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Fishbone's work begins and ends with accidents: first, a coffee stain on a sublet apartment wall, and last, the accidental ending of a book. The symmetry suggests that this is no accident or coincidence. Rather, it shows the book’s playful purpose. It spills, tricks, and moves on. Just when two chapters seem to build up one storyline, the next changes direction. The book employs a plethora of comparisons.
For example, the story of painting over the initial coffee stain is succeeded by an invitation for Fishbone to be painted by an artist. The painter’s tragic love story is set alongside the author’s. Fishbone’s childlessness relates to the loss of the painter’s child. They both devolve into unintended messes using cocaine in their grief. The author wonders how the painter’s country, Germany, compares morally to his (America). Plagues of then and now are compared. While these parallels don’t provide convergence or direction to the narrative, they succeed in expanding and deepening its scope. The book doesn’t travel forward so much as inward, asking big questions that have been pondered throughout time about humanity’s purpose. Just as the painter asks Fishbone to sit for a portrait, the author’s book invites readers to look into their own souls.
Part novel, part essay, part travelogue of trips to Europe, New York, and South America, the book is also a letter addressed to Fishbone’s lover, referred to as “you.” The writer looks into his own soul with brutal, crude honesty and asks the same of “you.” Toggling between erudition and sexual fetishes and violence, the narrative is hard to stomach, beautiful, forgiving, and tender in equal measure, much the same way as looking in a mirror is liable to feel. Fishbone’s work is a courageous, curious, and experimental example for “you” to follow.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review