There’s no way I can review Joe R. Lansdale’s upcoming novel FENDER LIZARDS (Subterranean Press, November), in my SCI FI book column. It’s just not in any genre under my rubric. But I wanna tell you about it. I wanna tell you about it in the way one wants to tell everybody about any book that made him grin, that made him laugh, that made him deeply fall in love with fictional people. I want to have a crate filled with copies of this book and I want to give them to people as gifts.

I did not expect this book.

You see, Lansdale being Lansdale, I kept waiting for some kind of crime or horrific event, and none materialized; as the pages went on, I gradually realized that this was a wholly mainstream novel of character, and one that focused on the human capacity to grow beyond one’s boundaries.

It’s the story of one Dot Sherman, a 17-year-old high school dropout sharing a trailer with her mother, younger brother, and obese grandmother, whose prospects in life seem cruelly limited. She’s employed as a roller-skating diner waitress, sister to a woman in similar circumstances with an abusive layabout man on top of that, and grimly certain that she will never end up any differently than any other member of her family.

Then two things happen. First, they hear from Elbert, an uncle they’ve never heard of before, brother to the father who went out for cigarettes one day and never came back. And second, Dot beats the hell out of her sister’s abuser with a two-by-four.

Dot’s life starts to change. Or, rather, she starts to change. It is nothing especially dramatic, though the story takes a wonderful movie-ready direction in its last third – but mostly, what occurs after that happens in small increments and tiny victories. By book’s end, it’s clear: she’s not gonna drift into a life of hopelessness. She’s gonna be all right. Sooner or later, she’ll be out of that trailer.

The book isn’t saccharine with uplift. It has all the wise-ass, snarky humor you would expect from this author. It’s at times split-your-gut funny. Every epiphany in it, every victory in it, is earned. It’s lean and muscular and good-hearted and vivid.

I adored Dot, who sometimes has too big a mouth on her for her own good. I loved everybody in the book, down to the guy who runs the diner she works for, all her fellow waitresses, and the judge who presides in the criminal case over that walloping with the two-by-four. I thought Elbert was great. I thought Grandma was great. I thought this was a ROCKY story for seventeen-year-old girls, and I concluded, again, that on the page, Joe Lansdale can do anything he wants, and none of it badly.

 

Tags: Book Reviews, FENDER LIZARDS, Joe R. Lansdale | Category Books, Commentary