Thursday, March 5, 2009
Hilarious, luscious, erudite, and stunningly imaginative!
I'm dying to tell you about this amazing book, but I don't know where to begin. Let's start with, "Buy it!" Drink it all the way down. You'll be more than satisfied, yet ravenous for more.
Skulk has a knack for making the preposterous believable, a device perfectly suited to its subject; post-9/11 America. We're deftly transported in a suspension of disbelief, the depth of which becomes apparent only after the last page brings us abruptly back to earth. The book begins with a familiar premise -- 40-something liberal professor (Gronsky) gets the hots for an Ann Coulterish-conservative firebrand (Skulk) -- but before we know it, we not only believe in their improbable relationship, we're cheering for it. T.L. Skulkington (of the Connecticut Skulkingtons) could be Ann Coulter, if Ann Coulter only had a heart, and a brain. Although the book never mentions that thought, or its connection to a later reference to Frank L. Baum, that's the way it works - on many levels, seen and unseen. The tired sobriquet, "thought provoking", would be a slighting understatement.
Skulk is billed as "a post-9/11 comic novel", but don't expect manga, nor a tendentious rant about 9/11 truth. In fact, for those who have avoided the "rest of the story" of 9/11 (rest in peace Paul Harvey), there may be no better introduction (certainly none more entertaining!) than this book. Everything you didn't want to know about 9/11 is confined to no more than two pages, and by the time the ride is over, you'll want to know more. The book is an endlessly illuminating romp through post-modern America, with more food for thought about why Americans remain obtuse to their government's glaring lies than any supposedly rational explanation I've encountered.
When has such an extensive armamentarium of historical, literary, musical, and political allusion been deployed in such wonderfully transparent, light-as-a-feather prose - with some insanely funny verse tossed in for an extra treat? Estrin's penetrating satire spares no one - liberals get an especially incisive look - yet there's nary a drop of sarcasm or cant, almost as if Jesus were channeling Voltaire. Even when the Department of Homeland Security's proxy goons (the Wichita SWAT team) disport in a side-splitting free-for-all of bloody repression, the action is fueled not so much by political antipathy as by a childish desire to seize a rare opportunity to try out all their high-tech toys. Estrin's light touch leaves us space to consider that this all-too-real political theater reflects a contemporary politics less rooted in interest, theory, or history than in the cynical tropes of well-connected propagandists.
Gronsky and Skulk's mission is to deliver a "teaching moment" to shock America awake to the master deception of 9/11. True to its multi-leveled structure, the book itself never misses an opportunity for a teaching moment, from the working class subtext of Frank Baum's The Wizard of OZ to a brief meditation on the artistic technique of apposition, unobtrusively delivered in an absorbing rendering of a mythic Brechtian opera. Estrin says in the Afterword that he "had fun" writing the book, which must be a vast understatement. Sheer delight in an apparently effortless stream of creation pours from the pages. The closest description might be Mozart on a word processor.
I haven't even mentioned the maniacally funny department store Santas-of-the-month, the brooding epistolary spirit of John Brown that hovers over the book, anchoring it in the deeper history of the nation, or the book's near-perfect selection of props, right down to a vintage BSA motorcycle. It continues to work long after the final page, triggering days of unexpected insights. To take one example, Estrin relates the basic story of the 1850s Kansas range wars, which pitted teetotaling Boston Brahmins like Thomas Wentworth Higginson against inebriated southern ne'er-do-wells. In its own peculiar way, this melee presaged the Civil War, but I had never noticed that it defied Marx's dictum that 'history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce'.
The book seems to fly and too soon it is over in a clever accelerando to the final page, delivering the climax with a punch that - only afterward - we know we should have seen coming. Buy it, fly it, and soon you'll be talking about it to everyone you know - if you can find the words.