Even the dog won’t touch me.
Tom Bradley
Ahadada Books
ISBN Number: 9780981170411

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          The title page of Tom Bradley’s latest book calls it “a collection of stories.” And indeed, Even the dog won’t touch me. is just that, but something about this description seems wrong. Overall, the 10 stories between its covers work better as a unit than as stand-alone pieces, yet, they really aren’t linear enough to be called chapters of a novella, either. Rather, the book itself seems to inhabit the gray, slippery place between categories vaguely (and often inaccurately) known as “experimental.” Not that this term works any better. But while Even the dog won’t touch me. may defy easy classification, it is nonetheless an engaging, inventive, and highly entertaining work with a strong sense of absurdity, a keen ear for dialogue, and an eye for the worst human behavior and its most comedic extremes.

          As the description on the back of Even the dog won’t touch me. helpfully points out, the stories in this book “bounce back and forth across the Pacific as if it were a mud puddle”—across the Pacific meaning between China and various locations in the United States. They also follow, roughly, two tracks: the grotesque misadventures of an equally grotesque Utahn at home and several aspiring writers’ equally absurd misadventures with the U.S. publishing industry. Like twin mandarin cherry stems, these two tracks weave in and around each other and ultimately connect in a big, hard knot of story.

          Our Utahn is Sam Edwine, 300 pound, egocentric and lapsed Catholic Ph.D son of a seven-foot-tall miles gloriosus who spent World War II guarding a POW camp in Southern Utah and diddling his best friends’ wives (his story—perhaps written by Sam himself—is hilariously chronicled in “Undecorated Dad,” the collection’s first piece). After an Ionescoan novel pitch session with several superficial “consultants” who seem more like over-caffeinated aliens than actual human beings, Sam and his wife suddenly show up in China, where Sam is billing himself as a “foreign expert.” Possibly to write the novel he has just sold for six figures without ever having opened his mouth to explain a word of the plot?

          “The Stylist,” which details Sam’s encounter with these androgynous “eyeball[s] with salivary glands” is one of the collection’s finest and funniest stories, deliciously mocking the publishing industry’s obsession with image over content, spin over substance, and the author’s persona over his or her style. I don’t think my comparison to Ionesco is an exaggeration. While “The Stylist” may not swim with the non sequiturs found in The Bald Soprano or The Lesson, Bradley writes with the same breeziness, the same broad humor, and the same focus on absurdity.

           “This, um, sheath of yours,” said the stylist, gathering up a pinch of dingy doubleknit, peeling it away from the bristles on Sam’s inner thigh, and snapping it back with a small rubbery sound, “not to mention your grunting voice, your self-conscious, self-loathing mannerisms, your facial bone structure, right down to the ineptly repaired harelip—” 
           “Thank God for provincial plastic surgeons,” interposed one of them. “They bring such homespun freshness periodically into our lives.” 

          “—all of this is what we in the industry call an ensemble. And, just by the sheerest, most fortuitous chain of accidents, yours is that rarest of rarities. It’s something I’ve only heard speculated about, during all-night shoptalk sessions after everybody was getting sleepy and dreamy.”

          “The sheer untutored vigor of certain presentation-selves,” intoned a consultant who seemed to be reciting a passage from some unimaginable textbook,” transcends even the minimum requirements of grooming and personal hygiene.”

           While in China, Sam’s behavior goes to hell right along with his grooming and personal hygiene, and the absurdity just keeps mounting. In “One Child Policy,” he kidnaps a baby girl from a Chinese family after some family members tear his wife’s coat. He also steals a scooter from a disabled beggar and does so again in “Sam Edwine Says Hi to a Bum in Foo-Chow (Marco Polo went there, too),” while raving about being murdered or deported and how much he hates living in China. In the title story, Sam, a Palestinian student/abortion doctor and the doctor’s emotionally abused, addle-brained, New Age-y girlfriend (a transliteration of her Chinese nickname gives the story its title) do drugs and improvise amateur political theatre while wandering through the streets. The book closes with “Closet Fiction,” in which the author reveals that Sam stole his magnum opus from a friend who committed suicide by overeating, and then lodging himself behind the organ of a Mormon ward house. 

          If that sounds like a lot to digest in just 121 pages, it isn’t. Nor are Bradley’s trips through acts of shocking selfishness and depravity painful or precious. His characters may be uniformly unlikable, and even borderline sociopathic, but their antics are entertaining and his prose even more so. What makes Not even the dog will have me. most enjoyable, however, is that its satire very rarely feels heavy-handed or misguided. Sam, for example, isn’t the typical crass American insulting the foreign culture in which he lives, but an overgrown child in every imaginable way. There’s an innocence behind even his cruelest actions that makes him compelling, his life definitely representative of what is commonly called “the train wreck syndrome.” The reader simply can’t look away from Sam out of sheer disbelief. And while finely-drawn characters hardly seem to be the point of such a broad, often scatological work as Even the dog won’t touch me., they are certainly the best part.

          Well, maybe the second best part. As I said earlier, the second thread of Even the dog won’t touch me. focuses on the foibles of the publishing world when Sam isn’t present. Now, normally I can’t stand books about writers, the act of writing, or the industry behind writing. As a rule, they are either shallow or irritatingly brimming with in-jokes. And while “At the Airport,” in which a character bearing the author’s name upends a Big Gulp on a famous author’s head is a solid satire on the cult of fame surrounding certain bestselling writers, I confess I was uneasy when I read the title of the story “At the Creative Writing Workshop” until, reading ahead, I realized…I have suffered through the exact same workshop.

          And so have you, if you have even the slightest interest in writing. All of the characters are here: the irrelevant professor; the over-eager social outcast who wants to show his tormentors up by achieving literary fame; the bored and mildly scandalized academic student; and the too-gregarious experienced author who knows just how to make it big in the industry and just can’t resist pontificating. In this story, the latter’s name is LurLeen. She has a literary agent and knows all about the “formula” one has to use to get noticed.

           “Your imagination,” LurLeen seemed to be saying, “works well enough for the current marketplace, but you use too many adjectives and adverbs! You should try counting them sometime and see how many you use. And restrain yourself, because, after all, writing is a pure act, and not just wallowing in pleasure like a medieval mass or a gothic cathedral or something like that. Plus you need much, much, much shorter sentences and just a whole lot more dialogue, especially in the part where your space-detective has problems operating the computer with the keyboard like a manual typewriter….This above all: my literary agent said you have to create characters that you, and your reader, aren’t intimidated by. As a matter of fact, to be on the safe side, you should only write about people that you can condescend to….Then for sure you’ll never put any literary agents off, because everybody likes to feel superior, right?”

           Oh, yes. I know that classroom, and I know LurLeen. And Bradley’s satire of the creative writing workshop in all its blandness, uselessness, and posturing is, hands down, one of the best and funniest I have ever read—thoroughly vicious and highly accessible to all readers. This story is truly the standout in a collection of standouts.

          Then, there are two stories which seem to exist outside of these two threads: “At the Beautician’s” and the colossally titled “Procedures for an American Military Wife Stationed in Hiroshima During Times of Increased Terrorist Activity.” In the first, a soldier still dedicated to Maoism reconnects with two former military comrades, now proud capitalists who run a hideously westernized beauty salon dedicated to Sylvester Stallone. In the second, a U.S. military wife listens to a 50s-style radio drama about preventing a terrorist attack while tending to her children in her husband’s absence. While both stories still have the Ionescoan absurdity and the conventionally unlikable characters found in the rest of the book, there is something darker here. These two pieces, after all, are not about the stupidity of literary posturing or the whims of a privileged man-child, but about the world beyond these, which is filled with more anger, fear, violence, and horror than Sam or LurLeen could possibly imagine. Both stories are exquisite, and can easily stand alone.

          Even the dog won’t touch me. is an entertaining and fast-moving satire that readers interested in absurdism and more avant-guard small press titles will likely enjoy. Best-selling authors and image consultants, however, may find much to squirm about within its pages.