Collected writings of William K Gillespie and friends

Reviews:

We might consider Steal Stuff From Work an anti-capitalist manifesto in novel form, a call to arms whose urgency is dampened only by the malaise that washes the narrative. Debut novelist Jasper Pierce has created a world defined by worker dissatisfaction and its attendant resentment, recognizably ours but pushed a notch out of realism and into the realm of the neardystopic . That this near-dystopia hews so closely to social realism is telling, and shows a novelist hitting his mark with a strong indictment of the US labor system.

Dramatizing the plight of various characters stuck in menial jobs with no benefits or health care, the book extends this realism into the speculative, imagining what might happen if such laborers united—and revolted. The results are mixed, making for a more complex argument than simply socialist revolution as easy fix.

We follow Kemp as he moves from job to job, his fragmented narration effectively mimicking the fragmentary nature of a life lived in part-time, the uneasy feeling of losing one’s identity to multiple meaningless, disposable jobs. How to maintain some semblance of personal dignity in the capitalist workplace? Following Kemp’s logic, you steal stuff from work. He explains his MO early on: 

I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me.

As Kemp moves from job to job, from dishwasher to server to telephone book distributor to bookseller to Web designer to bed-and-breakfast lackey, he swipes, or helps others swipe, the following : steaks, alcohol, a mounted black bear, gardening tools, books, records, a city bus, a hotel room, the obligatory toilet paper, and more. He collects jobs; he collects things stolen from jobs.

When he finds himself reunited with his old friend Jasper, who has made a home of his workplace , a Rent-a-Room inside the mall where Kemp distributes phone books, a revolution is hatched. Or rather, an already hatched revolution swells, as it’s really Jasper’s brainchild from the start, with Kemp putting aside his apathy to help make his friend’s vision reality. Jasper is more elusive and transitory than Kemp, his politics more radical; if this were Fight Club (1996) (and the two texts’similarities are worth noting), Jasper would be the Tyler Durden to Kemp’s anonymous narrator.

Together, Jasper, Kemp, and their cohorts found Steal Stuff From Work Day, concentrating on spreading word to disgruntled employees nationwide in preparation for the November 11th holiday. Kemp builds a website where he uploads SSFW business cards to be downloaded and printed by their network of Kinko’s employees. The group plans and pulls off (or doesn’t quite) pranks like making CDs and playing them in stores that sell CD players. “When it explodes,” the mastermind explains, “the employees go to turn off the music and find a label on the CD with a note about Steal Stuff From Work Day.” Through these kinds of schemes, the group is able to organize and execute a day of mass-scale vocational kleptomania.

Through relating these schemes, too, the novel acts as a how-to manual for the reader, its title functioning as much as a command as a description of the events its covers contain. A number of schemes are offered up as ways to blast holes in the system, ways to unite the masses. There is a note of caution, however, as the pranksters don’t always win. People get hurt. There are fires. Injuries. Citywide calamity.

As all this goes on, Jasper, Kemp, and their crew are squatting in a farm-turned-commune guarded by stolen police cars. Kemp, the apathetic foil to Jasper’s radical socialist, asks himself whether this new situation is much better. Disillusioned with the community he has helped create, Kemp wants out, and quickly leaves to fend for himself. While the novel at times veers anxiously close to Adbusters didacticism, Kemp's sustained ambivalence about the movement he's founded keeps it from reachinghe's founded keeps it from reaching that point. 

As well, Kemp's contradictory ethics are questionable, making him somewhat unreliable and thus more complex as a narrator. "I'm principled," he says. "I never steal from coworkers or customers, only from the job itself." Despite these self-proclaimed principles, he can't help but steal wine from a friend, and vegetables from the farm. Kemp's politics are earnest, but his principles breached. Who is the enemy? It's no longer clear: his kleptomania overpowers his ideology.

The novel enacts a revolution whose conse- quences remain ambiguous at the close of the book. Whether or not Steal Stuff From Work Day is a feasible solution to the problem, the problem exists: humans as workers are undervalued. The novel's great strength is its ability to proliferate parables describing this problem, and Kemp's rhetoric fre- quently sears. While his more ideologically driven moments occasionally come off as overwrought, their sheer earnestness forgives the melodrama. Structured as a progression of short vignettes, his narration is interspersed with shorter, more urgent passages rendered in italics and often using the collective "we" to abstract Kemp's story to a more universal problem. "What was wrong with us that we couldn't pay for childcare, tuition or a trip to the dentist?" he laments. "Given every chance to become middle class, we had fallen flat."

Steal Stuff From Work Day provides an oppor- tunity for the employees of the world — and by this time, the organization has made a global impact — to seize power and resources. And it works — or seems to, at least partially. The aftermath, according to tele- vision and newspaper accounts, is part apocalypse, part new world, with neither version winning out. When, in the last few passages, the point of view shifts from Kemp's "T" to second person and finally to third-person limited, there is a confusion of per- spective that seems intentional. Where throughout the novel the reader is asked to do a good bit of work filling in gaps left when jumping between scenes and temporalities, here the reader is left with a number of irresolvable ambiguities. This is less irksome than it is fitting, for, by the end of Steal Stuff From Work Day, few people, Kemp included, know what has happened. The revolution has taken place. Now what?

Milks, Megan. "Vocational Kleptomania." American Book Review, vol. 30 no. 4, 2009, p. 19-19. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2009.0110.

 

Steal Stuff From Work: An Interview with Author Jasper Pierce by Joel Gillespie, published in Smile Politely 2008 October 13.

Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a real impression that lasts long after you put it down. Steal Stuff From Work, new from Jasper Pierce on Spineless Books, is a great reflection of our current state of affairs, and a signal of what may be to come. Kemp, a light-fingered dishwasher at an upscale Seattle restaurant (as well as an employee at other menial jobs), steals from his employers while trying to keep his life in order. When a theft goes wrong, he loses his restaurant job and organizes others for a National Steal Stuff From Work Day. Things spiral out of control, on both a personal and societal level. It’s a moving and disorienting tale of extreme commitment that springs from roots of extreme apathy.

After the jump, Jasper Pierce volunteered his ideas on being overworked and underappreciated, his book’s roots in Champaign-Urbana, and the potential for revolution in the United States. Stick around and check it out.

Smile Politely: I really like the line, “A stitch of sleep before the alarm clock reopens the wound.” Exhaustion seems to be an ongoing theme in the book. Were you sleep-deprived during the writing of the book, or was that just a recollection of past experiences with exhaustion?

Jasper Pierce: The novel depicts characters who hold multiple part-time jobs, working more than forty hours a week, with no security or benefits, who still cannot make ends meet. Thus, exhaustion.

SP: The book is set in Seattle, but you’ve worked in Champaign-Urbana. What are some similarities to businesses or people in the book to their counterparts in real life?

JP: The restaurant Eisenhower’s as a setting is modeled after Kennedy’s, back before it became a tasteful golf course restaurant and was housed in Sunnycrest mall, dark and windowless, with an authentic aura of creepy malice. The owner Allen Strange is a conflation of numerous notoriously abusive, unpleasant, or incompetent restaurant owners in the twin cities, including Ray Timpone, Pal Bock (of the Original Pancake House), and Allen Strong (of the Courier and Silvercreek, among numerous other ventures). This part of the book wrote itself.

SP: The dialogue in the book is great, really snappy, with a lot of fantastic one-liners. Like, “That’s your rent money. You need that to buy beer with.” Was the dialogue made up out of whole cloth, or did you store away some gems that you’d heard?

JP: I made it up, but working as a waiter for many years I absorbed the quick, sarcastic rhythms of restaurant workers. Waiters and waitresses are caustic when out of earshot of the customers, in contrast to the polite, servile face they may present in the dining room.

SP: What’s been your experience with socialist and anarchist organizations? Are you a student of any particular political or social philosophy?

JP: I’m a socialist, with faith in the ability of ordinary people to manage their own government and economic institutions, and with a belief that the purpose of those institutions is to provide for the basic needs of the people. I am not affiliated with any organization at present and vote Democrat by default, sometimes with mild enthusiasm.

SP: The ending of the book reminds me a lot of Invisible Man, where the nameless protagonist is holed up in a room full of light. Was that an intentional parallel or, if not, do you think it’s a comparable situation?

JP: The character of Kemp could not ride out the consequences of his beliefs and becomes permanently alienated both from society and his former friends. The parallel to Ellison was not intentional, but kudos to you for making that connection—it’s most flattering.

SP: What is your background? In the book, the narrator’s mother is a professional strikebreaker and his father owns restaurants. Were you trying to say something about the necessity of proper parenting, or rather, something about the lack of conformity passed down and therefore less complicity?

JP: Kemp’s alienation from his workplace and the world began at home. His parents treated him like an employee, a liability, or an asset, regarding him as an uncertain economic investment rather than a human to be loved unconditionally.

SP: Was the character of Cy (a waiter whose competence is matched only by his kleptomania) based on a real person, and if so, what is that person up to now?

JP: Cy was originally based on a guy named Cy who lives in New Hampshire, but became infused with the mannerisms of Louis, who is a professional waiter at an upscale steakhouse in Cincinnati.

SP: “I wondered what kind of glue would hold the city together when money stopped working.” What do you imagine would be the glue?

JP: It would have to be compassion. Otherwise it would be blood. I believe people are hard-wired to care for and respect one another, though, as we mature, this programming gets overwritten with greed, ambivalence, cowardice, fear, and self-interest, which are all characteristics rewarded by this economic system.

SP: “Money is at most paper, no more than a bribe and threat, an imaginary negative number.” No question here, just really liked the line.

JP: :)

SP: I really liked the preventing information highway robbery announcement. Have you had jobs that passed out crap like that, except not as self-awarely? What the hell?

JP: Never have I worked anyplace with that level of self-awareness, but that memo makes explicit a characteristic of many office jobs I have held. Underachievers are valuable assets, posing no threat to the managerial class.

SP: What is the most interesting thing that you’ve stolen from work?

JP: Myself.

But the important question is not what but why. Why would you be tempted to steal from work, if you would never steal from a store or from church or from strangers? Because the work you do has no human value? Because your boss doesn’t appear to work or even know how his business is run and yet has bought many antique cars with the revenue his laborers generate? Because you have more charm and fire and education and work experience than the neurotic managing editor who assigns you his grunt work? Because there’s something innately offensive about making $10/hour to park Lexuses for New England assholes whose dogs get better health care than you? Because you got paid minimum wage to remove asbestos from a greenhouse in July? Because you were meant for something better? Because we all were?

SP: I also saw a lot of parallels to Fight Club, even in the female character passed back and forth between the main characters. Did you ever consider Jasper and Kemp being two sides of the same personality?

JP: Not as such. They both grew out of my personality to some extent, but were also modeled on real people. The characters, to the best of my ability, were meant to be complements to one another: mutually exclusive personalities, in other words.

SP: Was this set in the present-day? There really weren’t a lot of clues that I recognized. What do you imagine Kemp is up to now?

JP: The novel is set in 2011, though this is not revealed. This future world is the same as the present day, if trends (such as rising gas prices) continue. Although this is far from clear in Steal Stuff From Work, a deadly virus is unleashed on Steal Stuff From Work Day, stolen from a lab, and a plague sweeps the world. Kemp is likely to be one of the survivors, because of his total isolation in the secret hotel room. He will be one of those who gets to rebuild society, whether or not he is up to the task.

SP: Do you think there’s any potential for actual revolution in the US? Do you consider the book more of a cautionary tale, call to arms, or a bit of both?

JP: On the path we’re on, social collapse seems inevitable. There is potential for revolution in the U.S.—that’s how our country was founded. The book is a call to arms. One of the reasons it is set in Seattle was to honor the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which still stands as a model of what a united population could accomplish.

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REVIEW BY IAIN MATHESON

 

If iter_ability_ marks/divides and exceeds from the start (sic:)) then iter_ation_ - caught in a lop-sided reversal of act into potential,made a sub-transcendental asymptote - never comes,can never come. Repetition then must stand a kind of difference.
          I gabble this mantra to make myself feel better about opening another /mail with apologies for the delay.:)

I think _Steal Stuff From Work_ is a little masterpiece. I'd like to concentrate on pp. 44-.
          From p. 55 a generalised redistribution - initially individual--anarchistic,tendentially (as Machiavellied by Cy's spectacular theft of a grand piano pp. 48-50) (only) a gesture: constrained by (available) stock and by financial and as it were political prudence i.e. constrained by objective pro-fetishism/exploitation - phases (freed of the first constraint but not the second) into a high-potential reformist activism; but once put beyond _both_ constraints i.e. massified: converted into (a tactic of) destruction _as opposed to destructuration_ it (said redistribution) phases once more into a lawless/feudalised (= honest:)) (neo-)capitalism - retrieving (the violent _phenomenon_ of) property relations by way effectively of a dominating/principal commodity fetishism (this the constitutive mis-recognition of capitalism itself: the homeostatification of feudal fetishism (exchange-value)),implicitly fusing the previous forces means and relations of production into an/_the_ instrument of production in a new infrastructure _itself_ - finally - the neither formal nor real subsumption by capitalism of (what counts today as) (radical) _reality_). Of contingent dialectical necessity then said redistribution's truth is _non/apocalyptically_ to _destructure_ _nothing_:

STAGE               1              2a              2b              3
  
PAGE REFERENCE      ...p.44        pp.48-50        pp.55-59        pp.62/64-
  
DIEGESIS            ...William's   Cy's            the             the
                    Kinko's        piano           meeting         janitor/
                    email          theft                           William's
                                                                   dis-
                                                                   illusion;
                                                                   general
                                                                   dis/
                                                                   integration

COMPOSITION         Redistribution Gesture          Reformism      Neo-capitalism
                    (individual--  [expressive      (collectivist: [contingent--
                    anarchist:     immediacy]       pre-rational)  necessary
                    formal)/                                       term;
                    gesture                                        contingent
                    [latency]                                      dialectical
                                                                   mediacy]

/                   |-------------------------------X--------------X
MODEL               X
                   |--------------X

Note the difficult logic of all this establishes not the contingency but the necessity of our 'dialectical mediacy'.--No doubt it is finally in something like these terms that we should understand both capitalism's 'ghostly' resilience(s?) and the historical lesson of the American Revolution,perhaps the only (founding) event by which capitalism's '''identity'''/_system(s?)_  was/were exposed - precisely in and by being assumed in practice.)
          Still there hides in 2b's warmth and in the difficult logic of the shift from 2b to 3 the transcendental blueprint of an im/mediate/interstitial utopia: reformist praxis _lived_ (thus as a pre-communism) _i.e. outwith any (constructive) 
attempt to render this pre-communism (strategically) explicit by way of destruction_,_outwith (as the first Wittgenstein might say) any attempt to _speak_ a(n only) showable/_. Because a more-than-reformist praxis carried out under the same conditions could yield yet more than a _pre-_communism.--Is that the real lesson of _Mai '68_?

Reviews:

A wonderfully specific and witful inventory of forms in all senses and sizes. This is the pro model, believe me. — Robert Creeley, 2004

 

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The Review of Contemporary Fiction
June 22, 2007
Pg. 151(1) Vol. 27 No. 2 ISSN: 0276-0045 
Book review by Joseph Dewey

DOMINIQUE FITZPATRICK-O'DINN. TABLE OF FORMS. SPINELESS BOOKS, 2006. 113 PP. PAPER: $12.00.

Upon seeing an exquisitely wrought statue of, say, a horse, most would see the horse, few would see the marble. So it is with sounds, crude if musical, audaciously coaxed into words. Here is a gathering of language exercises, poems that constrain language by preset obligations, intricate, inventive, demanding directives (words juxtaposed within a line must share a vowel; each line must contain all 26 letters; each successive line must contain one additional letter); here is, in short, an intemperate delight in the marble. The volume--there areno editors listed and the author's "name" is a glorious fabrication--provides a glossary should the careful eye fail to perceive the imbedded patterns. If the challenge is to uncover the design, the glossary may seem intrusive, like a tacky magician distributing a lame handbook of magic tricks to patrons during a show; but in practice the guidelines only help clarify the exotic designs (among them, liponymns, haicoups, and pangrams), like taking a backstage tour of Disneyworld.Of course, language so precisely sculpted must struggle against appearing oppressively clever--a poem that "must" use all the consonants once before repeating any can seem a sterile thing. Only news poems collaged from current events even acknowledge the real world. What we are given, rather, is the compelling it-ness of language liberated from the tedious expectations of mimesis and narrative, language played with brio and elegance. Language thus constrained may depress some readers, like seeing some magnificent jungle animal caged. These are acts, such readers sniff, but not art. But language here is far from restrained--it is disciplined, wily, animated, resourceful, in turn nonsensical and musical, but supremely vital, dazzling to confront ("read" is not quite the verb), sculpted lines smeary with fingerprints, stunned by the audacity of their own construction.

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Nufer, Doug. "The Content of the Form." American Book Review, vol. 31 no. 5, 2010, p. 17-17. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2010.0007.

Even though few books provide such thorough explanations of their principles of composition as this book does, Table of Forms revels in deception. It is, to begin with, a Spineless Book with a spine that has nothing on it. The author, Dominique Fitz- patrick-O’Dinn, is a patently fraudulent pseudonym for William Gillespie. The “fourth edition,” with a 2006 copyright date, is the first fully revised edition, and was released in the spring of 2007. Anyone who has noticed Spineless Books, with its 2,002-word palindrome story 2002 (2002) by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie and its Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Prize for rule-driven literature, might be prepared for this audaciously ambitious and beautifully realized collection of poems written by formal constraints, and yet even the most devoted followers and practitioners of such work may cringe at the prospect of having to deal with procedural poetry. Formal work poses two problems: will the forms overpower the poems, making these pieces more interesting as puzzles than as works of art; and, will the act of reading be reduced to a guessing game, in which the reader must solve the puzzle behind the poem or feel stupid at being left out of some joke perpetrated by the poet? Gillespie solves the latter problem by providing a glossary, with definitions and etymology of the methods he uses, and identification of which poems follow which methods. Even when the forms are traditional and obvious (sonnet, sestina, palindrome), this is an essential key, particularly when so many poets take liberties with certain forms, such as the sonnet, as to defy definition. Relieved of having to play the guessing game, I found myself going back and forth from glossary to text, but even- tually the elegance and panache of the poetry kept me from checking the glossary until later. Although formal constraints have been around for centuries, Gillespie works in a contemporary tradition whose foremost practitioners are members of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Que- neau and François Le Lionnais. Gillespie’s poetry can seem as feverishly wrought as some works of Ian Monk and at other times as stylishly refined as some works of Harry Mathews, but Table of Forms more resembles Queneau’s 1947 classic, Exercises in Style, where he retells the same vignette in different ways, branding each version with the rhetorical device he uses, as well as the recently re-released Oulipo Compendium (2005) edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, with its definitions and demonstra- tions of a wealth of formal devices. Occasionally, Gillespie’s terms and definitions vary from what other rhetorical guides offer, but these variations, along with their examples, amplify rather than con- fuse the issue at hand. As Georges Perec, particularly in his novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), seems disinclined to limit himself to using “only” one constraint at a time, Gillespie often uses more than one form at once, sometimes combining them, such as in the following heimlich (haiku plus limerick). Maneuver Newspoem 16 March 2000 there is a forest on fire, flames spreading higher and higher. do I stand around, while it burns to the ground, this deadly maniacal pyre? For that matter, the entire newspoem series not only introduces another layer of constraint to many of the poems here, but also addresses a complaint poets often hear when forms are as evident as content: by forcing readers to adjust to an unusual mode of expression, the writer is being effete or hermetically self-indulgent. Using reports of current events, Gillespie began writing newspoetry in 1995, and from 1999 to 2002, he and Joe Futrelle edited a newspoetry site at http:// www.newspoetry.com that offered a poem a day. These poems show that a level of personal engage- ment with the world at large is more moving and effective than the emotional slop political feelings too often inspire. After all, using their own table of forms, “embedded” journalists that call mercenaries “contractors” render events in an authoritative cant that is more intent on protecting the status quo than with revealing what really happened. A writer using formal devices can emphasize the insidious linguis- tic patterns people have come to accept, whether it comes from the newspaper of record or some broad- cast of fair and balanced propaganda. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. Using the pantoum, Gillespie retells the story of people sent to prison for protesting the School for the Americas in “Dan and Doris Sage.” As the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the stanza that follows, the pattern high- lights the pathetic absurdity of the protesters’ plight, as they are trapped in the government’s scheme of justice. In another pantoum newspoem, Gillespie and Andy Gricevich commemorate a presidential encounter with a former adversary, but in “Clinton Does Vietnam,” the form takes on a breezier, hilari- ous tone as it plays with the mode of speech of a consummate politician. Many of these poems express a certain personal stake, either in political or social matters, and many do not express a stake in anything Gillespie or his pseudonym might care to reveal. The advantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is not that you get to say whatever you feel like saying, but that you get to say whatever the rules allow. The freedom such restriction allows can lead the writer to write works she or he never would otherwise think of writing. One disadvantage of working with a variety of demanding rules is that the objective of meeting the demands of the rules can overpower all other con- cerns. I don’t mind if the forms take over the poem, but some of the poems here (e.g., “Joey Zoey” and “Poetry Class”) strike me as more interesting in the ways they follow their rules, while others, such as the above-mentioned newspoems, reach out to readers to make them alternately forget and appreciate the rules of their construction. One danger of working with rules is the rule of taking a constraint to the limit. That is, to tap the potential of a particular constraint, a writer tries to test all of the possibilities such a constraint offers. After spending time on a project, it’s tempting to publish the outtakes as well as the more refined work. Gillespie avoids this pitfall. If he sometimes provides only brief illustrations of constraints that others have applied to more fully realized projects (why attempt lipograms, after Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter “e” and Christian Bök wrote a long poem in univocal sections, practically exhausting the words that contain only one kind of vowel), his facility at combining constraints sets and meets additional challenges. Rather than repel readers by cloaking its procedures, Table of Forms invites anyone to participate. This is a generous and welcome addition to the literature of constraints.- Doug Nufer, American Book Review  

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Table Of Forms marvellously fulfils every hope I (could have) had for it. As I read it: in its course the paradigmatic (as in essence meontologically the non-identical transcendental condition -- or irreal limit -- of any/all pragmatic matrice(s)) is forced to appear as meontologically the irreal repressor,(only) virtual death of various actually:) meontologically identical -- since /algorithmic or as-phonetic* -- counter-paradigms; that is: forced to appear as being unable to '''function''' juridically save in an alienated way,ontologically as the hermeneutic closure,terminal arrest,de-semiotisation of some -- N.B.: exemplary -- /instances of the syntagmatic. As I read it then Table/ brings general linguistics -- finally -- to /term by way of an unavoidable integration-dissolution of the concept of the (meontological) paradigmatic into that of its /alterior: (Heideggerean) onticity,'''signifiers''' &c. as simply ontic—heterogeneous. One putative transcendental condition collapses into a transcendental obstacle and in so doing (re-)opens the -- material -- questions of the principle and ontological consistency of the field of '''language/s'''.----This is an excellent place forward from which refreshed/schooled to be (re)going:).

—Iain Matheson, personal correspondence

Reviews:

“Back during the turbulent 60s, faced with the threat of nuclear holocaust, racial and cultural unrest, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War, American artists Stanley Kubrick (in Dr. Strangelove) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) responded by inventing absurdist satiric fantasies so outrageous and compelling that they exposed the nightmarish logic underlying our nation’s collective peril—and kept us laughing even as they cut most deeply. Q. Synopsis’s hilariously disturbing and deeply informed novel about the 2020 American Presidential election, Tinyman for President, is that same kind of ambitious satire—albeit one whose off-the-grid creative impulses have the ability to channel moral outrage into the literary equivalent of Never Mind the Bollocks. Wake up, Americans, and… 
Make America Tiny Again!"
— Larry McCaffery, 
editor of Storming the Reality Studio, 
Expelled from Eden, 
and Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

---

The New New Journalism
Davis Schneiderman (bio)
Tinyman for President
Q. Synopsis
I-BeaM Books
150 Pages; Print, $20.20

That this anonymous novel’s price is that of the vexed year it covers is one of the many small details lovingly girding the body of this metafictional text. Another is the name of the purported author, a pseudonym for a small-press writer whose impressive work has been seriously underappreciated, even while maintaining a those-in-the-know impressiveness for those, well, in the know.

In fact, it was because an ABR editor approached me to review a work by this specific author under their real name that caused me to agree to write this review. Only when Tinyman for President arrived in the mail did I discover the nom de guerre; after corresponding with the editor, I was told the author would prefer I review the work “as a novel by ‘Q. Synopsis’ rather than mentioning that ‘Synopsis’ is one of his pseudonyms” (though he added, “if Davis feels comfortable doing it this way”). Since I’ve long ago given up any sense of comfort, I agreed, although the preceding sentence suggests this is not the first Kierkegaardian identity our intrepid author has deployed.

That I started writing this several days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a mere week and change after the insurrection at the Capitol that provides a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction for Tinyman, it’s also true that the book manages to carry more than enough insightful surprises. These hold water during a period where everything about the United States is leaky. Or maybe air filled, as the Tinyman cover shows an untethered balloon with American flag design (foreground) about to be popped, optical illusion style, on the tip of the Capitol dome (background). There’s no middle ground anywhere.

Q’s frame — diametrically opposed to the QAnon cult and its role-paying-game paranoia — is one part New Journalism (see the back cover comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson) and three parts questioning of a “what the actual f*&% is going on?” mode. Put those in a blender with a bit of barely credible comic-book backstory, and you have a satire not for the ages but for this age. This now. This muddle. Let me explain.
In the novel, Tinyman is the most pathetic type of self-involved superhuman, in a world that has more than its fair share:

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem…Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5’8 3/4”, 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations…. Also, unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.

Q. runs with the joke, as Tinyman takes on various public- and self-deprecating aspects that collect against the dominant narrative of omnipresent superhero stories. In a world without The Tick, The Boys, etc., this might be enough of an animating spark, but it’s precisely the sense of imminent deflation (cue soon-to-be-popped cover balloon) that make Tinyman work so strangely compelling.

It’s not the plot, which is deliberately simple — Tinyman and his team try to get him both elected and not elected as President, and he persists nonetheless; there’s a Watchmen (1987) like chill over the proceedings, as heroes are forbidden from using their powers, and the ambiguous toggle of Tinyman’s un/electability proves an acerbic commentary that exists both narratively and as a seeming act of meta-narrative omniscience.

In any event, Tinyman doesn’t want to be President (or does he?), and the while the enterprise benefits from the Bartelby-like ambiguities of the titular here, the novel’s crypto-protagonist is his hapless campaign manager Johnny Werd, who works for Tinyman precisely because Werd doesn’t really believe Tinyman can win (and despite their mutual disdain for Trump).

Their lazy campaign is like Trump 2.0 if it came from the left, and we never find out if Tinyman will take the prize. In a way, the plot is extraneous enough to be almost entirely beside the point. And plot aside, Werd’s how-not-to-run- a-campaign schtick is often enjoyably resonant: “In trying to assemble the policy platform on the Tinyman campaign wiki, Werd was cutting and pasting large portions of Warren’s and Sander’s online text,” followed by a thoughtful excurses on how most political facts are repeatedly plagiarized in the sinister act of “becoming” facts. While Werd is filled with familiar self-loathing, the narrative voice delivers some of the best bons mot as it ambiguously separates itself from Werd. Q. make’s excellent use of free indirect discourse, and it’s the blurry line between character and narrator that allows Tinyman to transcend its comic-book-paper-thin story. Such insight is a marker of Q.’s former work (presented most notably in a biological pathogen-based post-apocalyptic novel I’ve thought of numerous times since the advent of COVID). There are numerous passages that jump off the page — easily untangling from the story and floating free over the dark discursive state that currently dominates our lives. The way this often works is worth explicating. In this typical example, Werd muses upon something with his sardonic commentary:

Joe Biden was connected, somehow, to Ukraine and hackers and the deep state and he invented the novel coronavirus along with Hunter Biden as part of the plan to take your guns away so you’d be defenseless against the black helicopters. These lies swirled endlessly on Facebook like a clogged toilet.

Following this is more abstract commentary upon the example: “What’s in a fact? Is a fact loud? Fancy? Does it give away hats? Does a fact have lobbyists? Yes, if often does. But lies have lobbyists as well.” 

It is impossible, though, to recreate the impact of these insights in a review, because there are so many examples, and they are often wildly surprising and uproariously prescient. Q.’s power has also been their ability to write adjacent realities that reflect our own back to us in glorious distortion. Before Trump, this was competent and entertaining postmodernism. During/post Trump, the sentences have a way of puncturing our tenuous hold on reality. 

I desperately want to share by way of final example the book’s last paragraph, but I don’t want to ruin its impact. Instead, the last narrative page (after the paragraph) closes with a single word, centered mid page: “THP!” It’s as if Bloom County’s Bill the Cat had a reasonable chance of controlling the nuclear football. 

I’d like to say that’s a deranged fantasy, but, of course, Tinyman for President isn’t actually fiction. That’s simply what makes it so stunningly effective.