This is a novel set on a college campus and the course focused on is stand-up comedy. It’s a promising intersection given college campuses in United States are the home of “woke” and stand-up is a discourse where boundaries of what can be said are often pushed.
There is a reference to white noise, which suggests the Don DeLillo book. He was brilliant at naming the hidden American cultural currents of his time (a project that Bordas is engaged in, resulting in many insightful observations) but his books were sometimes like essays where the characters were interchangeable ciphers mouthing ideas.
In contrast, Bordas creates a soap opera-worth of related characters – students and teachers, twin sisters, father and son, loving marriage; these create a panorama of time. In White Noise, DeLillo wrote of a society loosing the ability to “distinguish words from things” – a postmodern anxiety that some would say is at the heart of the no man’s land of modern culture wars.
A toxic masculinity event instigates this modern cultural exploration. A successful comic is coming to teach on the course and awaits his fate – will he be cancelled or not? His old comrades understand his situation and younger comics seem more beguiled by his comedic success. His name is Manny (hee hee) and the opening section is sort of a Waiting For Manny with some thoughts on stand-up, theories of stand-up and stand-ups.
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In stand-up they say open and finish with your strongest material; in this book the strongest material is in the middle – the guts of the novel. Eventually the novel moves up through the gears with a college shooter scene that is really funny and ticks the zeitgeisty American commentary box. Shortly after this, one of the teachers – Kruger – goes to see his father in an old folks’ home. Here is a shooting scene of a different nature. In this father-son relationship is the essential hurt at the heart of Kruger’s life – the raw foundational material that is at the heart of human life and the striving and diving that drives the surface of adult life.
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(And yet – Kruger still considers how it can be turned into comedy material). It is a surprising and powerful scene. Always and everywhere is the comic’s need to alchemise the stuff of life into a laugh. This dynamic is expertly depicted but is also shown as a tactic to avoid the pain of living while seeming to confront that pain. Bordas includes writers in this process.
There is a bravura section where a man recognises Manny and shares an anecdote about writing a fan letter when young to a famous comedian and how his father wanted him to write to another comedian instead. Now that his father is dying he asks whether Manny might help get a reply, were he to write to the comedian. The letter might provide solace or healing, somehow provide a proxy protection from death. It’s also a proxy love letter to his own father.
Manny thinks back to how his son, when a child, was very sick in hospital ... and how he avoided eye contact with other child patients in case he would catch the bad luck of those who caught cancer. Here is a brilliant insight into how fame is viewed, how fan mail is seeking to touch the hem of the garment of the modern-day saint and to receive a reply – like the relic of a saint – to access the luck or the success of the elevated, a type of superstition to be protected from the harshness of life.
At its heart, this a meditation on the sadness and difficulty of life and how this can be mediated – the ways we try to deal with the hard material of life to allow us to continue living: the relentless passing of time we seek to ignore by constructing our lives to avoid the terrible ticking.
This is encapsulated in a neat final phone image. “What was the point of all this? Of writing, of going onstage, of art, of f**king? Wasn’t it to make time disappear?”
The final pages feel rushed and it’s almost as if the comedians reject, however temporarily, their cold comic credo and, dare I say it, a slightly feel-goodness descends, albeit punctured by a sudden image of The Plague. Death lurks but then “Death was only something to joke about.”
The Material is often acutely insightful and sometimes very, very funny. Recommended.
Kevin Gildea is a comedian
