Mr. Dynamite (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

Rating:
Summary: The Perils of Love (and Other Things)
Review: So exactly what horrible fate hovers over Jarleth Prendergast, the madcap protagonist of this irresistibly funny tale by Meredith Brosnan? Does ruin gnaw at our hero's genius (self-imagined or otherwise) because his minimum-wage job, his screaming spouse and his groaning board of alcohol and hallucinogens conspire to undermine his magnum opus, a film saga of the Irish Troubles rendered into great art by the miracle of animated clay figures?

Alas, Dear Reader, Prendy is threatened by his own Sense of Justice. I don't mean his sudden deprivation of a tidy inheritance by two of the Norns back in the homeland, or the unconscionable antipathy of every merde-slinging philistine in New York who tries to turn him into a reverse Baudelaire. No, Prendy's life is set on the course of tragedy when he discovers that the one person he has truly loved, a sex-worker named Amelia, killed herself because of her abuse years ago at the hands of her stepfather.

What is a man to do when those who are powerful destroy what he loves? Forget about swearing out a complaint at the local police precinct. Prendy is a man of action and he has a gun which, at the very least, he will not discharge into his own foot. And Prendy has the vibrant catacombs of New York, from Lincoln Center to the Lower East Side, to plot a denouement worthy of an urban Hamlet on drugs.

The slapstick vividness of Prendy's discourse (delivered in a slightly warped epistolary fashion with his back-home attorney, himself the subject of a surprising change of fortune early in the book) results in a story that I find utterly engaging, especially as Prendy's boisterous antics gradually unfold the core of tragedy.

By the way, not by chance is Prendy's lover just one inch shorter than Dolores Haze, that haunted presence from another great love story. Just buy the book, Dear Reader, and tremble.