Better not to call One More Thing a short-story anthology. Even the subtitle seems reluctant: “Stories and Other Stories”, it reads, as if to apologize ahead of time for how minor so many of these stories are. Better to recognize it for what it is: a collection of comic strips sans pictures, sketches and notes fished out of author B.J. Novak’s waste bin, with special guest appearances by the occasional short story.
Of the 63 “stories” presented here, few have a page count numbering in the double-digits and most of these don’t bother to create or develop any kind of narrative arc. They’re simply jokes. “Confucius at Home” (the worst of the lot, like something an intern would pitch to Mad TV) is nothing but a cheap riff on the fact that most of Confucius’ famous maxims consist of little more than commonsensical advice and everyday sayings preceded by the phrase, “Confucius say”. “Kindness Among Cakes” is a two-line exchange that reminds everyone again that, yup, carrot cake is generally considered disgusting.
Sometimes there’s promise, as with “A Better Hitler”, but in those instances Novak only goes so far as to introduce concepts that could work, if developed, but left undeveloped only sound like cast-away Jack Handy quotes. Novak wants laughs and he wants them fast, but he seems to have forgotten how essential timing and development are to earning them. Punch-lines and absurdities arrived at too fast aren’t the caps to jokes — they’re just quirks and twee.
Not that he doesn’t try to fight against these limits with an inspired bit of threading. Occasionally – but only occasionally – the half-formed ideas Novak introduces in one story will slyly peek in on another story. There’s a certain charm when “The Girl Who Gave Great Advice” pops up again in “The Ambulance Driver”, and a sense of confidence that accompanies this decision: it feels as if Novak’s got a sort of vision. When the desperately seeking woman in “Missed Connection…” describes her vanished lover’s red t-shirt and in doing so recalls the narrator of “All You Have To Do”’s foolproof plan for finding the love of his life (and the reason he prefers to use “shirt” instead of “t-shirt”) that moment of revelation deserves whatever laugh it gets. Other examples of such complicated layering are rare, though, and so what feels at first like the mark of a talented writer ends up feeling like a left-over idea he was simply too lazy to develop.
It may be that Novak isn’t comfortable delivering comedy in the confines of a prose-narrative. Maybe he doesn’t have the ear for prose and timing on the page, which comes naturally to him as an actor and screen writer. Certainly that would go a long way towards explaining why his style is so uniformly flat. Slews of characters – from a Congolese warlord to the young heir to the Kellogg’s cereal fortune on to a sex robot with the capacity for love – speak with the same plain, direct cadence.
Longer stories may tackle diverse settings and diverse problems – a group of young men trying to stage an intervention, a visit to Heaven, a would-be poet’s pathetic if ultimately successful striving for literary eminence – but they tackle them with a style so utilitarian they come across more like the beginnings of essays, or, again, sketches of a better story. Only with “The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela”, which takes the form of a transcript, does Novak manage to invest his characters with distinct voices (and in the case of Gilbert Godfried, all-too accurate) and the energy to match. It’s a rare moment of triumph, but one that’s undercut by his biggest flaw.
Because what Novak fails to do – in the roast as in any story – is invest it with real significance. It’s not for lack of trying: there’s no mistaking “The…Roast of Nelson Mandela” is Novak’s attempt to take a stand against the self-satisfaction and frivolity of America’s entertainment industry and celebrity worship. The story is a show-case of juvenile behavior and crude personalities thrown into stark relief by their contrast with the saintly and good-humored Mandela. It’s also a showcase for Novak’s sanctimony and for his greatest flaw as a writer. For every time he comes up on the theme of his story – and he really does come up on it; it’s rare he’d pass a chance to state it baldly – he doubles back at the last second. In “The Roast”, he gives Mandela a moment to mock the way each of the gathered comedians and the audience have wasted their freedom by engaging in this spectacle. Only the next moment Nelson recants with a hearty laugh and reveals he was just ribbing the participants.
On one hand, it’s a welcome retraction. There’s something deeply disingenuous about a man who’s made his living writing and starring in disposable entertainment chastising the same people who have made him famous and lined his coffers. On the other hand, it’s one of the few moments in the entire collection where Novak stops smiling his smarmy, accepting little smirk and flashes a fang — even looks like he might bite. But he never commits. Novak loves nothing more than to pull this switch and each time he does it it feels as if it’s because he’s afraid of actually engaging with what his story’s been building up. As though he realizes what he has to say is schmaltzy and insubstantial and that the only way to protect himself from any critic who would point it out is to throw a shade of irony over these “messages”.
Now, it’s not that irony is without its place. However, it’s difficult to take seriously anyone who insists that a so-called “culture of irony” is squeezing all the sincerity right out of us. Even moreso anyone who contends this same culture’s left us unable to form real connections from behind our amorphous and all-purpose shields of snark. What sounds to some like a klaxon heralding our last chance to change sounds to me like little more than alarmist screeching, all of it, from David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram” (which practically started this movement) to Dave Eggers’ spit-shined (and quite frankly opportunistic) and resold appropriation of the same to the cottage industry of bloggers and would-be academics who fill every corner of the internet with their scribblings denouncing the triumph of “post-modern thought”.
Irony may be a prevailing trend in our time, and it undeniably holds a special place in our humor, but what seems to some to be a prognosis seems more to me like diagnosis. If the cultural body’s infected – and make no mistake, in a world where the sweeping range and speed of information, misinformation and disinformation leaves everyone with a fragmented worldview that none of the old verities and dogmas can make any sense of, it most certainly is – irony’s just an antibody produced in abundance.
Far more virulent is that peculiar strain of sentimentality that couches itself in irony, looking for all the world like just another harmless antigen until the moment it saddles up to an unsuspecting cell, sheds its protein coat, and reveals itself for the schmaltzy and infectious pathogen it always was. It’s the style Kurt Vonnegut adopted when he was falling out of his rocker in those last few years, the M.O. of cheap sitcoms that are more interested in shilling humanist morality than in getting an honest laugh, the standard operating procedure in every post-Apatow Hollywood comedy, and the guiding principle of One More Thing. Sometimes Novak is little more earnest than all of that, as with “Sophia” and “They Kept Driving Faster and Outran the Rain”, but in those rare instances it’s clear from the soggy dime-store humanism and the fortune-cookie poetics of each story that he doesn’t have the high-seriousness required to take on substantial ideas in any sustained way.
What this also means is that One More Thing doesn’t have the high-seriousness required to deeply engage the comic. Because he never sees it as anything greater than a cloak to cover up naked ideas with, and only sees the worst of it as a simple anesthetic, he wanders into the same trap that snares the overly earnest and the pretentious alike: he thinks of comedy as a lower form. Why should he waste time developing all of those skit ideas if they’re only good for a quick laugh, anyway? It’s certainly not going to sustain the reader. What he misses is just how fine this distinction between the two is. (Or, as Flannery O’Connor once said, “all comic (works) that are any good must be about matters of life and death.”).
The absurdity of a man falling in love with the first sex robot to develop sentience deserves better than the maudlin treatment it receives here. Played fast and loose, it’s a perfect opportunity to mock the petty realities of love while simultaneously reminding us that it’s because something so precious and life-affirming is built on such shaky ground that a botched love is all the more tragic. Here, though, Novak goes out of his way to defend the hero from derision, to have already made him the butt of the national conversation, in order to keep the reader focused on the soppy moral of the story.
Imagine how much more biting “The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela” would be if Mandela hadn’t doubled-back at the end, and instead the story had closed on B-list celebrities losing their minds when confronted with the banality of everything they’d done. It wouldn’t be entirely honest – Novak would still be condemning himself even as he casts his lot with the saints – but at least it would show a respect for comic timing and the power of venom that is tellingly absent in the current version of the story.
As it is, Novak doesn’t seem to have the guts necessary for truly comic writing. He underestimates it even as he overrates supposedly “serious” writing and in doing so, he patronizes his audience. It’s not that people merely want to be distracted with cheap comedy or that’s all it’s good for; those weaknesses are Novak’s alone.