BLANKETY BLANK: A MEMOIR OF VULGARIA is indeed the perfect title for D. Harland Wilson's novel, because if the average person picked it up and read any given page, his reaction would be, "What the fuck?"
Part of the take-it-or-leave-it "bizarro" movement, Wilson's book isn't a novel per se — at least not in any shape, form or fashion that you're used to. It does tell a story in its own roundabout, A.D.D. way, of a serial killer who's all the talk of not your average, ordinary suburban America neighborhood, like PEYTON PLACE with a Chernobyl cloud hanging overhead.
How different is this tract of homes? Just consider the family of protagonist Rutger Van Trout. In the opening chapter, he hammers a hole in his hand, just for the hell of it. His son is a werewolf. He haggles a guy selling a BMW Futique with built-in KITT mode (as in KNIGHT RIDER). People's skeletons have ghosts. Mass-murdering Mr. Blankety Blank becomes the rage, precisely for his rage. Lou Diamond Phillips is a supporting character.
Why, yes, this story is full of meaningless sketches and nonsensical asides, with discussions on BREAKIN' 2 and Mae West's nipples. It's that kind of word that thinks nothing of interrupting itself for a paragraph-long history of the Ferris wheel, a discourse on the blank Scrabble tile, a rant against chiropractors, notes on the handlebar mustache and various haikus. As one character says on pg. 65, "This doesn't make any sense," which is the point of this purposely absurd underground subgenre.
Case in point: "Layke took the y out of her name and laid it on her bed. She realized that ys were basically upside-down penises and wondered why her parents had put one in the middle of her name. Then she realized that all letters looked like penises if you perceived them from the right angle and wondered why her parents had given her a name full of penises. Then she put her y back." You can either see it as pretentious or harmless, depending on your tolerance for experimentalism ... and for scenes of people stapling their cheeks together. —Rod Lott
Buy it at Amazon.
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