John Apple and Murray “Cheese” Marks have been best friends for years. They regularly take time away from their lives for a “ponder,” a booze-filled weekend of raucous, sacrosanct male bonding. But 1999 is different. John is hell-bent on finding a soul mate before the end of the millennium, and for this ponder he chooses Disney World, a site of immense significance from his childhood memories. It is also a liminal space in which everyone is a character and reality is warped.
Overall, Daniel Roberts’s PONDER will be familiar to readers of 20th-century fiction. The protagonist (and narrator) is Cheese: a privileged, flawed, and somewhat neurotic straight man who seems to exert very little agency over his own life—buffeted about by the winds of fortune (or at least, feeling that he is). This setup isn’t novel; it draws from a host of precursors, including Philip Roth and Chuck Palahniuk. But here, it is greatly enlivened by the somewhat apocalyptic millennialism of 1999 and the funhouse-mirror reality of Disney. The real star of the show is the prose. As a character, Cheese draws on his 20th-century forebears, but being the son of two bookstore owners particularly justifies his verbosity and lyricism. At times, the descriptive language is deliberately literary, as when Disney architecture looks like “something Jules Verne might have imagined on his deathbed.” At others, it’s more broadly allusive and still effective; the cursing of a rich young woman from Savannah is satisfyingly said to have “Spanish moss hanging from every naughty vowel.” However, the text also knows when to focus, and it can be razor-sharp when it does. When Cheese explains the weekly schedule of his somewhat cool, business-like marriage and observes, “We are really only married on the weekends,” the remark hits right under the ribs.
PONDER also sails on a sea of carefully crafted discomfort. The story is set in 1999, and social attitudes were certainly different then than they are now. Since the narrative is in first-person, Cheese’s racism becomes a defining trait of his character and the reading experience overall. Sometimes it’s hard to read past this; there are stark, concrete moments that can be fairly stomach-turning, as when Cheese asks various Indian park employees if they all know each other. But the text also delivers some of its funniest punchlines using the same material. When Cheese asks a British bartender of Indian descent if she knows an Indian man with an entirely different job working in an entirely separate part of Disney, he quickly hedges, “Not that I’m a racist. My wife is Chinese.” His interlocutor’s response is dry and laugh-out-loud funny: “I see, how interesting.” It’s clear that the text doesn’t share Cheese’s attitudes, and it enjoys a few sharp moments like these to really offer an opinion on the matter. Nonetheless, for such a large presence in the text, it’s somewhat frustrating that there’s no meaningful reckoning with this part of the character; and different readers will likely have different degrees of patience for the dusting of racial microaggressions over a narrative largely about men’s narcissism and the sexual objectification of women.
PONDER isn’t for everyone, and it’s unclear that it makes any insightful argument about its subject matter. But it’s still unapologetically weird, shockingly funny, and rendered in satisfying prose that can equally delight or dismay.
Daniel Roberts’s PONDER has more than enough style and off-kilter humor to hold a reader’s interest.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader