Arthur the Absurdist
By Clay Smith, Fri., Sept. 21, 2001
Arthur Bradford is either a master of the absurd or a debut author determined to turn book critics everywhere into tongue-tied nincompoops. Dogwalker (Knopf, $20), his collection of beguiling stories, is impossible to explicate -- with a straight face, anyway. In "Mollusks," the narrator of these alternately whimsical, deadpan tales and his friend Kenneth, who collects slugs, find a specimen "like a big ham, a little softer maybe" in the glove compartment of a deserted car. Kenneth's wife Terresa doesn't think it's very funny to bring a 10-pound mollusk home with the intention to sell it, so she marches up to her husband and kicks him in the shin. But since Satanists seem to be the only people in the market for giant slugs, Kenneth absolutely refuses to sell. In "Chainsaw Apple," our hero has the keen idea that it would be a real crowd-pleaser to use a chainsaw to carve a person's initials into an apple (this is accomplished while the apple is stuck in that person's mouth). After he practices on his friend Robert Ulfburg and gets his "R" and "U" down to a fine art (as bits of apple fly into Robert's nostrils), it's time to take the act public. At a popular restaurant with an outdoor stage, the narrator suddenly revs up his chainsaw and asks for volunteers under the assumption that no one except Robert would actually offer themselves up. But sparky Betsy Smith pipes up and won't take no for an answer. The chainsaw artist has never done a "B" or an "S" before but to back down would be an unforgivable violation of the performer's code of honor.
There is also a story in which Bill McQuill gets sliced neatly in half by a train on MoPac and lives to tell about it, four dogs who harmonize beautifully together, one who merely talks, and a shy muskrat who does a mean imitation of a few of the great Oldies. Most of this is conveyed as if it were just the most normal thing ever.
Bradford, who will be at BookPeople on Wednesday, Sept. 26 at 7pm, now lives in Vermont but is a 1998 Michener Center graduate who decided to move to Austin in 1993 because he liked Slacker. Like Richard Linklater, Bradford has made something tangible and entertaining from the episodic daydreams and unarticulated oddities that make the majority of us merely smirk and laugh at ourselves. "It was easy to lose track of time in that kitchen," the narrator of "Mattress" says. "Sometimes I feel as if my whole year was spent sitting in that room, telling stories and laughing at our misfortunes." A lighter Jesus's Son but with intriguing levels of humor like George Saunders' Pastoralia, Dogwalker compels you to keep reading it, to see what the misfits and mutants running rampant throughout will do on the next page.
