The Buzzing [Paperback]

It depends on why you liked the memoirs. If you liked them for clean, unobtrusive prose and an acute, peculiar and hilarious, but compassionate, take on things you might otherwise miss or take for granted, I think you'll like The Buzzing. Knipfel's prose is deceptively simple: elegant, not ornate. He's generous with detail, yet manages not to crowd the reader. In fact, it may be that very space, together with an unorthodox approach to structure, that disconcerted some readers who liked the other books.

The memoirs present discomfiting slices of imperfect lives, but Jim Knipfel is always right there to reassure the readers that he sees what we see, that our uneasy feelings are valid, and that everything's okay enough at the end of the day. It's almost like being able to rubberneck at a car crash with the injured driver patting us on the head and telling us thanks for looking.

The Buzzing is different. Nothing gets tidied up for us. The main character, Roscoe Baragon, is not there to hold our hands. He's funny and he has a six-toed cat, but he leads us into anxiety-provoking places and leaves us there. I loved it. This is the first book I've read in a long time that gave me room to think, let alone something to think about.

I got a real kick out of this novel. Neat characters, well-told, funny, weird, ultimately sad. There's a lot going on in this book, and always surprises, so I never got bored with it. Lots of in-jokes for fans of Japanese monster movies and 30s era horror pulp. I liked it well enough to go out and buy another of his novels.

Visiting wackos are certainly the order of the day at the New York Sentinel - or, at least, Roscoe Baragon's corner of the office. Once a star reporter with a nose for a breaking story, Roscoe has drifted into stagnation in the last few years, demoting himself from front-page news to human-interest stories to the rock-bottom "Kook Beat," a series of news-of-the-weird featurettes, courtesy of the city's nutjobs (of which there is no lack). Out of deference to his formerly stellar reputation, Roscoe's boss Montgomery allows him to pull many a shenanigan, but with a steadily decreasing lack of patience for the whimsy. Roscoe only survives his job with liberal helpings of booze and cynicism, trying to convince himself that he does what he does for the laughs (rather than because he's a washed-up hack). When necessary, he anesthetizes himself with terrible B-movies, which he owns in quantities large enough to fuel MST3K for several millennia.

Most evenings, Roscoe meets his friend Emily at a deserted bar to hang out and chew the fat. Emily's a medical examiner at the city morgue, but surprisingly reluctant to spin hilarious tales about cutting up corpses, so most of the time they tacitly agree not to discuss their jobs. Occasionally, Emily will give Roscoe a highly confidential tip (what else are ME's for?), and he'll use it to break a story - or he would have, before his permanent self-exile to the Land of Conspiracy Theorists. As it happens, Emily decides to share a weird anecdote about a homeless guy whose body was determined to be radioactive when they brought it to the morgue. How did they know it was radioactive? Well, the uranium sensors picked it up. What are uranium sensors doing in a city morgue? Uh...good question. Maybe you could ask the HazMat team called to the scene, or the government suits who showed up instantly to reassure, deflect, and conceal, before issuing a press release that said exactly nothing.

A long-dead fire reignites in Roscoe's whiskey-dulled eyes, as he perks up and starts asking the kind of difficult questions that make Emily nervous. Suddenly, he's seeing signs and connections everywhere: in the confused ramblings of his regular kook callers, in the white noise of natural disasters and geological phenomena, in the mysteriously omnipresent acronym SVA. With a cavalier disregard for his actual job, Roscoe starts pounding pavement again, in search of the thread that will lead him through the labyrinth and give him a story that will save his career. But wait - he doesn't care about his career! Or does he? The trouble with maintaining a facade of ironic distance is that you eventually begin to believe your own ruse (even if no one else does); does Roscoe want to be a flash reporter again, or turn his back forever on the know-nothing kids and incompetent bosses who rule the roost these days? The answer depends on where the story leads; but the further Roscoe delves, the more closely he resembles the crackpots he interviews. Then again, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Featuring a delightfully lurid cover by Chip Kidd that reminds me, strangely, of a lunchbox circa the 1960s, The Buzzing is fresh and quick-witted in a way that's all too rare - I laughed out loud several times, which is not something I ordinarily do when reading. The dialogue is distinctive and vaguely noirish (most of the characters qualify as "hard-boiled," and everybody drinks and smokes, all the time), but doesn't sound phony in the modern setting. A cast of colorfully named characters straight from the fringes of society helps to keep the pace moving, too. The ending is purposely ambiguous, and although I see why it had to end where it did, I really, really wanted there to be more; very little is definitively answered, and quite a lot is left up to the reader's imagination. Which, I suppose, is a condition of a novel about conspiracy-theorist kooks and the journalists who love them. Pick up a copy of this very cool book! Along with The Buzzing I also urge you check out another fun novel: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez -- maybe the most entertaining novel I picked up off Amazon this year.

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