MADOREABLE

I read the first ten or twenty pages of this the other night before I fell asleep having not slept the night before and then working an extra-long day on the range packing 5.56MM rounds into magazines and handing them out to officers and privates and seeing the same faces over and over all people who are not supposed to be able to shoot well and therefore cannot and one time I went out to shoot and it turned out my sight was hella fucked up and this leads me to believe that the next time I qualify I will do much better than 24 out of 40 because my sight must have been fucked up before but somehow I still managed to knock down 24 of those fucking targets but anyway later that day I had this thing that was mandatory we all had to go to regarding pre-deployment and anyway that night I just wanted to sleep so I drank one Samuel Adams beer that had been in the fridge awhile and I lay down and began to read this book, it opened well though I was a bit confused, it didn’t matter, it opened well, it opened like this:

“Third date, right?” Paul says passing the joint to Geoff.

Now this may come as a surprise to those of you who know me best, especially given some of the things I have written and how involved with drugs they were, but I don’t generally like any story to open with the use of drugs. It feels like a cheap way of garnering interest in the reader, I guess, or something like that. Bottom line is that I feel like usually people who write fiction are lying. I just don’t believe you know anything about drugs. I think the people who know all about drugs are all in jail or something. This is of course very unfair, and an extremely shitty thing to say in a review. I’m just saying, right away I thought: this has the possibility of being a lame novel. Only because of that line. Of course I read on. Like I used to do with submissions at dispatch litareview, I’ll at least read the first three paragraphs to three pages of your story or book. So I read on. And the first three pages were good.

This isn’t going to be a raving review. There were some very clever things done with this book, which I will get to later on, but these are tempered by some things I wasn’t so enthused about, most of which were not the fault of Ben Tanzer.

The book takes place in the 90’s. I like books that take place at times and places that I have been alive and been to but still don’t really know anything about. This book takes place in New York City in the 1990’s. I’ve been to New York City and I like to think I’ve been alive since the late 1980’s. But I don’t like much about either. Generally the 90’s were pretty gay, although the first eight years of this century have been dumb as fuck as well. Maybe I’m just  now starting to think that the world is kind of a cool place, though I used to look at it with a lot of wonder and wide eyes. Anyway this is also not the fault of Ben Tanzer, and all I’m trying to get across right now is that I took an interest in the book immediately because I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to live in New York City in 1996 or something. Turns out I hate New York City. I hate a lot of things about it. This isn’t even its fault. It’s just that I’m a dumb Yankee. Maybe southerners think that people from New York are Yankees, but really they are their own breed of retarded. They’re certainly less generous and humane than your average New Englander, and that is what leads me to loathe the big city of New York.

Anyway the characters in this book are all professional twenty-somethings. All living in that life I don’t know about, where you graduate from college and go on to do something professional and secure. They’re all leading these very professionally-oriented lives. The book opens up with a rundown of the cliche dating rules. It’s about sex on the third date. I’m terrible at dating. I’m terrible with rules. I’m terrible with women. I never do things conventionally, and the consequence is that I never get what I want. All I want is a woman to talk to me all day about things that matter to both of us, other than the sappy relationship crap that nobody ever really wants to hear which makes people nauseous without even trying. I don’t know that it’s fair to talk about myself so much in a review, but I’m a very selfish person generally, somehow, even though I’ll give everything.

Anyway this is a theme throughout the book, the rules of dating. The chapters are mostly short and to the point. There are more than eighty of them, and the book is 173 pages long. Or close to that. I read this whole book today, pretty much. I was at like page 30 when I started reading it this morning. I took a long nap at some point, watched some television, so I could have finished reading it and written this review much earlier.

It takes a few chapters for a main character to come out. He comes out in the form of Geoff, who is there from the beginning. Geoff’s best friend is named Paul. I am named Paul. There are frequent interludes, repetitive in nature, where Paul and Geoff step outside their office at the World Trade Center and smoke weed from a bat pipe. You know, the long bat thing. Not an actual animal bat. Animal bats are annoying. Yes. Anyway, I think that these interludes, along with the four maybe five scenes of Geoff at the coffee machine and all these guys giving their witty opinions of what Geoff should do next in his relationship with Jen, someone who he met very randomly when he and Paul were out, I don’t remember exactly how and I don’t think it’s all that important, I just remember they were at one place and then they went another place and then they had a follow-up date–I remember that Paul almost scored with Rhonda, who is Jen’s slutty best friend, and Rhonda had to puke in the bathroom, so Paul just bailed out, leaving his underwear on the bed. And I think that the way I am describing this is illustrative of the subject matter, in a good way. Relationships are never very easy to chart. They are pure bullshit for the most part, with little things counting for way too much and so on. I think that Ben Tanzer did a good job putting me in the mood to react to relationships and care what happens one way or the other.

Finally Geoff and Jen break it off after some weird thing happens at her sister’s sort of shotgun wedding to her baby’s father. It was pretty sudden that Jen invited him, and so to offset it, he had Jen meet his father and brother, who is a homeless junkie. I guess I might be spoiling the book a little bit. I should get out of that mode sort of.

So, Madore, what do you think of the book?

Well, I’m so glad you asked.

I think that the biggest plus with this book is the low impact on my mind. I don’t have to think very hard. This is a good thing for a writer to accomplish. That means he is conveying his story without demanding much investment from the reader. I didn’t so much want to put the book down as much as I felt that if I did put it down it would surely be waiting for me when I came back to it, and that was a good thing.

The second biggest plus with this book is the dialogue. Frequently hilarious, I felt like these were people I’d be jealous of, people I’d want to hang out with, hipster types who use the term “weird” like it means anything–real people, that is, I thought these were people who could exist or more likely have already existed at some place in time, probably roughly New York City in the mid-90’s.

Other pluses include the swift nature of the prose, and the rarity of mistakes, which are on the editor of course, especially in the case of a book, but they’re no big deal, I just can see myself definitely catching them if I was the editor, but since I know that the people at Orange Alert Press are incredibly multi-faceted, earnest people who do things like readings and other things to bring lit to the people, I’m willing to forgive these little things.

One thing though that I will not forgive is the shitty shitty shitty layout and design done by some place called Szostek Design. Anyone could have come up with that. All the underlining is jarring. I don’t like it at all. A better font could have been chosen. I could go on. This of course is not going to be a problem for the average reader, but it is for me. If I know I can do better, I get mad that I paid money to see it. But nonetheless, I suppose it got the job done. More than that, they did do one cool thing wherein they omitted the dashes in the spelled-out numbering of the chapters. I like that. I think if there is a second edition of this book, OA Press needs to do something about this design business. Szotek can go to hell, on the real: that was pure laziness. I could do exactly what they did in this book in the space of about 45 minutes; anyone want to test me? I only hope that OA Press didn’t spend a lot of money on that.

Other than that, I would recommend this book to someone looking for a good read for a flight or something. It’s enjoyable, to be sure, but at the same time I feel like Tanzer has better things up his sleeve. He was trying to do something with this novel, I’m not sure what, but I think he got it done