SOUTHPAW

A surreal comedic novel about a baseball fan’s bizarre adventure, set in modern-day Los Angeles.

Laemmle presents Icarus J. Spinoza: a left-handed aficionado of America’s pastime who has a penchant for marijuana and tacos. He lives with his girlfriend, Fiona Dam, in the Frogtown neighborhood of central LA. One evening, Icarus fails to return from walking the couple’s dog, MacGuffin, and Fiona is understandably concerned; Frogtown is near the Los Angeles River, a body of water “generally derided as a real dud, little better than an open-air sewage system,”and Schlitz-guzzling ruffians and other unsavory types commonly hang out on its shores. As Fiona begins her search for her boyfriend and her dog, readers learn that Icarus is, in fact, on a strange journey of his own. Icarus wakes up by the river, sans MacGuffin, where he’s met by a talking goldendoodle named Charon. It turns out that the canine is the Charon—the mythological figure responsible for ferrying the dead to the afterlife. Icarus isn’t dead, but he would like to find his own dog, so he and Charon venture further into the seedy locales surrounding the river. It’s eventually revealed that a particularly sinister coyote, who’s been “radicalizing some of the local canines,” according to Charon, wants to flood the city. This rambunctious tale manages to include bits of real-life history, philosophical discussion, humorous illustrations by Keynan (often featuring dogs), and, for better or worse, plenty of instances of defecation. The combination makes for a tale that offers readers an uncommonly irreverent look at the City of Angels. Its weirdness can result in a tangled narrative, at times; for instance, the portions that lean heavily on Greek mythology are often humorous, but they aren’t always clear in their intent, as when the mighty Poseidon takes the form of a beaver who, for some reason, has a keen interest in seeing human breasts. There are also more obscure entities, such as Menoetius and Polyphemus, which may not be familiar to those uninitiated in the classics. In the end, though, readers will come away with a new appreciation for a place as strange as the creatures—real and imaginary—that call it home.

An ambitious, if sometimes hazy, ecological/urban tale that comes straight out of left field.