Commentary |

on An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking, a novel by Ben Slotky

A youngish man takes to the stage one night, gun in hand, and delivers a 150-page monologue about his desolation, including a few stray thoughts on cats, Brazil nuts, Louis C.K., etc. His audience, which he has taken hostage, may or may not actually be there. “There” is the movie theater he has recently poured all his money into renovating.

That money is apparently gone now, as are his wife and six sons. “What happens after you lose everything and everything leaves you?” our man asks. “What does that sound like, how does that feel?” His dog, by the way, has also recently died. “This is piling on, right?” Yes. “Isn’t it?” Yes. “Ma’am?” YES.

This is the book’s central conceit — not the dog’s dying (thank god), but the constant, agonizing, self-conscious questioning; the doubling-back; the, most importantly, spoken-aloud-in-the-moment depicted as text. “So we should start, I guess, even though we’ve started before,” he announces at the top of Chapter Three. “Before and again, ma’am, before and again and a little bit about me, I don’t really understand time travel? Like, I don’t get it. I may have said this before, but it’s true.”

Slotky, who has published a collection of stories, and who, as his back-cover bio is at pains to point out, has also fathered six sons, certainly has a gift for rendering spoken language in written form — by no means a one-to-one operation.”You ever do that?” the narrator asks. “You ever watch a movie or read a book or see something on TV and start watching it and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck anyone’s saying anymore.’ You know?’”

Yes, dude. It’s happening right — wait — right about now.

But he keeps going, of course he does. “And maybe that’s just me, and maybe that’s just me, and maybe everybody else just gets everything. You ever get the sense that everybody else just gets everything? And you don’t get anything? Like I get that, I get the sense that I don’t get anything,” he says. “Like right now,” he adds.

One pretty obvious arena for understanding and interpreting all this is the United States of Mass Shootings which, like Slotky’s book, places white dudes center stage, armed and alienated, and demands our empathy. But I’m not sure we really need another book about yet another sad white dude, gesturing wildly, impotent and at a loss. That’s not to cast aspersions either on the narrator’s sadness, which is genuine and, in its way, tragic, or on Slotky’s writing, which is lucid, fluent, and occasionally funny. But something here is missing.

Midway through the novel, the narrator expresses his astonishment that women “live in fear, and are objectified, sexualized, trivialized, belittled, demeaned and ignored, right? Terrible! But,” he adds, “they get to wear boots.” He continues: “[O]n the one hand, there’s the fear of being raped and on the other hand, you know, boots … I’m not saying it’s a good trade-off,” he adds, “I’m not saying it’s even.” What a relief! He repeats the joke later, clothing it the second time in a racist slur, and it’s precisely as funny the second time as it was the first. Which is to say: Slotky’s meta joke about his narrator’s failed joke (the narrator thinks he gets it but he doesn’t, Slotky wants us to know! Slotky is jumping up and down to tell us!) fails for the same reason.

And maybe this is just me, but do you ever get the feeling that you don’t know why you’re reading what you’re reading? This is a book you can finish in a day, but I put it down around noon, and it took a few days, and then a few more, before I could convince myself to pick it up again. Someone else can make the case that we are mortal, and time is limited, and we should only finish the books we actually want to finish. As for me, I’m still clinging to the belief that I’ll be able to read both the books I want to read and the books I don’t. Does it make sense? No. No, it doesn’t.

Maybe An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking is about the limitations and inadequacies of language, the way language has failed one particular guy, and I know you know the guy I’m talking about. He keeps circling around and mocking and digressing from and returning to these narrative conventions and even particular words that just don’t make any sense to him. “Have you heard people say the word riddled, ma’am?” he says. “You know how sometimes people say the word riddled, how that’s a word people say?” And then, 30-some pages later: “Is this germane to the story, ma’am? Is it germane, would you tell me if it was germane?”

There is a way — hear me out — there is a way that a building is not unlike a narrative. This is a point our intrepid hero makes himself: “I like to come home after a hard day of whatever it is that I do around here and just construct, you know? Construct the fuck out of a narrative,” he says, and to drive the point home: “I constructed [italics are Slotky’s] this whole place, this whole building [the theater].” He certainly did. But the theater has led him to bankruptcy, and his monologue is not terribly—how should I say this—coherent. Nor does Slotky’s central conceit — the ramblings, non sequiturs, and uneven punctuation of someone speaking aloud — stay fresh.

Our narrator is obsessed by the mechanics of narrative because his own methods have broken down — both the actual course of his life (kids, wife, money, dog, et al.), and his ability to narrate the comprehensive story of that life. His life has fallen apart, but the more crucial loss is his ability to tell that story. So that’s where we are: he can’t tell his own story, but he’s forcibly gathered certain external elements — theater, audience, stage, performer — as if he can play-act the story into making sense. But he can’t, and it doesn’t, so we’re left with this tangled mass of digressions. He can’t tell his story, so he’s taken hostages. In more ways than one, am I right? (I’m saying he’s taken the reader hostage, too. I’m saying we’re the hostages. Is that clear yet? Is it?)

I’m talking to my Romantic Associate about how I’m having so much trouble finishing this book, and writing this review, and he says I already know what I want to say but I don’t want to say it so I’ve gotten myself all tied into knots. Which is obviously true. I’d wanted to read the book in the first place because one of the blurbs calls it “both the funniest and one of the saddest novels I’ve ever read,” and that’s a combination I’ve found, historically, to be as perfect and right as olives and banana peppers on pizza. But I don’t know. I don’t know about this one. I don’t know that we need it — that’s what I want to say.

“You ever watch a movie or read a book or see something on TV and start watching it and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck anyone’s saying anymore.’ You know?”

My dude. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

Contributor
Natalia Holtzman

Natalia Holtzman was a 2018-19 Emerging Critic Fellow of the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and elsewhere. She can be reached on Twitter via @NataliaHoltzman.

Posted in Commentary

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.