Deadpan poetry

>> Lenny Bruce Is Dead reads like a dream

by JULIET WATERS

Last week, on an uncomfortably hot summer afternoon, Lenny Bruce Is Dead was the perfect read. Flipping through the novella a second time, I decided my favourite line was still the first. The dedication, "To my sister." It's difficult to convey how charmingly twisted that sounds unless you've read it. There's something offbeat about dedicating the weird and lurid memories of a sex-obsessed Jewish teenage boy to one's sister.

On the surface, Jonathan Goldstein's novel reads as though there were a silent understanding that we've all read Mordecai Richler and Phillip Roth, so we don't need the whole story, just the updated details. Have the boys jerking off to The Love Boat, have the first date at a Eurythmics concert, have our anti-hero Josh discover a bottle of "The Rebbe's Kosher style Love Lotion" in his parents room. People who prefer life darker and deeper will probably pass it off as slacker lit. Then again, "Life is quick" says Josh, flashing forward to his deathbed. "It's a fucking dream." Who has time for narrative bulk? Lenny Bruce cruises along at gentle warp speed, and then out of nowhere one gets attacked by a quick flash of grim reality.

It makes sense that Goldstein has moved from Montreal to Chicago to become a producer for This American Life, the National Public Radio show that nurtures postmodern storytellers like David Sedaris and David Rakoff. Goldstein's writing is meant to be read out loud, and digested in small bites. He has a strong sense of anecdote and the eye and nose of a poet. He wakes up in the middle of the night and "the blankets in her room look like an old man's face thinking." After his mother dies, he buys the wrong pickles, the kind his mother calls "a real goyish pickle." He wants "the crunchy kosher kind that made you feel like you were biting your boss's prick off."

There's not much story in this novel, so it's difficult to summarize.

Josh returns to Montreal after his mother's death to hang out with his father, Chick. They are spiritually and emotionally lost. Chick deals with it by barbecuing. Josh deals with it by remembering his girlfriends one by one. There's Vered, whose nose is like a turtle, who lets Josh name her right nipple. Or J.R., who licks his hands right after he's fingered her. Kay, whose laugh "is like a mouse running out of your pant leg," and who dumps him for a guy named Reggie, who claims he once peed next to Leonard Cohen at Ben's Deli. There's Mimi, who has a hand like a jumper cable and makes him a mixed tape with a Smurf song and one by Leonard Cohen. (Josh calls him Leonard Groan and describes the song as being about a girl who "blows bubbles, spun her own dresses and baked bread." Definitely not the kind of girl you'll find in this book.) There's Gina who drinks. There's Jill who has frizzy hair and who makes him think of "a glass of orange juice slimed with ketchup fingers." He meets her when she's selling kisses and he's hard up.

And finally there is Honey, "a lonesome little sock of a girl.... Honey went to this horrible daycare where they never let her change out of her wet bathing suit. Her mother sent her there each day with just a thermos full of coffee.... Honey's mother planted sunflowers on the front lawn of their building. They looked like dirty yellow ski-suits that you find in the schoolyard after all the snow has melted. They looked like a wrapper off a candy that only the sickest kid ate."

How's Leonard Cohen's health these days? Because Leonard Groan Is Dead might be a great title for the sequel.

Lenny Bruce Is Dead by Jonathan Goldstein, Coach House, pb, 155pp, $17.95