AN EVENING OF ROMANTIC LOVEMAKING

While holding a small-town movie theater audience hostage—at least in his own mind—a disgruntled man rants for more than 100 pages about this, that, and nothing.

According to this nameless man, who waves a gun and says he's rigged the place with tripwires and plastique, he is 46, dying of cancer, failed at business and marriage, and has six kids. He's loaded with gripes, among them how “everything is simultaneously the biggest deal that's ever happened and also totally pointless.” In his own eyes a daring comic (à la Gilbert Gottfried, perhaps), he delights in nonsensical segues. “Huey Lewis wanted a new drug, but I want a new dog,” he says, launching an aimless routine about getting the right pooch. He assaults good taste, going on about how the best frozen lemonade he ever had was at the Holocaust Museum and jumping on the opportunity to repeatedly utter the N-word in riffing on what people once called Brazil nuts. It’s hard to say what Slotky, who is White, is after since the book is neither funny nor shocking nor alive with ideas or feeling. In other words, it’s no A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Israeli novelist David Grossman's International Man Booker Prize–winning 2017 work about a tormented stand-up comic. If anyone is being held hostage, it’s the reader who keeps waiting for Slotky’s patter to matter.

A book whose brevity is its greatest reward.