A Totally Awesome
Book Review for You
The novel is named for its main character: Awesome. He is a giant, a giant who builds robots – among other things. Jack Pendarvis is not a giant, but he could be. What I mean is, he could be a giant of literature who builds robots (stories) that go on to do things he couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend on his own; in fact, he’s well on his way. Although this is his first novel, he’s also written two collections of short stories and is working on a detective novel called Shut Up, Ugly, all with San Francisco publishing pygmy MacAdam/Cage. With other work published by the likes of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, The Oxford American, The New York Times, and Paste Magazine, Pendarvis has established himself among the likes of George Saunders and Dave Eggers as one of the hippest wordsmiths in the game.
Awesome is quite short and frisky throughout. In a nutshell it is a contemporary tall tale. Awesome can do all sorts of amazing things, like so many Paul Bunyans and Pecos Bills. But he is also an egotist, through and through, although his egocentrism is not entirely unfounded – he is, after all, a snappy dresser, an incomparable lover, a gallant warrior, and a generous soul. His quest is to collect the items listed on a nationwide treasure hunt in order to win back the love of his leading lady, Glorious Jones.
Suffice to say, Pendarvis’s writing is very fun to read. He flows freely from one thought to the next and makes the reader laugh the way only the best comedians can. At the base level, it makes one feel darn good about oneself, lending a bit of Awesome’s good-natured swagger to the reader. The writing is fun, not only for Pendarvis’s sense of the absurd, but for his discussion of it, which works in dialectics. All at once he can be angry and sweet, pompous and humble, timeless and pop lit du jour; and in that way his writing reflects humanity at its core – G.W.F. Hegel would be a fanboy. For instance, Awesome shifts easily from bragging about his black card to committing full on penile removal, just to prove a point. Basically, he’s so awesome that he doesn’t care about anything, even though he actually cares about everything – he attributes it to something like zen. The bottom line is: Pendarvis’s writing is remarkably clever, even at its most foolish; and while it may seem at times like he’s not really thinking about what he’s doing, he is – much like Beckett or Barthelme. To me, this novel establishes Jack Pendarvis as something like his generation’s J.D. Salinger, although notably far less controversial (if at all) and not exactly a recluse (he grants interviews).
Unbelievably, despite all of my lavish praise, at press time Pendarvis doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! Probably he has scruples enough as to not simply write his own, as so many undoubtedly do, which speaks volumes of his own sense of humility – maybe. If you’re wondering exactly what this guy is all about, what he’s up to and why, and whatnot, I’m afraid you’re going to have to read his stuff to figure that out for yourself. Probably I’ve confused you more than anything. But Pendarvis himself provides an interesting examination of his own work. At the end of his short story collection Your Body Is Changing, in a “story” called “Final Remarks,” Pendarvis pens what could be seen as a manifesto of sorts. The following is an extremely abbreviated version:
"Many of you are here to get to know me better. I am not the flashiest candidate. I am not the most eloquent candidate…I am not the candidate with the most teeth. I am not the candidate with the best skin. I am not the candidate with both kidneys. I am not a generous sex partner...But I will work for the iceman delivering the ice. I will work for the playwright writing his plays...There is no limit to the work I will do. I love this country. I love the mountains. I love the rills...We stand at a crossroads. The choice is clear. As for me, I believe in the future. I believe in the flag. I believe in the children…I believe in rainbows. I believe in ponies. I believe in dreams."
Yeah, it’s sweet, like when babies laugh upon passing gas. But it’s also sort of prophetic in the way it aligns the concerns of nationalism with the childish sensibilities of our popular culture; and that, especially, is what this novel does. There’s been a lot of talk – well, not a lot, but enough – about the particular situation of literature today: postmodern, post-postmodern, who-really-cares, et cetera. In Donald Barthelme’s essay, “Not-Knowing,” he ponders this particularity in respect to the impoverishment of our contemporary language; basically, he says that we are all getting very simple-minded, and our literature must adapt to this simple-mindedness in a way that retains complexity while pandering to our lack of intellectualism. I think Don B. would have found in Awesome a compelling and creative response to this problem and I hope you do, too.
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