Dole 2, Kevin. Tangerinephant. Lynnwood: Afterbirth Books, 2005. 164 p. Paperback. ISBN 0976631016.

Kevin Dole 2’s debut novel, Tangerinephant, is a hilarious, imaginative, and at times heartbreaking book. Michael Tangerinephant, the novel’s protagonist, is dating a cyborg-prostitute, occasionally gets abducted with daytime TV-obsessed aliens called the Chill, and has just found out that he’s the fall guy in a trillion dollar finance scam. The plot could have easily been sensationalized by a lesser writer. But Kevin Dole 2 handles it with grace and humor.

Dole 2 uses Tangerinephant's abduction by the Chill as an opportunity to parody American culture. A collection of scenes mimicking talk shows runs like a chorus throughout the book. The subject matter of these talk shows is always the same: testing one male after another to find out who a particular baby’s father is. Dole 2 captures the atmosphere and structure of a Jerry Springer-like routine. His narrative voice continually jabs and mocks the things it describes. Although the scenes are designed like a script, they are far from objective and formal. For instance, there are no fathers on the show — each of them has become a “baby-daddy.”

Satire pervades the novel. Dole 2 represents American pop culture and all of its strangeness and idiocy while deploying various forms of shorthand and typography. The phrase “Was th-is/at it? Could it be?” (76), for example, one of many such abbreviations in the text, has multiple meanings; it’s a compact and convenient way to convey them all. The shorthand is just one facet of Dole 2’s metanarrational spoof of his own work.

Another interesting authorial device is a system of parentheses that begin to mirror the plots, counterplots, and characters’ thoughts. At the start of the novel, the narrator writes, “Maybe it can(not) be fixed, maybe it’s (not) too late” (9). The parentheses point to major subtexts and tensions within the story. A similar point is made in the passage describing Tangerinephant’s girlfriend: “She (wasn’t as pissed as prior since he had told her he was going in advance (though she hadn’t expected him back so soon))” (70). Here characters’ opposing thoughts and attitudes push against the surface of the plot and the actual text — a tension communicated in a subtle, visually provocative way.

Tangerinephant is a daring, original work thematically and in terms of its storytelling. I highly recommend it for an enjoyable experimental summer read.