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In an effort to make the top half of the blog landing page look as though there are words in some of the posts and not just pictures and Amazon adverts, I thought I’d push out a review of something I’d read recently rather than stick to the strict order of things. So here goes nothing.
I read Veins as I used to enjoy Toothpaste for Dinner, a comic strip by the author, Drew. TFD is dark and daft and en vogue with the current trend for consistently well-done badly drawn cartoons. Plus, Veins was really cheap and quite short, and I’m swayed by the arguments in defense of short(er) fiction*, particularly when it helps push my books read beyond 40 a year…
It delivers something similar. The narrator, M.R., is a dumbass, a deadbeat bum who has a curiously skewed positive slant on his demonstrably awful life. Teased remorselessly in high school (they call him “Veins” and “Titty Veins” because of his pale, transparent skin and later because he develops fat man boobs) he prefers to hide in the roof space above the girls’ toilets to listen to them pee rather than attending lessons. The younger of two siblings, his older brother is a successful college man, football player and has his life on track, according to their father, until he drowns in his own puke after one party too many. M.R. finds him dead in his car but rather than call the police, something he believes his father (who scratches off the serial numbers of the electronic goods he ‘finds’ and brings home) would not be pleased about, he ignores it and pretends nothing happened. Only he left his fingerprints and vomit at the scene and is arrested on suspicion of murder. Although released, he is estranged from his family (now his father has a good reason to kick him out) and ends up sleeping in his dead brother’s car.
His life goes downhill from there.
One Amazon review mentions the film Napoleon Dynamite in a comparison to help people who ‘get’ the humor and truth of the film to find this book and enjoy it on the same level. I would argue that Napoleon is a success story in so far that he and Pedro score one for posterity at the end. M.R. drifts towards an inevitable end like the diseased corpse of a dead cow being carried along by the contaminated river to the barred intake pipe of the local water plant. His character is pitiable but inspires no sympathy, and in all honesty, it’s hard to believe someone this stupid would be able to put down in words the tragi-comic narrative of his incompetence. There’s a scene towards the end where he thinks he’ll be framed for arson so buries all his belongings in his car (the same Toyota in which his brother died) in the backyard of his parents’ house. He drives the car into the pit but has left no clearance for opening the doors. At this point, I was quietly hoping he’d be stuck and die. Instead, he breaks the windshield and escapes, only to be arrested.
It’s an odd one, I’ll grant you, and in places, it’s funny but more face-palm than chortle chortle. If you’re nostalgic for the 80s and 90s then go for it. If you like dark and uncomfortable humor, you’ll probably enjoy parts of it. I, on the other hand, found that when my partner read bits of it over my shoulder I had to apologize for reading it. The fact it is self-published probably speaks to its objective quality and its author’s place in the literary pantheon (I’d posit a service industry level position where the highlight of his day would be spitting in the sodas of the admin and support team of the assistants to the mailroom staff of the pantheon lower-level strategic business sector) but it provided some entertainment on the daily commute. For the two days it took to read. It’s also broken down into 90-odd very short chapters, so nice and bite-sized when attention is constantly demanded elsewhere. Easily worth 99p but I wouldn’t go much higher.
*Two of which you can read on the Literary Hub and, once again, in the Guardian.
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