Fiction Writers Review » comic novels

[Reviewlet] Trophy, by Michael Griffith

Brian Short — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:00:36 +0000

Michael Griffith’s funny, infectious novel Trophy (TriQuarterly) follows Vada, a once promising college student who, after losing his parents in a car accident, drops out of school and never again does anything productive. Meanwhile, Vada’s friend and rival Wyatt becomes a top earner on the Asian golf circuit, gets hailed as a hero for stopping a grapefruit knife-wielding assailant (Wyatt mostly saved the knife-wielder from himself, it turns out), and becomes engaged to the local weather woman, Darla, whom Vada promptly falls for and who treats him like her best girlfriend. Vada makes a plan to tell Darla about his feelings, and then he dies.

That’s the whole point, really, of the book, following as it does the last twenty minutes of Vada’s life—as he finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, the gags and absurdities layering and corkscrewing until you don’t know which way is up.

But Griffith’s novel is more than a series of jokes or comic set pieces. The narrator both claims that Vada is telling the story—he attributes specific words to Vada, claims Vada lied in the previous chapter, etc.—and refers consistently to Vada in the third person, which together make the novel seem less about a (mostly!) pathetic character dying and more about the pieces of each of us which come across as pitiful, unsuccessful, unrealized, incomplete. Vada describes himself as “a hard case, only not in the unreformable-criminal way…but for crimes of excessive interiority and fear.” It’s Social Anxiety Disorder as a metaphysical state, and Griffith deftly connects this human moment to the acts of writing and reading and also, more universally, to our relationship with mortality. Griffith’s fearless narrative gearshifting and his funny, nuanced portrait of grief give the book a degree of subtlety which makes Vada’s story moving and satisfying in ways that less ambitious comic novels can’t hope to achieve.

Extras

Steve Almond recently interviewed Griffith for the Nervous Breakdown, and here’s another interview from Cincinnati’s City Beat.
On the NEA’s website, read an excerpt from Bibliophilia, one of Griffith’s previous novels.

In Defense of Comic Novels, Part II

Celeste Ng — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:53:58 +0000

Lipsyte cites Wells Tower as one writer who isn't afraid to make readers laugh

Recently we discussed a Times article about why comic novels often get overlooked when it comes to literary awards. Over at BlackBook, author and Columbia professor Sam Lipsyte adds his thoughts on the status of funny fiction today:

Do you feel that literary fiction is afraid to make people laugh these days?

I think there’s a worry that if it’s funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the serious books tended to be pretty funny. I don’t know if that’s as true these days. [...]

Who do you think is still doing that?

Well, Padgett Powell is still doing it, Barry Hannah is still doing it. Ben Marcus can be hilarious. Gary Lutz, Deb Olin Unferth. These are all people that are really dead serious and dead funny, and I’m interested in that as well. Wells Tower. I think it’s being done, but it’s not as front and center, not as widely read as it used to be, fiction that does that sort of thing. Maybe it’s also linked to readerships, how they’ve changed over the years. Or maybe it all got eaten up by Harry Potter and Twilight. I think, more and more, that’s what adults read now. All the people we’ve talked about are people who write hilarious, heartwrenching, and often horrific fiction, and they wrote for grown-ups. Maybe there aren’t enough grownups who want to read that sort of thing anymore.

Read the full interview, including Lipsyte’s thoughts on getting an arts education, reality TV, and his latest novel, The Ask, here. Via TEV.

In Defense of Comic Novels

Celeste Ng — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:58:31 +0000

In the art world, comedy seldom gets its dues: if it’s funny, many assume, it can’t also be “real” art. At the Oscars a couple of years back, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly lamented the plight of “A Comedian at the Oscars”: “the saddest man of all / Your movies may make millions, but your name they’ll never call.”

Something similar happens in literature, Erica Wagner points out in the UK’s Times:

Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. Publishers have to choose which books from their list to submit for a prize such as the Orange: is a book that makes a reader laugh really worthy of a prize? Or is it just, well, not serious enough?

But Wagner points out that being funny and being good are not mutually exclusive:

The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime. The reason the classic comic novels — such as Lucky Jim, or Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle — stand the test of time is not because they are great comic novels: it’s because they are great novels, full stop. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: comic novel or serious novel? Doesn’t matter. Brilliant novel.

To support her case, Wagner lists her top 10 comic novels, including Deaf Sentence by David Lodge and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (”Yes, it’s about the Holocaust. But it’s really funny, too.”)

Are you convinced? And do you ever write funny, or do you stick to the serious route?