey Dubois, a 24-year-old gigolo and stripper of fine uncut endowment, not much brain, but more heart than you’d expect. Handsome Huey is a misfit’s misfit—a good soul who’s not much good at anything but being a prancing, g-stringed boy toy, and because of that, he always seems to be bumping n’ grinding away in survival
mode. He’s paradoxical young man: though an exhibitionistic gigolo, stripper (and other kinds of performance, er, artist), he pursues these pursuits while a sense of misplaced honor constantly struggles to break through his selfish exterior.

Even his own private desires make him a freak in an environment already a-roiling with alternative, offbeat desires (S&M fans and the like). Huey has little taste for women his own age. He likes them older. In fact, much older as revealed in Palmer’s sympathetic portraits of Huey’s three main forty years-plus paramours: Malibu matron Madelein; Debra, the abused, lonely wife of an L.A. cop; and, the real
song of his heart, Gloria Madlock, the late-night waitress at the Donut Hole for whom Huey loyally puts on a free midnight show from behind his hotel window, san culottes.

As the novel opens, Madelein from Malibu has just given Huey the boot out of her beachfront bodega in the mis-belief that Huey stole her jewelry. The next day, Madelein winds up mysteriously dead. Not surprisingly, straight society’s suspicion naturally turns toward Huey, who, like his associates in the sexual underworld, is no friend of law and order, lying to the cops even when he’d better off telling the truth.

Soon, Gloria herself mysteriously vanishes as the law closes in. Huey has to leave L.A., but on the way out, he takes us on a gamy, hair-curling tour through the underground of male strip venues, “staggette” parties, private video shoots, all of this arranged by some of the sleaziest, most crooked agents imaginable.

With the hot breath of the law steaming his shoulders, Huey jumps from a bedroom window and lands in a fugitive’s gig--a traveling male striptease troupe that takes him through Las Vegas and on a zany zigzag into America’s heartland (where the biggest audiences of all exist for this kind of entertainment). This barrel-bottom, Barnum & Bailey male animal act happens to be the hideout of a fellow narcissist whom Huey suspects made off with both Madelein’s jewelry and her life: the perfectly named Billy Slipton.

After a series of entertaining and tawdry mishaps—why anyone would ever choose this showbiz career path befuddles my comparatively conservative mind—Huey rips off and gives the nefarious Slipton the slip and sets fire to the troupe’s motel in his escape (hence the title).

Hugh finally tracks his beloved Gloria in Omaha, only to learn that she, like so many in this world, keeps her own secrets, even while parading naked.

After a pungent exploration and analysis of women’s mud wrestling (there’s actually a business and craft behind this performance genre), Huey learns once again he’s only found another bad refuge and so must flee. From there, he stumbles into my favorite stop-over in the entire novel: Clown Town, a bizarro setting that could birth a whole novel of its own inside its limits. (At this point, I must leave you to discover this community for yourself.)

At the end, Huey does land on his feet, a little wiser and, as he realizes with touching insight, a little older. Like other comic heroes, he may not get what he starts out wanting, but he gets something much better.

Palmer—who worked as a male stripper to research Motels (I doubt George Plimpton went so far)—describes Huey’s world with lively evocative care, insight, humor and remarkable kindness. Such a milieu is a natural target for easy putdowns and lazy, knee-jerk moralism. Palmer avoids both.

Sometimes, though, the narrative seems thin. We’re told little, if anything, about Huey’s background and the plot eventually seems to drift away from its whodunnit aspects. Motels of Burning Madness could have burned on for a few pages longer; for example, I wanted more insight into Huey’s brief sojurns of dancing in respectable middle-class households. Though, with a roomful of women grabbing at his intimacies, Huey probably doesn’t have much time to ponder the family photos he passes by and reflect on his outsider's role in the secret world hidden behind those bland smiling masks.

(Photo by author)