TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT

Chaos ensues after a man at a crossroads reaches out to an old flame in this comic sequel.

Seattle, 1989. Aspiring poet and habitual weed smoker Jasper Trueblood, 30, is leaving his partying ways behind. He enjoys his job teaching English as a second language at a community college—a position in which he makes frequent use of a ventriloquist dummy named Bosworth—and he’s engaged. Of course, his fiancee, Daphne, is still a bit of a party animal, and they don’t have too much in common outside of a certain insatiable lust for each other—but how long can that last? Not very long at all, it turns out, as Jasper learns when he comes home early to find Daphne enjoying the lust of another man. During the resulting personal crisis, Jasper decides to buy a ticket to Guam to drop in on his old college girlfriend, Lani Sablan, without contacting her first. He expects Lani to be shocked, but actually she foresaw Jasper’s arrival in a dream—though that doesn’t change the fact that he is in very real danger from her meth-dealing husband. After a brief stay on the island, Jasper escapes with his life back to Seattle, thinking his trip down Memory Lane is over. But a few months later, he gets a call from Lani, who wants to bring her daughter, Rose, to the Pacific Northwest and stay with Jasper. “I’m an emotional wreck, Jazz,” she tells him. “My tropical depression evolved into an all-out typhoon. I need a new start. Rose does, too. I’ve never been to Seattle, but I hear it’s beautiful.” Is Jasper about to finally have the adult life—and adult love—that he’s dreamed of? Maybe. But it will involve quite a bit of tragedy, a prison sentence, and several sessions of talk therapy with a stripper named Ginger Snap.

Hickey has a natural way with words. His descriptions are original and often quite funny. Daphne, for example, is an “ever-slumbering but ever-amorous opossum.” But the writing is sometimes a bit too cute, particularly the dialogue, which often seems to serve no purpose other than to momentarily amuse readers. The question of why is a recurring one. For example, why do all the characters seem so taken with Jasper, an overweight, horny, perpetually stoned man with a ventriloquist dummy? (Readers, by contrast, will struggle to find him charming.) There is a larger question regarding just what the novel is trying to say. Potential thesis statements are littered throughout the text—many of them spoken by Ginger Snap, a walking, talking male fantasy that bears little resemblance to a human woman—but by the end, the book does not succeed in being about anything. Nor is it just a simple lark, given a particular and needless death that the author has seen fit to include. The story’s female characters, who should be intriguing, are ultimately only there for the redemption narrative of the decidedly uninteresting Jasper. The experience will be an unsatisfying one for many readers.

A humorous but disappointingly stunted tale about a would-be poet’s adventures.