The LaughingMaus

“If you’re the devil, then it’s not me telling this story.” is the first line of this beautiful novel about an orphan boy growing up in a bordello in Excellent, Idaho.

If you’re the devil then it’s not me writing this review. I loved this book like I haven’t loved a book in many years. I loved Out-In-The-Shed, Dellwood Barker, Ida Richilieu and her blue dress, her red dress and her white dress. I loved Damn Dave and his Damn Dog, Not-Really-A-Mountain, the human-being sex story and I loved the concept of killdeer, “If you act like you’re looking for killdeer, you’ll never find killdeer. You have to be killdeer.”

I was in awe of Tom Spanbauer’s writing and the way his name translated itself in my head to “bridgebuilder” every time I looked at the cover. It’s not an academic translation but one of metaphor – knowlege becoming understanding.

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is body writing a human-being-story. Unfolding origami body, revealing heart truth. Pernicious.

Eeeeeeeeeeeee. This is my first read by T.C. Boyle and I had a great time although it took me two runs at it to get the whole thing down. I went into the bookstore with T.C. Boyle on my mind, having just listened to a podcast at NPR in which he talked about his newest book, The Women. It is a fictional account of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the women in his life. A friend of mine recommended Water Music, the foreign language section of Wittwer had it, I bought it.

What struck me the most about the story was that the characters never came to rest. Four hundred thirty-seven pages and they were running flat out in every direction – either away from the consequences of their actions or directly towards the logical thing to do, even though it was obvious they had no chance to escape the aforementioned serious consequences. The story moves at a break-neck pace, Ned Rise, Mungo Park, and especially poor Johnson pay for every quiet moment with a chapter full of trouble.

The old man, nestled beneath his bush, sleeps on. Deathly still. His mouth hangs open, the pink bud of his gums and palate an hors d’oevre for the huge green flies that hover round the putrefact chicken. A column of ants has been using his foot as a highway, mosquitoes tatoo his cheeks and eyelids. Looking down at him so frail and motionless his bones in stark relief against the yellow muck, a terrible realization comes over the explorer. Old Eboe, last of the Jarrans, is dead.

Ah, but is he really dead, and what of that putrefactive chicken? What sort of a person comes up with this storyline? I jumped and squirmed. The language is not colorful, it is disgusting, stinky and delightful. Any author who makes a bushpig say: “snark snark” has a firm place on my Authors-To-Read-More-Of list.

From the back of the book:

The year is 1795: George III is dabbing the walls of Windsor Castle with spittle, Goya is deaf, De Quincey is a depraved prepubescent and young Ludwig van Beethoven is wowing them in Vienna with his second piano concerto. In London, Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, is drinking Strip-Me-Naked with Nan Punt and Sally Sebum at the Pig and Pox Tavern in Maiden Lane. And, far from his native Edinburgh, the explorer Mungo Park is stranded in the Sahara, a prisoner of the Moors of Ludamar.

Water Music is the rambunctious account of two men’s wild adventures through the gutters of London and the Scottish Highlands to their unlikely meeting in darkest Africa, as they search for the source of the Niger, a river no European has ever laid eyes upon.

It was a lovely August evening with a bonfire and wine. A muskrat rustled in the bush by the stream while Janice told a story about an old man who lives in her village. Two years ago he was seen for the first time escorting a young Vietnamese woman through town. A few months later they were holding hands and exchanging private smiles. She was pregnant. Now he is often seen by the fountain in the middle of town with his son hanging on to both his fingers, trying to figure out how to walk. The old man looks happy and his wife looks happy. They exchange private smiles over the baby’s head.

Janice and I smiled over the idea that an unmarried man in his later years, chose not to settle in at the local pub and drink beer, watch soccer and wait patiently for the last days before his funereal to pass, but instead to open up a catalog (and possibly a can of worms) choose as best he could and see what happened. We agreed that Love – as a way of life – could turn the world upside-down.

“Pfft, but-but-but the old man was probably just bored and wanted a maid he didn’t have to pay.” sputtered Daniel, our devils advocate. “Haaarh, you girls have heads full of jelly. You are so full of romance you can’t see a business deal when it bites your nose. She was probably very poor and happy to leave that misery and get a free ride into the Western world.”

We ladies advanced the theory that the old man offered the young woman an escape from poverty, received her graciously, and treated her upon her arrival withrespect, in effect loving her before knowing her. Or, maybe it was the other way around, he “bought a bride” and she although young, came to keep him company, brought laughter and cleanliness into his home, put zinnias on the table, treated him with respect and joy as a human, not an old man. We were not talking about being “in love”, but about the deeper act of loving. What honest person has the stamina to deny Love and refrain from loving in return?

And now I ask myself, is Love a force; a thing that exists without need of humans? Along the lines of the tree in the forest, if we were not here to feel it, would Love still exist? Whatever the unknowable answer to that question is, it clearly works as a force in the subjective lives of humans. The attempt to deny this made Daniel look as foolish as a beekeeper denying centrifuge.