It is possible to read a book the whole way through, word for word, skipping nothing, and afterward, be just as lost as at the beginning. Finnegan’s Wake is like that. Ulysses, too. William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace–all are fascinating writers but hard to follow. M. Price’s PLEASE FEEL BAD I’M DEAD feels like a candidate for this abstruse club. It starts with seventeen-year-old Jhaegar Holdburn contemplating suicide. This normally serious subject is treated with quite a bit of dark humor courtesy of Jhaegar’s insecurities, pop culture references, and stream-of-consciousness musings. When he finally works up the courage to load his gun and pull the trigger, he misses and shoots his ear instead. After a hospital stay, he goes to a house party, and the house explodes. Then he goes to school, and the classroom floods. From there, the occurrences get trippier and trippier, leaving the reader to wonder, “Did that really happen?”
Jhaegar may be an unreliable narrator, but he is a compelling one. The novel is formally inventive, with sections written as plays, poems, film reviews, even recipes. Characters have whimsical names like Snowelda Roach and Gwynevere Clamshell. The dialogue is a mix of world weariness and quick-wittedness, reminiscent of Larry Doyle’s I Love You Beth Cooper. And the references. How many other novels name-drop Émile Durkheim, David Lynch, Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc (who self-immolated as a political protest), news anchor Christine Chubbuck (who shot herself during a live broadcast in 1974), and Periwinkle, the cat from the TV show Blue’s Clues? After a while, however, all this weirdness wears thin. Price, the author, is at his best in passages that show Jhaegar’s unique mind at work: “What if my name was Zucchini? That’d be cool I think. Zucchini Holdburn may not work, but Zucchini Paganini would be a different story. People would say I sold my soul to the Devil for that amazing name.” Unfortunately, there are too many passages where Jhaegar isn’t interesting but annoying: “As a matter of—wait, wasn’t I—I was gonna do something…I was…uh…I shrug my shoulders. Oh well, right?” Novels that rely heavily on inner monologue, nightmarish imagery, and To the Lighthouse-like narration still need enough plot to keep less-committed readers engaged. For all its innovations, PLEASE FEEL BAD I’M DEAD disappoints on that basic level of story.
Funny and quirky, a model of postmodernism, M. Price’s PLEASE FEEL BAD I’M DEAD nevertheless disappoints at the basic level of an understandable story.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader