Lev Ockenshaw is nearing his thirties in the 2010s. A transgender man, Lev is preparing for his upcoming hysterectomy while working as a tester at a company that makes security cameras. As the story proceeds, Lev soon has a lot on his mind: He’s mourning a rift between him and his best friend, Stanley; he’s receiving threatening emails at work; and he’s researching the mysterious death of Chad Goeing, a (fictional) transgender man who lived a century before and who never completed his magnum opus, “The Nature of Time.” Lev also sees and attracts ghosts and goddesses, often when he comes into contact with paperclips—a condition he calls “speculirium” and describes as “Half pathology, half imagination.” He takes pills to hold it at bay, which is an early clue that Lev is in some sort of mental health crisis.
Tucker Lieberman’s novel, MOST FAMOUS SHORT FILM OF ALL TIME, is presented entirely from Lev’s point of view, in often very short fragments that jump from these primary story threads through whatever Lev finds interesting. And Lev finds a lot of stuff interesting, from pop culture to philosophy to history to the dynamic between the cisgender and transgender worlds. In between these often interesting diversions, Lev brings his coworker Aparna and his friend Stanley together to form a trio, then gives Stanley’s car away instead of selling it as requested, causing a rift between them that Lev mourns. Unfortunately, these narrative threads get lost a bit in Lev’s recitations of trivia, indulgent explorations of philosophy, and historical reveries. While many of these bits and pieces are interesting, they serve to bury the tale itself. Down under it all is the story of a man going through something and coming to a crisis, but when the narrative threads reemerge Lieberman simply snips them: The threats are resolved, the friendship is repaired.
More consequential but also lost in the volume of digressions is Lev’s obsession with Goeing, which manifests as Goeing’s silent ghost following Lev around and eventually converges on a moment where Lev’s sense of reality collapses and something tragic almost happens. Afterwards, Lev is reborn again, in a sense: He gets back on his meds, changes jobs, and seeks a more stable future. All of the conflicts are resolved and the questions answered, and yet the book rambles on for quite some time before coming to an end in seeming exhaustion. The end result feels like Lev’s story wasn’t what interested the author in the first place.
Author Tucker Lieberman has a lot of interesting things to say in MOST FAMOUS SHORT FILM OF ALL TIME, and the story of a transgender man in crisis has a compelling, beating heart at the center. But that heart is buried under philosophical noodlings and trivia blasts, diluting the story’s impact.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader