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First, let's do a standardized-test sort of simile.
Franz Kafka is to Salvador Dalí as D. Harlan Wilson is to_____________. |
| A. Richard Hamilton |
| B. Marcel Duchamp |
| C. The Ultimate Warrior |
| D. Weebl and Bob |
A lot of words get used when describing Wilson's work. The Wikipedia article suggest: irrealism, science fiction, fantasy, Bizarro, splatterpunk, absurdism, literary fiction, ultraviolence, and postmodernism. Those are lots of -isms and sub-genres, but it doesn't quite explain what the book is about.
It's quite difficult to explain what a book like this is about.
In the most literal sense, it's a story about Mr. Von Trout and and his family and the neighborhood where they live. Perhaps more accurately, that's the framework for the giant pop-culture clusterfrazzle that is Blankey Blank.
The book reads like Dali attampting an exercise in a Zen sort of living-in-the-moment with an ADHD Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Trying to make a linear, cohesive story out of a novel like this is setting yourself up for a migraine. (You'll find yourself asking things like, "Since when did he have a robot?" And you'll never get answered.) The book is best read allowing each scene to exist with only the loosest connection to previous and antecedent. Occasionally, events will have some bearing on the story at large, but for the most part, they just are.
Take, for example, this random excerpt:
| The children had gone apeshit. Too much sugar. Too much TV. Too much neglect…They screamed and ranted and stomped and rooted and broke things and elbowed each other and punched holes in the walls and held their breath until they passed out and woke up and had more temper tantrums. Their parents ignored them and took turns painting and blowdrying each other. When they finished, they armed themselves with Taser guns and hunted down the children, pursuing them through the limitless interiors of their McMansions. The windows of Quiggle Estates glowed and flickered with blue zaps of lightning as the children were captured and electrocuted to sleep. |
Usually, this works quite well. Meandering (or jolting) from playful to borderline offensive to incomprehensible, it manages to keep one turning the pages in befuddled entertainment. Sometimes it furthers something like a plot, sometimes it doesn't.
Occasionally, however, I found myself skimming the paragraphs, especially when characters would become childishly existential: paragraphs of wandering questions along the lines of "Why do they call it a building when it's already built?" that build on one another, starting with idle curiosity, become a meditation on some grander scheme, then usually meander back to meaninglessness. In addition, there are short sections of "A Short History" of a thing, event, or person. "A Short History of the HandleBar Moustache", for example. These very fictitious sections are often quite fun, but toward the end of the novel there are perhaps a dozen sequential segments. They start out clever, but before the sequence ends, they border on tedium.
It's doubtless that Wilson's latest work will leave most average or casual readers scratching their heads in confusion, as though looking at so much contemporary art. But despite its shortcomings, fans of the avant-garde, experimental, and irreverent will find this to be endlessly entertaining fun.
Oh, and what's the answer to the simile at the beginning of this review? I suspect it's somewhere between "All of the Above" and "Blankety blankety blank."
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To preorder Blankety Blank, visit Raw Dog Screaming Press here. To see D.Harlan Wilson's online Bizarro Journal, The Dream People, click here.