Book Review – Apathy by Paul Neilan

A Light, Witty Book About Being a Twentynothing in the 2000s

May 13, 2009

Paul Neilan attempts to satirize desperate relationships, office life, and the pointlessness of the world, but he fares better at crafting simple, crude bits of humor.

Paul Neilan’s Apathy and Other Small Victories (St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN: 0312352190, 2007) is hilarious in a way that books usually aren’t. Normally, literary humor isn’t the kind of thing that is actually laughed at out loud. And while Apathy is funny, literature it is not. To open this book up and expect Richard Brautigan’s randomness or Woody Allen’s absurdity or Martin Amis’s wit would be a poor decision and a misdirection.

That’s all fine, of course, because –while intelligent and literary – rarely does the work of Brautigan, Allen, or Amis provoke the deep, belly laughter found in chapter after chapter of Neilan’s debut novel.

The reader follows the non-committal protagonist/anti-protagonist Shane through his relations with his sexually-abusive and stilted girlfriend, his BDSM drug-dealer neighbor, a perpetually-cursed nerd of a dentist, and the deaf dental-secretary who winds up dead. Shane ends up as suspect number one, but he cares about as much as he cares about any of the other things just mentioned: not at all.

A Non-Sequitur of a Novel

Neilan’s book is a combination of non-sequiturs about office life, the lies people tell themselves, and the lies he tells other people. In fact, the whole story almost seems like a tangent off something much larger and more important that is never really clear. Shane’s uneventful and unsatisfying life as a whole? Maybe, but probably not, as there really isn’t any story here to mention aside from a thin tale of murder that takes a backseat to the set-up and pay-off of the jokes.

While it’s possible to analyze this book from a literary perspective, it makes a lot more sense to just take it in as an easy read that is clever without being nerdy (Monty Python, Ian Frazier, Dave Barry), irreverently hilarious without being too segregating (Charles Bukowski, the lyrics of Seth Putnam), and funny within the context that Neilan places his characters in, as opposed to being pedestrian observational humor and lame, unbelievable situations (most sit-coms).

Laughing at the Absurd

Though laughing about deaf people and bestiality can feel both dirty and satisfying, Neilen presents all of his jokes and characters as being so absurd, so ridiculous that its not their handicaps or fetishes that are being laughed at. Instead, the reader sees the deaf secretary singing off-key karaoke or reads about Shane describing the noises of his eerily macho neighbor’s guinea pig.

The writing is weak when it tries to do things that writers do, but that’s just a problem with mish-mashing styles. Literature is literature and humor writing is humor writing. The story rarely feels like it’s trying to be anything more than an easy, funny read, and while it’s certainly low-brow, a person could do much worse than read a non-stop parade of crafted punchlines such as the one found in this book.

The copyright of the article Book Review – Apathy by Paul Neilan in American Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Book Review – Apathy by Paul Neilan in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.