Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

"I need plywood," said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was "need" something.

That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before the NYPD began hiding him.

He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. his hands in their horrible bandages must've been on his lap and I couldn't see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining room table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

Money Breton lives in Alabama with her friend Hollis ("Hollis not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He's my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only."). Her daughter Mev has a kindly heart and a need for methadone. She has a boyfriend in New Orleans named Dix who is as dumb as a concrete levee. She works as a "script doctor," polishing up a script about Bigfoot and flying out to Los Angeles every few weeks to get yelled at by the producer, Belinda. Her son Paulie is in the witness protection program, readying to testify against some unnamed assailant (she calls him the "Evil Snake Parts Criminal," among other things) who is responsible for raping and torturing Paulie. And her cat has gone missing.

Why Did I Ever is made up of 500+ mini-chapters, some stretching to a couple of pages, but many more only a sentence or two long. They're clever little snapshots of frustration, of interpersonal tension, of annoyance and grief, of professional hardship and, when Money lets herself think about him, a deep, deep anguish about the state of her son. Most of them aren't all that important to the plot, the plot that isn't all that important to the novel. They are funny and weird:

I would say to one particular ex: "Twit was too short a word and Pigboy was unkind. I should never have said such ugly things about you. Bumpkin, however, and Thieving, Lying Wino can stay right where they are."

I liked the ones about Dix especially:

Dix says, "You don't gotta worry. I'm not one of those guys gets his rocks off beatin' on a woman."

"God love you," I say.

"You do gotta worry, though, that at times I can be verbally abusive."

"No, you really can't," I say. "To do that you'd have to know the language better, Dix. You'd ahve to know, first of all, what is a verb."

"Everything that you own," he says, "is the BEST STUFF MONEY CAN BUY!"

One can easily recognize Why Did I Ever as the work of the same woman who wrote Oh!, a book I also found to be riotously funny. Except Oh! has a kind of forward energy, a propulsiveness that makes it impossible to put aside, but Why Did I Ever takes a deliberately antithetical strategy, delivering the novel in halting chunks that only seem to come together in the aggregate. But this works, because it's easy to see that Money's life itself is similarly in tatters. The story with Paulie, which is only rarely directly addressed but seems to run under every other misfortune and sadness, as if Money cannot let herself look at or think about her son directly, is extremely touching and sad. I was skeptical for most of the novel that Robison would pull it off, but I thought the ending especially really brought things to an effective (if very sad) conclusion.

Oh! by Mary Robison

Cleveland turned away from the table, and then he turned back to them. "What are you?" he said. "Because you aren't my kids, and you aren't adults, and you aren't anything that anyone could respect or love. What are you doing in my house when every day you break my heart? Looking at you, day after day, I feel pity and even horror. Yes, I do. And, above all else, disappointment. You've let me down in dozes of ways--hundreds of ways, and you've been doing it every day of your lives. Did either of you ever think of that? You'd better--both of you--find a true course and stick to it, and stop destroying your own father."

Cleveland is a dipsomaniac millionaire, a tycoon of soda-pop stores and "midget golf" courses. He lives in a mansion with his adult children: artsy dilettante Howdy, who forsakes art for the theater as easily as he forsook rock and roll for art; and Maureen, a glum single mother who has inherited her father's drinking problem. They are kept together by the clever housekeeper Lola, whose brusque manner barely conceals an affection for her sordid charges. And as much as Lola tries, the house invites Chaos, not least of which in the form of Chris, Maureen's ex and the father of her little girl Violet, who has recently won the lottery and come to press his luck further by stalking Maureen and convincing her to return to him.

Have you ever seen Shameless? Well, I haven't. But Mary Robison's Oh! is what I imagine that show is like: a breathless madcap comedy about a broken family, and the great sadness lurking within. We come to understand that Howdy and Maureen have been deeply wounded by the absence of their mother, who they've been told returned to her native Ireland when they were children. To fix their lives, both come to the conclusion that they must go to Ireland to find her, and become whole. But it's hard to imagine these two ever going to Ireland, to imagine Maureen staying sober long enough, or for Howdy to commit to the plan, and besides, we quickly begin to suspect that the hapless pair have not been told the full story. Cleveland, their father, has brought home a new fiancée, Virginia, whom Maureen and Howdy find uniquely threatening. In a detail that is symptomatic of the book's humor, Virginia is familiar as a children's television host on local TV. On screen she talks to a man dressed like a clock, and tells children about the weather and the time. She seems hopeful that knowledge can bring order, but it is doubtful that she can do anything for these people.

I dug this. The dialogue snaps and sizzles; it's incredibly funny. Isolated bits of it can't capture the ceaseless energy of the book, but let's try anyway:

"Yes, it's settled," Maureen said. "You'll come with us. Actually, it's a good idea because I didn't really trust howdy to handle everything."

Chris said, "The trip could be a honeymoon."

"Why not?" Maureen said. "Marrying you is no different than not marrying you."

"Don't try to act nuts, Maureen. You do it well enough without trying. I swear I can't keep up with you. Here I am burning up six different ways, and I can't even tell if you're serious."

"Neither can I," she said, and sighed. "But, Chris? I do admire you for burning down the toolshed. Sometimes, I guess, the admiration I feel for you is love, like. Or maybe not. Anyway, I can't picture myself with anyone else."

"You lack imagination," Chris said. "Don't you know how come I torched the toolshed?"

"It doesn't matter," Maureen said, and sighed again. "It's a symbol."

"Jesus," Chris said. "Jesus goddamn Christ."

Oh! never lets up. Robison summons a tornado to trap and torture the motley crew that's assembled at the Cleveland mansion, and ushers it off stage almost as quickly, having done its damage, and leaving the family to do more. It's a story about trivial, insufferable people who are somehow too funny and too sad to be contemptible. Like its title, it's a sudden bolt of revelation, of shock, of surprise.