In this novel, a man named Glenn Beck encounters plenty of trouble (any resemblance between the protagonist and the former Fox News commentator is most likely not a coincidence).

“There are a lot of Glenn Becks in the phone book,” the author writes. “This is one of ’em.” This Glenn Beck engages a whore. Is thrown in prison. Gets kidnapped. Twice. Repeatedly soils himself. One through-line holds the tale together: McGrouchpants clearly disdains Beck and takes palpable delight in dropping him into humiliating scenarios. The novel’s subtitle is somewhat misleading. There is no mystery to solve; at some points in the story, the author writes: “Glenn Beck thought, ‘It’s like I’m a detective.’ ” While McGrouchpants declines to offer a mystery, he seems well read. He dedicates the 2016 book to “sanity preservers” Alain Robbe-Grillet, Joan Didion, and William S. Burroughs. He kicks off the novel with quotes by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Pauline Kael. But the work’s subtitle and the author’s pseudonym are an indication of the level of wit. The tale’s second sentence (“The whore was not the one he ordered”) sets the scabrous tone. The bulk of the 200 chapters are one to two sentences. For example: The 45-word Chapter One Hundred Eighty-Three ends with “Something had to give.” The next chapter opens with “Like: Glenn Beck’s bladder.” Along the way, the author delivers some amusing lines and colorful details. And readers who dislike Beck (and Fox News) will likely enjoy the story. But too often McGrouchpants seems to be of the opinion that the mere mention of Beck’s name in a compromising or scatological context is hilarious. Fans of Mel Brooks’ 1968 comedy The Producers may remember the humorous reaction shots of outraged Broadway patrons to the spectacle of Springtime for Hitler. Those will doubtless be the looks on some readers’ faces as they tear through this tale. In comedy, timing is everything, which raises the question: Why would readers in 2020 be interested in a book ridiculing Beck? Beck’s public profile and cultural standing have waned considerably since his Fox glory days when his signature blackboard and onscreen crying jags were brilliantly skewered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Unfortunately, this novel feels a bit too much and too late.

An action-packed but uneven comic romp.

A feckless young man struggles with precarious jobs and a general failure to connect in this bleakly comic novel of alienation.

McGrouchpants’ narrative follows his antihero Chris Schuyler’s progress through the 1990s as he moves from his home in Rochester, New York, to college as an English major at the University of Chicago and into a series of dead-end jobs that are the tale’s focus. They include a high school summer job as a lawn mower; a five-and-a-half-year accounting stint that Chris loses when the slot is upgraded to require an MBA; a copy-editing position that ends when he takes too many sick days; a desperate, farcical stab at selling vacuum cleaners; and a gig as a fundraising canvasser in Portland, Oregon, after which he slides toward homelessness. Chris’ story is a bildungsroman in reverse about a peculiarly ’90s brand of eternal adolescence. He’s obsessed with indie rock bands, zines, and avant-garde movies—the title refers to Ang Lee’s art house action flick—as part of his rebellion against the “stultifying suburban” lifestyle his domineering father urges on him. Yet Chris’ lot is eternally stultifying work, infrequently relieved by awkward lurches at romance, with the longed for life of urban hipster intellectualism forever just beyond his reach. Chris’ closed-in, second-person ruminations could have been claustrophobic, but McGrouchpants expands them into a keenly subversive portrait of workplace social psychology, unfolding in long convolutions threaded with scabrous attitude. The result feels a bit like The Office might if David Foster Wallace and William S. Burroughs rewrote the scripts: “Tina, who’s training you, hardly notices that you’re five minutes late (you fell asleep for 40 min. in the front seat, drooling on your steering wheel—you got back from your ‘approved’ dentist appointment early, and put that time to good—if hardly anticipated, or, even, hardly avoidable (as soon as you pulled into the place, you beelined to a spot, and fell down like a ton of bricks) use)—and, instead of remarking on your slight tardiness, with a wave of her hand (‘Ahhh!’) and a practiced, commiserative co-worker grin, buckles down to the task of your 3-hr. block of training.”

A funny, caustic tale of a slacker’s dejected resistance to mainstream success.

A collection of three novellettes blends nostalgia, cynicism, and ribald humor.

This volume opens with Moral Hazard, in which Albany, New York, teens spend a sex-fueled summer together in the early 1990s. Chris and Belinda are just having fun, as they’ll both be off to college soon. But this casual relationship turns into love, at least for Chris. Maybe there’s a future for them, provided they’re faithful to each other. Nonsense: A Proust-Like Memoir, and Stuff follows the formative years of Chris Snyder (similar to the preceding Chris but not the same character). His first-person narrative primarily recounts his late-’80s childhood in Albany and his experiences and studies at the University of Chicago. His youth teems with the books he devours; popular music on vinyl, cassette, and CD; and a hodgepodge of eclectic friends and family. The final tale, My Mother the Street, deviates from the earlier novellettes. Goth punks in Los Angeles witness the start of a zombie attack. Of course, most of them are stoned, so whether or not the assault is truly happening is anyone’s guess. McGrouchpants’ tongue-in-cheek style and intentionally vulgar comedy mostly succeed. In Nonsense, for example, increasingly longer footnotes spin off into stream-of-consciousness tangents. They’re usually pop culture–related and gleefully irreverent. But in the same story, many sentences end with a winky-face emoji and a #yeah—an extraneous social media gesture for the already sardonic tale. The author, who’s previously published flash fiction, sets a consistently brisk pace. This works best in Moral Hazard, as the not-always-predictable Chris and Belinda share a brief romantic interlude. The narrative approach is less effective in My Mother the Street; myriad characters are unestablished, and short, cryptic conversations hint at a longer, fuller story (which readers don’t get).

A striking, albeit uneven, assemblage of bawdy, sometimes sentimental tales.

Where does one begin a discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s famously difficult novel, Gravity’s Rainbow? This free-wheeling critique takes a loose approach. On the first page, readers learn the following: Pynchon was 8 years old when World War II ended; he was good friends with author Richard Fariña; and the character Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow is “essentially a dumbass.” In the pages that follow, McGrouchpants tackles Slothrop, Russian demolition crews working in the night, and the novel’s Teddy Bloat in a shoot-from-the hip fashion. This is not a chapter-by-chapter analysis or a definitive investigation of certain themes. It is instead a playful examination of cultural references, including Nine Inch Nails and Eric Bogosian. It is a look at lessons to be learned from this “obscure tome nobody reads,” such as how the book “teaches you to be not-naïve.” There are also many personal (for McGrouchpants) allusions to Portland, Oregon. Powell’s bookstore and the Living Room Theater are the types of cultural institutions that allow for deep thinking on something like a comparison of Pynchon and music critic Lester Bangs. This brief work (under 25 pages) doesn’t answer a lot of questions. It instead builds a great deal of curiosity about Gravity’s Rainbow and its influence. McGrouchpants refers to the novel as being so immense that “it exists in its own time, and in its own space.” It is one of those books that can be read and reread. The novel has certainly influenced the cyberpunk genre and perhaps much more. But certain sentiments are not exactly clear. The author asserts that “a book where the bus doesn’t show up late, isn’t a book about human life” yet is that true? Some abstract passages, including how Pynchon’s name looks something like a molecular chain, do not exactly add to the intrigue. Yet on the whole, McGrouchpants’ unabashedly odd work provides a heartfelt ode to an unabashedly strange novel. What better way to pay homage to literary complexity?

Delightfully offbeat but dense, this love letter to Pynchon delivers its share of gems.

A volume of flash fiction skewers celebrities, politicians, and pop-culture figures of yesteryear.

McGrouchpants does not hold back in these short works, which include a mix of comic pieces, prose poems, and microstories. There are confessional celebrity monologues, fake advice columns, satirical case histories, Hardy Boys parodies, and a slew of other forms, all of which the author uses to shock and surprise readers into laughter (or some other reaction). Most are no longer than a page, and several are actually shorter than their own titles. A fair number of the pieces revolve around former Vice President Dick Cheney: Cheney claiming to have introduced Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson; Cheney volunteering to serve as a “human latrine” for troops in Iraq; Cheney recounting the time he ate a bag of goat penises on his front porch with Wilford Brimley. The longest story by far is the 28-page “A Bite-Sized Piece,” which alternates between a woman’s account of dating an erratic man known as the Argyle Scot and instructions for how to remove a leech from one’s body. A pen name like McGrouchpants is likely to insulate the author from accusations of misanthropy, but even so, the tales aren’t often funny as much as they are petulant or mocking. There’s a palpable animosity directed toward academics, sex workers, and columnist Dan Savage, among others. Every page is a surprise, and there is a certain delight in that. But there is little enjoyment to be had from the stories themselves. The jokes are extremely scatological. Many make sense only on the level of Dada or absurdism. The piece “ ‘Why Christopher Hitchens Doesn’t Matter,’ by George Orwell’s Reincarnation, Now a Six-Year-Old Living Outside Leeds,” for example, reads in its entirety: “ ‘Oh, blimey, guv’nor, he got it all wrong!’ ‘What are you studying in school?’ ‘Geography! It's my favorite subject!’ ‘What do you like to do for fun?’ ‘Football! Me and me mates like to toss it around!’ ‘Really?’ ‘Naw! We hit the pipe!’ The End.” Is that a commentary on Hitchens or Orwell? Or Britain? Or elementary school curriculums? As with most of the pieces, many readers will be left befuddled and slightly annoyed.

A bold but confounding collection of short humor pieces.

A short story collection about the problematic lives of mostly young people.  

The opening story, “Dead Uncle,” follows Roy, a Maine entrepreneur who owns the state’s only drive-thru funeral business, which gets its share of mentally exhausted caregivers finally experiencing personal freedom. In “Uninscribed Tablet,” a CIA double agent perplexes the unnamednarrator who tries in vain to unscramble her motives and capture her romantic attention; the speaker of “Don’t Leave Me Alone!” reflects on the friends he made and betrayed in grade school, and what became of them. In the longest and most fully realized story, “Surgery Without Anesthesia,” a carload of road-tripping buddies embark on a journey to Cape Cod and fill the journey with good-natured ribbing and “surface-layer bullshitting”; only at the end of the story do readers learn of one friend’s secret, which comes as a shock to the others. Overall, this is a breezy collection of tales that stretch the boundaries of the short-fiction form in a moderately appealing fashion. However, many are narrated in the immature voices of teenagers and too often feel like clipped scenes from a larger story. This is apparent in the standout “Fair-Weather Best Friends Forever,” in which a carload of high school seniors runs out of gas and the narrator, after years of rickety friendships, grows weary of them as they walk to a party. Here, the author’s characterization is at its most lucid and the situation is compelling enough to make readers want more. However, the tale ends just as the plot starts to simmer. Other works disappoint as they amount to mere sketches of a plot or a fleeting thought, such as the dreams of a transatlantic traveler or the panic-stricken diatribe of an insurance adjuster whose self-described “Double Life” is exposed by a felonious co-worker. Two short “essays” form the collection’s perplexing conclusion, including one credited to a “ghost contacted by Ouija board.”  

A creative but mixed bag of sometimes-bizarre tales.

A compact collection offers fictional vignettes.

The subtitle of this work hints at the form of flash fiction, which is characterized by brevity— usually 100 to 200 words grouped around a pithy hook or twist. Regardless of what the “Flesh Friction” mentioned in that subtitle means (it’s never made clear), the book’s contents reflect the elements of flash fiction. This is a compilation of two dozen or so quick dramatic bits, usually well under a page in length, with the whole book being only a few dozen pages long. Two other features found in flash fiction—slangy delivery and a tendency to sprinkle in sexual references—are likewise present in many of these miniature chapters. Readers should expect explicit sexual references and racial epithets. Throughout these stories, the author invokes figures from the current news cycle—Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, Kanye West, Donald Trump—and employs plenty of attempts at humor in order to make each vignette snappy and readable. Readers are clearly expected to be already familiar with American politics and culture. McGrouchpants admirably tackles a wide range of provocative subjects and offers some amusing tidbits here. But even knowledgeable readers will sometimes be at a loss since the author frequently lapses into incoherent babbling, as in “Why Big Pharma and Sociopathic Sex Advice-Givers are Shoveling Dirt Over Generation X’ers and Wilhelm Reich’s Graves” and other tales. A postscript to “ ‘FAMILY TIES’ and ‘GROWING PAINS’ Re-Runs Are Reality!” tells readers: “P.S. Try The Marx-Engels Reader, The Federalist Papers, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution (Abridged)…or, shut up! Shoot pool”—with the whimsicality obviously intended to be offbeat and cynical. Yet the result often reads like a slightly protracted and extremely disjointed series of in-jokes that fall flat, rendered in prose that’s jumpy and sneering rather than sharp and funny. Even flash fiction fans will likely be disappointed.

A timely patchwork of fictional bits and pieces that lands few punches.

McGrouchpants (Flash Fiction for the Age of Trump, 2017, etc.) delivers a collection of short stories about 20- and 30-somethings in Portland, Oregon.

Each story in this collection begins with an image of a tarot card, juxtaposed with a title (such as “Portland Fiction Writer [Card #0: The Fool]”). The stories take readers on a journey through 21st-century Portland and all its glory of coffee shops, Metropolitan Area Express Light Rail stops, and Powell’s Bookstore readings. The characters consist largely of overeducated, underpaid people who’ve settled in the city, armed with heartfelt opinions on bands (My Bloody Valentine and R.E.M., to name a few) and the correct brand of cigarettes (American Spirit). Although many find themselves working jobs they dislike, such as the young man who answers phones for General Motors in “Keeping the World at Bay [Card #12: The Hanged Man],” they are determined, in one way or another, to survive. The scenes of characters complaining in and about coffee shops don’t always offer the most thrilling prose. But the collection is at its best when taking readers beyond such obvious places of caffeinated, rainy Northwest woe. In “Down and Out in the Portland in Oregon [Card #11: Justice],” for instance, the narrator finds himself in jail for an extended period, and he must try to pass the days as best he can with selections from the prison library. It’s enlightening to see someone at the mercy of such an indifferent system—particularly when they already have such a distrust of the world’s systems. In “Jessica Consults Her Clipboard [Card #7: The Chariot],” a young woman clings to her job going door to door for a nonprofit organization, and it’s shown to be a nerve-wracking way to make a living. All told, it’s easy to skewer a place that prides itself on its weirdness but these stories get to the heart of the people who make up that very weirdness and often create nuanced and lasting impressions.

Intricate, if sometimes-whiny, portraits of Portland’s young and restless.