Wilson, D. Harlan. Blankety Blank: A Memoir of Vulgaria. Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008. 188 pp. $14.95 pb. $29.95 hc. ISBN 9781933293578.

A serial killer comes to suburbia. In good postmodern fashion (shout out, Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman), he is a rational extrapolation of the suburban system, not an exception to it.

Wilson’s Blankety Blank is encapsulated in the counterfeit thought of Paul Di Filippo, “[l]ike Paul Di Filippo meets Paul Di Filippo ... on The Bell Jar serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors covermount!” Because if Mr. Blankety Blank is a copycat killer, what are the townsfolk of Vulgaria, with their clone lives and endless malevolent lawns, but copycat suicides?

The memoir is mostly written in short, avuncular sections (shades of Kurt Vonnegut). Many of these are potted histories of this or that, emphasis on the pot. Also definitions, Confucian analects, aphorisms, and some extremely choice quotations (“I’m sorry I killed five people, ok?”—Gary Allen Walker, Serial Killer).

Another off-kilter memoirist, Mark Leyner, has a sort of running joke—what if we really thought in the terms suggested by corporate advertising and government policy? In Leyner’s hands the premise is wonderfully fruitful. By taking at face value the invasive and near-invincible culture (“red in truth and law”) which encompasses and composes us, he repeatedly shows that we already know the kind of lie it is. Leyner’s deadpan acceptance of spin and hype seems to demonstrate that ideology critique isn’t good enough—at least, that it tells us little that’s new. We already know that the pantheon of knobheads who occupy aspirational discourse are all injured parties themselves—despairing, near-suicidal wretches—and that the native population of normalizing discourse all feel like immolated freaks. A similar premise exists in Blankety Blank (which is great, since Leyner seems to be on a loooong time-out), though Wilson’s version is less “what if we really were what culture supposes us to be?” than it is “what if the things which culture supposes to be important really were important”? The result is breezily high concept comedy (“What if Patrick Swayze was an initiate of deconstruction?”) with a brazenly low budget.

So although Blankety Blank has an affinity with proto-postmodern proto-anti-novels like Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (where most of the “story” is digression), and with contemporary roving, docufictionary maximalism, or “hysterical realism” by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, the more obvious comparison is with “stuff you find on the Internet”—think “content provision,” think memes, blogosphere, MacSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Onion, all the belle lettres of the era of value-add reverie. This is the kind of book you’d forward to your friends.

People tell me Bizarro really lends itself to the short form. But, I don’t know, I’m often disappointed by wee absurdist set-pieces—which justify being not-very-good by being not-very-long. Their “weirdness” can be little more than a passive-aggressive refusal of all valuation criteria, but it’s usually pretty obvious which bits are the good bits, if any.

More gang for my guck, less lassitude for my vicissitudes: it’s strange that such a formally permissive book doesn’t give much sense of splurge. Admittedly, there are a few sections, mostly towards the end, where I found myself wanting to take Occam’s Blunt Instrument to Wilson and his book. And the slapstick injuries disrupt the tautness, the spareness, with queasy bodily cacophony (as per usual—who here can honestly say they haven’t uncertainly thumbed a residue of gristle from the SimCopter they left running on their iPod Touch?). But for the most part, you get the impression of mad skills on Windows Paint, not Adobe Photoshop. There’s great economy of expression. The bright bald triangular green head of the book’s pet praying mantis is its superlatively representative phenomenon, the phenomenon all its other phenomena aspire to, and the one you’ll dust from its cooling embers after it explodes. Keith Loutit’s breathtaking Metal Heart is the book’s perfect cinematic correlate. The frequently clipped and direct style is apt, in light of the meanness and narrowness of so much Vulgarian experience. The memoir’s dedication is “for me.” You get a sense of Wilson as chiropractor, briskly fondling himself gauntlets from the reader’s inner chitin. You get a sense of computer gaming—left to their own devices, the characters would get up to jaded, capricious fidgets that resemble the idle animation loops of point-and-click performers. Except a bit more trepanny. Their temperaments resemble the mood indelibly carved into the heads of platformer heroes—Mario’s resoluteness, for example.

They say Charles Dickens rejected a submission entitled “Orient Pearls at Random Strung” with the curt, “Dear Blanchard, too much string—Yrs, C. D.” I would have gone with “It’s made out of cum!” but either way the problem arises of the interconnection of micro-contents. What grouts together these petite feats, with all their sundry conceits and other raisons d’ être? Can they really all be jiggled together each flush to some others’ edges?

There are nods to the thick anthropological detail of late Victorian realism—the cumulative creation of a solid and consistent world out of the various interesting episodes occurring within it—but they are only nods, and they are nods along to the heavily-fuzzboxed totalizing roar of Empire metal. Then there is the moment-by-moment improvisation of interest which is the gist of slapstick. But I think prosody—the rhythm, stress, intonation, and all the musical contours of language—is Wilson’s best answer.

Sometimes, when Rutger Van Trout walked through the hallways of his McMansion, he could feel the blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety bank blank blank blank blank beneath him. So he built a silo, and he climed to the top. The blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety blank blank blank blank blank didn’t go away. At least now his feet weren’t so close to it. He couldn’t stay up here forever, though. Hewould have to devise other means of coming to terms with the blankety blankety blank blankety blank blank blankety blank blank blank blank blank. Something to divert his attention, perhaps. Or rather, something to keep his eye on the ball.

Mr. Van Trout looked down from the silo. Shielding their eyes, his neighbors looked up at him as their children obliterated entire communities of unsuspecting insects with blow torches.

He lifted his eyes and looked at the skyline.

People say “tum ti tum ti tum ti tum” when they’re scanning a line of verse, or “doot dee doot doot doopy doop doop” when they can’t remember the next line of a song, a bit like “blankety blankety blankety blank.” Prosody can be a kind of lender of last resort for the global economy of meaning. It’s like, lute grout. Its fidelity to living occurs at the level of mimesis of breath and pulse, borbyrigmus and the shift of sweaty balls and breasts.

—Lara Buckerton

(NOTE: See a stupidly long version of this review at Buckerton's blog: Quiche Straight from the Bucket.)