People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Who doesn't enjoy a good story of triumph? Those stories where the fallen and dejected hero, much like Odysseus, must fight insurmountable odds to come back and win the day, kicking ass and taking names--we live through them vicarously, pumping our fists for the hero and reveling in their crushing victories.

But what about the almost-triumphs? That is to say, where the lesson learned is that everything can't be spectacular, but sometimes semi-okay is enough? Sometimes I think I like them better.

1. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

I fell in love with Joe Meno's writing after picking up Hairstyles of the Damned with my Christmas book store gift card this past December, so there was no debate about picking this one up next. Not to mention that it's the only book I have yet come across with a decoder ring in the back.

The Boy Detective Fails chronicles the life and times of Billy Argo, a meddling kid of the highest calibre. His previous chapters, had they been written, may have had titles like The Mystery At The Old Mill or The Secret of Pirate Island, but this book starts at Chapter 33. It is here that we learn what becomes of a boy detective, once he is no longer a boy. His sister has committed suicide, and his sidekick has become a morbidly obese agoraphobic; the boy himself has been institutionalized for the past ten years, unable to cope with the changing world around him, until now when New Jersey state budget cuts have forced him out of the safety of the mental hospital and into the relatively big world of Shady Glens assisted living apartments.

Now Billy must cope with a graveyard shift telemarketing job, a dependence on Ativan, and the prospect of making new friends and falling in love. It's enough to make even the most average person nervous, but when buildings start vanishing, villains hold an all-day convention with lunch at the Gotham Hotel, and an Alzheimer's-ridden arch-nemesis turns up just down the hall with half-remembered malicious intent--not to mention the mystery of what truly caused his sister's death--it's only a matter of time before Billy must answer to his calling, picking up the trusty magnifying glass once again.

The cool thing about this book is how Meno plays on really classic mystery archetypes--the detective falling in love with a thief, the "dear reader" phrasings, the word search in the back--while creating something entirely fresh and experimental. The fact that it's interactive book (decoder ring and a secret story-within-a-story!) only serves to make it more engaging. Meno also constructs an entire working world within the book, soft and strange with somewhat antiquated speech, an alternate-reality New Jersey.

Dear Reader,

The story thus far, as you may have forgotten: Even as a young boy, Billy Argo showed an uncanny talent for solving puzzles of almost every configuration, arrangement, and design.

That is all.

No--it was more than a talent. It was a kind of very sad genius, so that in the end, the very sad genius appeared on the boy detective the way a child born with a deformity--a missing hand or one leg shorter than the other--might make the same adolescent distant and dreamy; like a birthmark in the shape of an elephant smack dab on the forehead, it led Billy to be somewhat shy, somewhat withdrawn, though not at first. No, at first the boy was at play: happy, daring, secretly cunning.

In the stark world of Gotham, New Jersey--small white houses and green, murky woods surrounding a modern factory town, home to both the Mold-O-Form Plastic and Harris Heating Duct plants, a burg bustling with both Prosperity and its companion Crime--Billy would run hand in hand with his younger sister, Caroline, and behind them, their childhood friend, a husky neighborhood boy by the name of Fenton Mills, would often come calling.

Through the nearby grassy field, with the chimneys of the plastics factory churning black clouds in the distance, the children would hurry, shouting, trampling the fuzzy white puffs of dandelions and sprawling knotty underbrush. Their hideout was an abandoned lot which was wide and silver and green with enormous, expressive daisies.The lot had remained unsold--being too filthy with lead after an explosion during the days when the land had been home to the old Drip-Less Paint Factory. Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made-up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stage coach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves. Together, forever, they would explore the near-dark world of wonder and mystery.

It is made clear that BIlly Argo's world, though similar, is not the very same world as the one we live in, and as such he is free to create a reality in which fantastic child heroes and ghosts and pirates and villains are as much a part of everyday life as bullies or rabbits. Child detectives, we find here, suffer much the same pressured fate as child actors in our own world, as Billy encounters a few on his adventures, all of whom you will probably know all too well as you find them. The whole thing is funny and sad all at once.

The Boy Detective Fails is one of those books that makes you want to speak so highly of it that the words themselves are just out of reach. You'll smile and well up with tears, and you may even write in the margins. I can't recommend it enough.

You can pick this one up at Punk Planet Books.

2. The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian

I found this book a few years ago, total luck on my part. Someone had left it behind on the counter at the art store where I was working at the time. When no one ever came back to claim it, I ended up taking it home. There was a Counterfit sticker jammed between some pages, a really brilliant local band that's broken up now, and I felt like it was a good omen. It must have been, because the book itself is pretty brilliant as well.

Our unnamed hero The Fuck-Up doesn't start out from nearly as lofty a place as young Billy Argo--just a slacker post-grad living with his girlfriend in New York City and harboring a crush on the concession stand girl while scraping by on a movie theater paycheck, complacent in an okay place. Not for long, however, as in quickfire succession he loses the concession stand girl, gets dumped by the college girlfriend and kicked out of the apartment, and is canned from the usher job for simply asking for a raise.

This is all in Chapter One, by the way, and marks only the catalyst in the almost insane downward spiral that is our young hero's life. Overqualified but underexperienced, he finds his way to sketchier and still sketchier employment; meanwhile, he crashes at his friend Helmsley's pad in Brooklyn (because it's always good to have a friend with even weirder problems than yourself, provided of course that neither end in tragedy), and tries gamely to tolerate the successively strange cast of characters that make their way throughout his life.

It's a pretty funny book in its own absurd and dark way, though it does take turns for the realist as well as the poignant when it's needed. Nersesian has a good eye for keeping the story's tone light despite his poor character's circumstances, as he could have easily dipped it all in melodrama pretty fast. Perhaps the only thing he does better than this is the way he describes the city. He also creates a world here (albeit a familiar one rather than fantastic), often and at great length, and in ways that are integral to the story itself:

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made. When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact. Things reversed. I ended up living somewhere I once avoided, with a woman whom I genuinely once disliked.

Recently we celebrated our seventh anniversary together with a decent dinner and a not dreadful film. I got out of work early that evening and took the F train to Forty-second Street. I crossed Fifth Avenue toward the Main Branch of the Public Library, but paused in the middle of the crosswalk. It was filling up with the evening rush hour crowd: men in trench coats, secretaries in tennis shoes, cabs in the crosswalk, cars honking, leviathan buses zooming inches, braking, zooming again, and bike messengers slicing through it all. The last time I was in that spot, seven years ago, there wasn't a person in sight.

Seven years ago that day, as dawn rose, I remember standing in roughly the same spot watching as the traffic signals hanging over each intersection slowly turned yellow then red. Cars zoomed forward, headlights still on, staying ahead of the changing lights; at dusk they could make it all the way down without a single red light.

At rush hour, the entire avenue was gridlocked. But I could still faintly make out the small white crown of the Washington Square Arch at the very end. The anniversary of my relationship coincided with that dawning, and although that morning marked something that eluded celebration, it couldn't be forgotten either.

Something honked at me, so I crossed the street, reboarded the packed F train, and returned to Brooklyn for the anniversary dinner.

I've never, I regret to tell you, been to New York, so I can't much vouch for the veracity of his descriptions; I would hope, however, that such a place really exists, dark yet beautiful, expansive yet ultimately familiar and like home. Someday perhaps I'll be able to tell you.

I was seventeen the first time I read this, and to tell you the truth, it kind of terrified me: the world of our narrator (aged twenty-two years) seemed unspeakably dark and all sorts of what could only be fiction. That was then, however, and I'm not sure if the fact that what I recognize most now, in addition to the amount of heart in the story, is the degree to which it is not entirely implausible with just the right amount of blind misfortune, makes it less terrifying or somehow even more. Nevertheless, any book that begs coming back to despite any implicit terror of the near future is a book that warrants reading. Go check it out.

Anything you've read lately fall along the same lines? Not quite a triumph, not quite a tragedy? Let me know. I love those kind of in-betweens. In the meantime, stay tuned for a word from PointBlank, who will surely be more prompt in his columnizings.

BlastProcessing

USA

OLD SKOOL

JUN 24, 2007 06:21 PM

So basically that first one is like Encyclopedia Brown meets The Venture Bros?

dingoes8

Milwaukee, WI

March 2004

JUN 24, 2007 07:10 PM

The Boy Detective Fails sounds really awesome. I love stories that challenge the "Happily Ever After" tendency of fiction. Sometimes things that make for good stories would really mess a person up in the long run, and not enough authors acknowledge that.