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Charlie Huston is a versatile author whose only rule seems to be "let's break all the rules." In this standalone crime novel he creates a character who tries every trick in the book to be unlovable but is endearing in spite of himself. He takes a job in a disgusting bottom-of-the barrel occupation, yet the work becomes his redemption. The book itself is gross, hilarious, absurd, and at the same time very moving. It shouldn't work, but it does, brilliantly. Web has been sponging off a friend who runs a tattoo parlor ever since his career as a middle-school teacher ended in a horrific moment of violence. He's retreated into himself, only connecting with others to insult them with savage wit that's barbed with spite and venom. When he hits rock-bottom, he reluctantly dons a hazmat suit and becomes an employee of a "trauma cleaning" service, mopping up blood, scrubbing human remains off walls, and scooping up splattered brains under the direction of a small business owner who takes pride in this nasty but honest work. It's only as Web erases signs of death that he begins to reconnect with life. When he meets the daughter of a suicide, he finds himself wanting to do more than clean up the mess her father left behind. Unfortunately, he has landed in something much nastier than it appears. Huston does one bit of rule-breaking that does not help the story. He's unaccountably allergic to two form of punctuation: quotation marks and ellipses. Dialogue is only marked with a dash, and sentences end. Just kind of. Like speech, only. See? This irritating practice forces the reader to give up the experience of flow so that the author can block out the delivery of each line like an auteur director who wants every scene to be rendered his way. Apart from that affectation, the book works at every level. It's rich with humor, profanity, and a twisty plot that never overtakes the even twistier character development. The owner of the trauma cleaning service is a rough-and-tumble philosopher; the suicide's son wants to be a producer and sees everything in terms of his unlikely cinematic career. Web's parents are an alcoholic has-been Hollywood hack and a blessed-out New Age dope-dealer who dropped out of his life long ago but sends him advice, money, and organic blackberry pies. Web himself is an enigma inside a self-deprecating yet arrogant carapace. Though every character is memorable, it's his journey as he's coaxed by events back to his own humanity that makes the story so compelling.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, February 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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