2010 Ann Sterzinger, 317 pages

Nine-Banded Books

PO Box 1862

Charleston, WV 25327

Lester is a university graduate student, teaching and learning Latin with little success as his wife masters Spanish. He is struggling with depression, alcoholism, his masculine identity—or what of it he can salvage beneath the cluttered artifice of his life—who is quite more than anxious about “defending his indefensible” doctorate-dissertation.

Lester, and the people surrounding him over the course of a winter—separated by a hilarious Christmas trip to visit his parents in Wisconsin—in a pointedly forgettable Southern Illinois university town, are well wrought characters of realistic emptiness, who as often as not, find refuge in trivial identities that are little more than costumes within which one hides a pained soul. The mostly unseen hub of this story is Chicago, the dividing line between Lester’s past and present, his heaven and his hell, hovering like some inviting purgatory just beyond most the pages of this dark witty comedy of human snares.

Ann has a pleasing style, which is nicely accentuated by the hundred or so footnotes on mostly vaporous modern trivia inserted as if giving the future reader a clue as to how unfulfilling life in early 21st Century America had become for someone given to ponder. Lester is stricken with a number of phobias, one of which is automobiles, with his comic crossing of streets oozing with the potential for tragedy. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the text, followed by a passage from early in the book.

“…and the memory of who she was under the slime of these domestic years…”

“He had the right to be a brain on a stick, and the duty to be a warm father to his family”

“…philanthropy is repaid by the cosmos with disaster.”

“…pinhole cameras of their minds.”

“…deafened by the hum of the vacuum left behind by his hope.”

“The smart-assed little fruit of their former fun.”

“…large pickup trucks wandered at random, like monsters in a primitive video game.

“He wore his thinnest coat. He almost went back inside to return it: the southern autumn air was soft. Big exotic fruits with convoluted green skins had dropped mashily from the trees overnight; the sidewalk seemed to be littered with the brains of small aliens. Semitropical birds chirruped. If it weren’t for the carpet of broken beer bottles that Lester could feel through the soles of his sneakers... if it weren’t for the leaf mold that made him feel feverish with allergy... if it weren’t for the regulation American males driving at sixty on the two major highways that ran through the student ghetto, crossed on campus, and serviced malls on either side before roaring off to parts more civilized... Lester might have thought it was a beautiful day.”

Ann should really try her hand at horror, as she treads close to the line here. Give Ann’s darkly humorous tale of an iron filament of a man adrift in a sea of magnets a read.

“The mind that clings is the loudest bird that sings.”

-Nowhere, Ann Sterzinger