Slice of life

>> Jeff Parker’s funny debut novel
Ovenman burns up the ’90s

by Juliet Waters

1991. It was the best of times. It was the worst. Okay it was neither, but if you squint and look back at it from a certain angle, it could seem that way.

Grunge was still dirty and fresh. Tattoos and piercings actually seemed a little menacing. There was a war in Iraq, and there was something about it on TV, for like, a week. And then the world went back to normal. And then there was a decade of degrading, impoverishing sanctions, Iraqi children dying from lack of medicine and nobody much knowing about that or caring.

We were all too busy not doing something, sort of, and drinking and listening to Slayer and/or subverting some marginal, crappy job. Sure there was good music, Nirvana, the early years. But mostly I remember a happy little tune an ex used to sing. It was called “Scam in the Place Where You Work,” sung to the tune of R.E.M’s, “Stand.” Yeah, that was our big protest.

Enter the world of Ovenman, Jeff Parker’s dark, quirky and very funny debut novel set in Florida, circa Desert Storm. Our anti-hero, When Thinfinger, is a pizza “specialist” in a time and place where the kids are so poor and strung out that late night pizza actually is power. Thinfinger is no slacker; frankly, he takes his job a little too seriously. He is, however, a scammer. Sometimes he’s a worse one than he intends to be, according to the Post-it notes he has to keep sticking on himself before he passes out drunk every night.

“For a moment,” Thinfinger recalls, in the first sentence of Ovenman, “waking up after this caliber of drinking is like birth. There’s all this nothing. Then my eyes pop open. The Florida sun hangs there in the open window, blinding me. My hand finds a yellow Post-it stuck to my elbow on which I seem to have written, You dont no much.”

The world comes into focus and he recalls the previous evening, brushing up against the Florida law for a fourth or fifth misdemeanour, and a judge (no doubt a Bush relative) who lets him know how it is: “Son this represents a serious caricature flaw.”

Indeed. This is one explanation for why Ovenman is so seriously caricature driven. In a good way. Ovenman reads like a high calibre graphic novel, minus the graphics. Cluttered, uncomfortable, compulsively crafted, unashamed of occasional farce or relentless surreal quirky distortion, this is writing you might imagine coming out of the brain of Julie Doucet, if she were a guy who lived in Florida.

Another reason for Thinfinger’s tragic caricature flaw might be Parker’s childhood. According to a recent Q&A, Parker’s mother ran a children’s party planning business and used to put him to work dressed up as a scrawny, disappointing superhero. This explains a lot.

Not that Ovenman reads like an autobiography. At times, it feels almost a little too inventive. Parker has enough natural talent he could stand to turn down the relentless, distorted, surreal quirkiness a notch. But just a notch. From, let’s say, 11 to 10. Anything less would risk nostalgia and if the ’90s could be against anything, retroactively, it should be nostalgia.

To be fair, Thinfinger does have it rough. He’s trapped with a terrible name (invented by a teenage mother and a bad step-dad) in an over-tattooed body (another reminder of another night he doesn’t remember), in a torturous relationship (with a girlfriend who has recently fractured her back in a biking accident) in a hardcore band who won’t let him sing anything except the band’s name (Wormdevil), with a bio-dad who’s recently started sending him letters that suggest he’s an even worse, clueless grifter than his son.

Somewhere midway through all of this, “I wake up and my Post-it says, the feeling is paind joy. I know what I mean.” Read this and you’ll know what he means too.

Jeff Parker reads at Blizzarts (3956A St-Laurent) on Sunday, Sept. 30, at 8:30 p.m. as part of the Pilot Reading Series.

Ovenman by Jeff Parker,
TinHouse Books, PB, 250PP, $14