Thursday, July 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Summer satire

By John Ziebell

It's summertime again, and, as the recent movie releases should remind everyone, this season is all about guilty pleasures. Vacation time is a great excuse for all kinds of bad behavior--watching trash on cable, eating too much junk food, reading the kind of books you'd scoff at during the rest of the year.

I've always associated Kinky Friedman's novels with summer entertainment, which is being less than fair. Friedman's storylines might be frivolous, and his lightly fictionalized friends less than characters, but the pleasures of his works aren't all guilty for people who don't believe that humor and narrative flair are mutually exclusive. He's not just a funny guy; he's a funny smart guy who can write really well, a combination that's far too uncommon.

Friedman was a respected name in country music circles a couple of decades ago--though no mainstream star, as you might expect from a songwriter who delivered such classics as "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore"--a fellow traveler of nonconformists such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. In the mid-1980s he began writing a series of so-called "mystery" novels, genre spoofs woven into the first-person musings of a country musician-turned-amateur detective coincidentally named Kinky "Kinkster" Friedman. The earlier books (anything from Greenwich Killing Time through Armadillos and Old Lace) more closely resemble the genre they're supposed to represent, but all the author's works promote his singular and often twisted sociological view, a unique blend of farce, fantasy, satire and cultural trivia.

Great fun, but after a dozen or so appearances, even a man who loves himself as well and truly as Friedman might want to look for a new focus. Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned introduces Walter Snow, a once-promising novelist who hasn't written a thing in the seven years since the publication of his first book. Walter lives in a basement apartment and has few friends left. Walter is the kind of guy who can spend all day fretting over the writer's block that has been plaguing him all those years. Walter is an understandably easy target for Clyde Potts, a beautiful, vibrant and seemingly sane woman who cons him into letting her store a package in his bank safe deposit box.

Of course the package contains a halibut--it was either that or stolen heroin, right?--and the predictable results unfold. But Clyde doesn't merely disappear into the white space at the bottom of the page, even after the cops show up. She actually likes Walter, and she too sees promise in his character.

Clyde seems to be a professional prankster with an unspecific social agenda, but Walter is smitten, and in no time at all she coaxes him into signing on. She already has a partner, Fox Harris, a flamboyant former mental patient whose personal history is murky at best. Exactly why she draws Walter into the fold isn't really clear, but it's no surprise the chaotic nature of this new human contact rattles him out of his literary lethargy. He's writing again, documenting a series of hilariously mean-spirited assaults on the Manhattan status quo, proud of his dual role as participant and observer. He's also committing a series of felonies, but that's life in Clyde's world.

"This material could be seen as racist, homophobic, politically incorrect, insensitive, and, well, frankly, unrealistic and ludicrous," Walter's agent says about his new work. "It's a stretch for anyone reading this book to believe that people really do these things. It's simply not believable."

Maybe so. And Friedman's material might be too, but that doesn't mean the book isn't funny, and, in the nature of satire, doesn't mean it isn't true. And it certainly doesn't affect success, because most of his previous books that share the same flaw are still in print.

And Kinky, through his marionettes, is on the right side of the battles that take place: harmless lunatics against an abusive mental health system, the homeless against Donald Trump, small local taverns against the paradigmatic corporate power that's become the new Evil Empire in all its unchecked expansionism: Starbucks. And admit it: In our fantasies, it's fun to imagine the everyday yuppie world sometimes looking, in the words of The Kinkster himself, "like the French Revolution had hit it at a hundred miles an hour." It's summer--be entertained. Buy this book. Read it. Don't apologize.