My other half thought this was very funny, somewhere between audible laughter and uncontrollable wheezing. I don't see it at all. There's nothing mean or vicious in it, so normally I would ignore it as a random variation in taste; but I have a cautious theory that it isn't random, that its appeal is specifically to the cool and maybe to the boyishly cool.
The subject matter is traditional for boyish amusement (pirates, monkeys, dressing up like women, repetitive word-games, meeting a hero and running away) and the treatment is perfectly flat. It's all funny precisely because the author doesn't care.
In-group cool requires that you know about, and maybe mention, the current right things; possibly all of that applies here but I'm not cool enough to know. The Pirates! is all mention in the use-mention difference to display cool affect, lack of affect. Pirates, monkeys, Darwin trot on and off stage but the plot runs on their accidental, not their inherent characters. Shit just happens.
The flap copy says the author wrote "to convince a woman to leave her boyfriend for him. She didn't." I'm not surprised, if she also found it a model of detachment. Nor would I be surprised if the copy is a final display of detachment and the woman abstract.
ISBN: 0375423214
So wrote clew in Fiction (21st c.). | TrackBack