The surrealist comedian Harry Hill once wrote a novel, Flight from Deathrow, that was so freewheeling, so crazy and irrational, that it came across more as a midair collision of riffs than a novel. It was grounded in no reality and so disappeared in an immensely unsatisfying puff of smoke.
Letters to Kevin, Stephen Dixon's new novel, suffers from the same problem. Ostensibly the story of Rudy's attempts to visit his friend Kevin in Palo Alto, in California, it eschews logic to follow riffs and ideas, like a dog chasing tissue in the wind. It reminds me of Harpo Marx – a cross between a child and Mr Hyde, half innocence and half id – in the way it ignores the everyday architecture of the rational.
Any logic here is a dream, or comic logic, and many scenes play out as vaudevillian routines or the wordplay duologues of, say, Abbott and Costello.
Comic confusion reigns. Rudy construes a bus driver’s use of the word “buddy” as the name Buddy:
“Do you mean me?”
“Well I don’t mean my Aunt Tilly.”
And suddenly the scene is about passengers asking each other about their Aunt Tilly and saying she’s fine and continuing the chain of inquiry until the final passenger answers: “I am your Aunt Tilly”. The chain obliterates novelistic structures and is the essential progression of childish storytelling: and then . . . and then . . . and then . . .
Following the thread of something to the nth degree, beyond the usual boundaries, can lead, like Stewart Lee's stand-up, to unexpected places of laughter unreachable by other routes. There is a fantastic scene, for example, in which the elevator Rudy is in falls apart. The destruction and disintegration are hilarious in their completeness, like Laurel and Hardy pulling their surroundings down on their heads.
But this method, or lack of method, leads to many tiresome scenes and bad puns: “The only thing to do was hit the road. But there were no roads in this part of the city . . . So I went to South Road in Central Park and hit it with my fists till my hands hurt.”
Why the bad pun? Because Letters to Kevin also has a postmodern purpose: to explore the limitations of language, the inability to communicate and the notion of consciousness. The latter leads to some great images: a warehouse full of phone booths with people trapped in them; Rudy writing his letter from a mail sack that is being delivered.
The postmodern intent is advertised on the cover. Remove the dust jacket and there is an alternative title, Ways to Get to Palo Alto, which is crossed out: erasure. The dust jacket itself shows a winding pencil: communication as a twisted and complicated journey. Not so much from A to B as from A to A.
There is a particularly tedious 12-page interlude on communicating with logs that is as much fun as Noam Chomsky on generative grammar.
The book is dotted with line drawings by Dixon – a two-time National Book Award nominee and winner of a Guggenheim fellowship – that are so rudimentary that they suggest children’s books and the contingent and fragile nature of the forms we accept as the foundation of our lives. An illustration of a queue of people is of scribbled forms that look set at any moment to unravel in the absence of any grounding baseline.
There is a very funny scene in which Rudy travels on the “under-America American Submarine” (note the redundant repetition of words) under land (the anarchy of it is great), and the captain, who was earlier disguised as a beggar, changes from one costume to the other midsentence, from captain to beggar to captain to beggar, until “under the last one, which could be of either the captain or man, was the real face of the captain or man or of someone else”.
Here is the postmodern anxiety about language: whether it can effectively name reality or whether we are living in nothing but language itself. These words are endless signifiers, with no signified at the end of the chain. (There is even a riff on living in a place called Nowhere.)
Letters to Kevin offers more than Harry Hill's madcap mayhem, but despite its flights of fancy it still induces torpor. True, the indiscriminate wordplay – "I've conned enough shifty deals for one day. I mean, I've dealt with enough shiftless cons for today" – may be seen as an examination of language. But despite moments of hilarity the resulting book is too often tiresome.
Kevin Gildea is a writer, comedian and actor
