Rufus and Alex used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Drömma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda! It was lingonberry of another tongue -- tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is a collection of ten short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner, and as darkly humorous social satires, each examines some aspect of modern (primarily Vancouver-based) life, and with the use of strange metaphors and quirky observations, Gartner continuously suggests and then subverts a lingua franca with her readers. The stories here are a slightly uneven bunch -- which I more loved than not -- and I can understand that reading this collection will all come down to personal taste.
In the line-by-line writing, I found some images to be fresh and amusing: Rufus was looking at her too intently, his chopsticks noodling in the air as if painting a devil's Vandyke on her face. And some images made little sense to me: He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe. I noticed early on that certain names, words, and phrases were repeated story to story, and I found myself seeking some significance in it. In addition to people riding Razors, wearing terry cloth shorts, reading Carlos Castaneda, and fondly remembering the nuns stealing the Nazis' distributor cap in The Sound of Music, there are multiple references to Annie Liebovitz, Pokémon, and The Simpsons. More specifically, in Once, We Were Swedes, Alex thinks of used vinyl shops as, "Places where middle-aged men in black concert T-shirts shot the shit with concave-chested kids who had rogue chin hairs and opinions about whether Muse frontman Matt Bellamy was really the late Jeff Buckley with plastic surgery", and in the next story, Floating Like a Goat, a woman writes that the great dilemma of her life was to decide, "to be an artist or be a muse?". In We Come in Peace, the pot-smoking angel says "The Dude abides with me", and in the next, the titular Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Lucy thinks of her husband, "It's all hakuna matata with him, her own Bobby McFerren and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful." (These examples might sound like I'm stretching to find connections, but they were everywhere.) Most stories have characters with mullets or faux-hawks, everyone seems to live on a cul-de-sac, and if there is deeper meaning at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs, it was beyond me (and slightly distracting to notice the repetitions).
Men, in particular, are judged harshly in this collection (and I think there's no coincidence in the fact that goodreads reviews have substantially lower ratings from male readers), and particularly in the first story, Summer of the Flesh Eater, which I happened to love. What woman wants these feminised men, as expressed through their cooking?
Patel made his Lapsang souchong-smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam-filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.Or what woman would want a man who reverts to adolescence (Once, We Were Swedes)? Who wouldn't prefer this?
Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I'm talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a "philosophy". A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I'm talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.This strangely off-kilter collection is justified by this quote from Floating Like a Goat:
The point of art, Miss Subramamium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belle lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.And by this matching quote from an interview with the author:
"If you meet expectations, you're doing the expected, right? You're toeing the line. If you meet expectations, you're doing what you're expected to do, or what success is considered. But shouldn't you be trying to do something else? I'd rather go down in flames, quite frankly, than have a nice little book. I'd rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that."Gartner certainly doesn't "go down screaming in flames" in this collection, but she does take risks and that can be…risky. It worked for me, might not for you (especially, it seems, if you are a BBQ- and pickup truck-fearing male), and I can only rate my own experience.
I do take issue with the lower ratings given by men to this collection. One goodreads reviewer refers to these stories as "acidic, shrilly-pitched, exhaustingly wit-dependent screeds", which to my ear, sounds as paternalistic as the Victorian charge of "hysteria" used against independent-thinking women of their time. And yet...I do understand that reading is subjective, and if it takes a uterus to have identified with Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, well, I came fully equipped.
