Suitors Book

I'm putting this on the new-new-new-thing shelf, even though it's not that new, because it is similar to all these new-new types of books happening now, which if I was more into theory or had gotten a Master's, I'd probably know the proper pedantic terms for. The point is, it's written fairly self-consciously, there are scattered meta bits and winks at the audience, it's clear Ben Ehrenreich is very smart and wants this book to be very unusual. And it absolutely is! But although I've got an extremely high tolerance for this kind of trickery and intellectualizing, The Suitors did feel a little contrived at times, a little forced.

Let me go back a bit. The opening sequence is wonderful, a very slippery picture of our hero and heroine, who start as characters outside of time, become more focused and detailed and personalitied, and then become more nebulous again, become a bit everyman and everywoman. I'm not doing a great job of describing this, but they're Payne and Penny, and they're at once specific characters with sketched personality traits and also meldings of all different kinds of characters, all of whom are united by the fact of falling in love with each other. (That's the best I can really do without quoting; have I made my point yet about intellectual trickery?)

(Actually, that was all Chapter 2. The first chapter, which is also the last chapter, is a very explicit snapshot view of everyone quite bloodily and gruesomely dead.)

Well, Payne and Penny get married and go off to live in the country in a little cabin. But Payne isn't happy with a little cabin to house his queen; he starts making little improvements and minor additions, then bigger and bigger and crazier things. It becomes clear that he wants to build a palace (because what else is fit for a queen?), and then the book enters its next phase, because skittering around the outskirts of their property is a nebulous number of other people, kids I guess, in the teenager sense, who spend all day huffing paint and having sex. Well so Payne enlists them all to help him erect his edifice. He is a ruthless taksmaster, and after the palace is built, they start going on raids to fill it with things. Soon it's filled with enough food and furniture and supplies and jewels and money to last several lifetimes, but they keep raiding, kind of just to kill people. Then they mine the mountain and start a smelting plant to make guns with, but when Payne tells them that they have to go fight in a war, everyone quits. Payne leaves anyway, leaves his Penny walled up in her castly, leaves his minions behind, and goes off to war.

Thus begins the next phase, which is the bulk of the book, where Penny, now pregnant, goes on to lead her bitter, furious, disassociated life with the minions. Did I mention that every single one of them, boys and girls alike, are destructively and totally in love with Penny? Yeah, that's the only reason anyone was doing what Payne told them to do all that time. I mean, they all couple and uncouple amongst one another, but each is slavering at all times for the merest hint of affection or even attention from Penny. And so it goes: they have lavish dinner parties, do inordinate amounts of drugs, fight terribly with one another, worship Penny, live their angry, unsatisfied little lives.

That's all the summarizing I can handle.

Here's the thing. As with most of this type of book, this motherfucker can write. There are large swaths of great beauty, be it philosophical asides, stunning descriptions of scenery, dissertations about love and hate and being and non-, snaps of great dialogue, brutal scenes of sex and murder and mayhem. The book is mostly very beautiful to read. But there's a lack throughout... I don't know if it's nothing more than a yearning for some kind of traditional narrative structure, or a need for some little bits of explanation for some of the more impossible things (characters sometimes go months without eating, for example, or swim entire oceans without stopping), or what, but it's all just sometimes... unsettling.

I bought this because Ehrenreich has a story in a forthcoming McSweeney's collection that is just mindblowingly incredible. (Plus his mom is the lady who wrote Nickel and Dimed!) It really is fascinating book, totally unique and strange and brutal and beautiful, but honestly? The short story was better than all of this. Hey Ben? Can you turn that into a novel please??