#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

#72 Fat Man- Joe Frank

This is the second offering from Joe Frank’s The Queen of Puerto Rico.  Like the first, It has a definite pulp quality. You can tell that Frank reads a lot of Charles Bukowski. So the story telling has an engaging quality, enough dirt to keep it interesting, and a level of cheeky cleverness that makes you laugh every once in a while.

Unfortunately, unlike Bukowski I don’t fine much heart in the story, which is fine on the surface. Sometime a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless failure of a man is just a story about a miserable, unemployed, loveless, failure of a man. You don’t always need redemption, hope or plot. The narrator seems to have a good handle on who he is:

“You know, when I think about myself and the life I’ve led, I feel self-loathing, shame, disgust. I’m a waste and a failure…but when I imagine myself as a character in a novel…well I think I’m pretty interesting, kind of offbeat, intriguing, entertaining.”

There is value here, but not deep meaning. Reading through this is like watching some nameless cable sitcom: you mindlessly ingest the show, are somewhat entertained, but forget it before the next one starts. All the lines sound vaguely plagiarized from some other pulp novel:

“She smoked camels, wore no make-up, picked her teeth with a toothpick, and drank a lot of coffee.”

“You can see that the subway stations were originally fine examples of innovative architecture. Now they’re filthy and defiled.”

Sometimes Frank hits a winner, like the *Notable Quote below which I found brilliant. And of course there is the very amusing story about Aaron stealing thousands of brownies from dozens of roadside Howards Johnson’s, then quietly returning them one-by-one months later.

Notable Passage: “After all, if one were to remove the turnstiles [in the subway] but make everyone go through the same motion as they passed into the subway, the sight of strangers queuing up to take a strong pelvic thrust at one another from behind would serve as an apt metaphor for the human condition.”

Rating: 7-6-8-6 Total= 27