By Carolyn See,
who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, August 29, 2008

THE DEFENESTRATION OF BOB T. HASH III

By David Deans

Random House. 242 pp. $22

"The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III" is a short novel, but it seems longer. It seems as long as a terrible blind date. But since it has to be true that there is a book for everyone and an audience for every book, I suggest that you buy copies for these people on your gift list:

1. Tortured adolescents who struggle daily with the question of whether there exists an actual "self," or whether each of us is simply an aggregate of cultural or genetic "information."

2. Graduate students or assistant professors of English who are too poor to afford actual entertainment; gentle souls who have corrected so many Freshman Comp papers that the language itself seems sometimes to rise up and writhe about them like a frenzied python.

3. People who think they're smarter than 95 percent of the population.

4. People you never want to see again. First give them a copy of "The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III" and then pester them about it: "Didn't you love the phony language exercise where the faux Italian family meets the faux Czech family for dinner, and they all have to put on carpet slippers and eat mayonnaise dips until the Czech host takes them into the bathroom to watch while he kills the live carp in the bathtub, the carp they're going to have for dinner? And he kills it with a carp hammer! Can you imagine? A carp hammer! And all this in the context of a picture book designed to teach English as a second language?"

You can cross these individuals off your gift list with impunity; you'll never see them again.

To love this book, you have to be the kind of person who is bowled over by the originality of the concept of a parrot falling off its perch in a suburban living room and then turning into the doppelganger of its owner, Bob T. Hash III. Bob is CEO of a company that teaches foreign languages through picture books, his most popular volume being "Forward With English!," a title that is funny on the face of it the first time you read it, and the second and even the third, but by the 12th time it's funny only if you're starved for entertainment.

The language exercise in the French restaurant is funny ("Je ne croyais pas que j'avais commandé un potage de cerveau," or, "I didn't think I'd ordered brain soup") because foreign-language mistakes in restaurants are always vaguely silly -- I myself once ordered a "red purse." And trying to track down two sets of lost golf clubs from an inefficient airline in German, describing each club in that language, is funny up to a point. And, of course, all this does suggest the overall futility of communication, which may lead to a meditation on the futility of human existence.

But meanwhile the novel has stopped being funny. When you put aside all the trendy, postmodern stuff here, the author gets into trouble with something as traditional and old-fashioned as characterization. Kafka's Gregor Samsa, after he turned into that cockroach, was sad, uncomfortable, limited, wretched. We felt for him. David Deans's pet parrot is a smug, self-satisfied bore. Bob T. Hash III, the businessman he turns into, is also a smug, self-satisfied bore. The picture book that the parrot/Bob Hash lives in and revises as he strives toward an eighth edition is boring. The wife the parrot inherits is, forgive me, two-dimensional. All the communication here -- and I know, it's supposed to be that way -- is bad parody, utterly banal. Yes, yes, you see the author's point, but couldn't he have had some mercy on the reader and made that point in 100 fewer pages? It's a lot more fun to write this postmodern material than it is to read it. Unless you're a tortured adolescent. Or a half-crazed language teacher. Or (you think) you're smarter th an 95 percent of us.

· We preview the big fall books.

· Andrew J. Bacevich outlines "The Limits of Power."

· Paul Auster peers into the dark.

· Julian Barnes confronts death.

· And mystery writers get away with murder.