Ron Charles reviews ‘Busy Monsters,’ by William Giraldi
I suspect Giraldi’s dexterity with antique sexual and racial stereotypes won’t win him many friends among those feminists unless they’re very ironic, indeed. We hear a lot about Romp’s extraordinary African American endowment. And during another adventure, Charles consults with an astronomer married to a “chocolate companion,” whose lovemaking is like “rumba or boogaloo.” That meeting falls apart when he watches a black lesbian “clobber the gal Negress-style, as they do in the ghet-tos of Detroit or Harlem.” We’re supposed to be laughing at him, right? But don’t worry, Charles is the first to object: “We are Democrats from Connecticut and I will not have you speak that way,” he says in righteous political correctitude. “We believe in suffrage, pro-choice, and penicillin, and you, my friend, are a powerful, dignified woman.”
Hijinks keep spiking through this screwball narrative, but what really keeps pumping it alive is that impossibly odd and self-conscious voice, a mixture of 19th-century gentility and modern hipster. Meeting Gillian for the first time, “I proffered her my hand, a-tremble,” he says. “I bowed here like a squire or some-such. Someone who owns property, fights criminals, admires estrogen.”
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Ron came to The Post in 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the Book Editor and lead critic. He lives in Bethesda with his wife, an English teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
As his bitter father complains, “Who talks like that?” Ignatius J. Reilly in love? It’s irresistibly strange. “I’ve been told my sentences salsa,” Charles boasts, but he frequently finds himself defending his memoirs against accusations that he lacks “Jamesian interiority and the plotting proficiency of Wilkie Collins.” Another reader complains, “Most of the events in your memoirs occur outside the scope of normal human possibility. . . . I also think your people all speak alike.”
True, I’m afraid. But Giraldi knows all that and has used this young lover’s manic, incongruous voice to produce one of the weirdest comic novels of the year. And he has a delicate sweetness that shows through at just the right moments in what is, after all, a very old, romantic story: “Mind always,” Charles tells us, “that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all.” If that kind of devotion can’t win your girl back from the many arms of a squid, let her go.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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