At first glance, Your Body Is Changing, the new short-story collection by Jack Pendarvis, is right out of the George Saunders school of satirical short fiction. The eight stories compose an allegorical road novella, stories of unlovable schmucks stuck in their ruts, and a few pieces of experimental fiction. But Your Body Is Changing is not only an outrageously odd book, it’s a knee-slappingly funny read.The collection’s title story is a road novella that features a fatherless young Alabama boy of 14 named Henry Gill, whose catalog of miseries includes an overarching belief in God, a teenager’s raging lust, a bad haircut, worse acne, and a lump on his chest that, due to an overabundance of estrogen, behaves suspiciously like a lactating breast. When his mother’s uncle suffers an aneurysm, she accompanies the old man to London for treatment, leaving Henry free to set out on a vision quest catalyzed by the appearance of Jesus, “who looked a lot like Luke, the scruffy diner-owner on the Gilmore Girls.” Jesus/Luke wants Henry to help Polly Finch, the paralyzed Miracle Girl of Upstate New York, get back inside her body, a task that is for Henry the perfect blend of mystical and kinky.Henry wanders in the wilderness, looking for signs. He goes from a public golf course to the home of a crackpot professor to an outsider artist’s Scarecrow Farm installed at a dilapidated high school. The artist, Brother Lampey, recruits Henry to be his disciple and help him deliver the Ten Commandments scribbled onto a cardboard refrigerator box to New York City in a wagon pulled by “six or seven shabby-looking goats who smelled very bad and had a dull, evil look in their eyes.” Henry makes it as far as Birmingham before he abandons Lampey and is taken in by a trio of performance artists at a lesbian dive bar. Henry experiences his first erotic encounter that involves the curious lump under his shirt. Instead of being flooded with shame, he realizes “there was some holiness to it after all, maybe not much, but some.”Your Body Is Changing takes its name from a book Henry’s grandmother gives him, the subtitle of which is A Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality. Henry’s quest is very much in the vein of Huck Finn, i.e., every road movie from the late ’70s onward. Pendarvis drags the Southern gothic story into the realm of contemporary grotesque. His protagonists are as biblically fixated as those characters out of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner, but they get their kicks off pop culture. Pendarvis’ perfect reader might be a hyperintelligent plus-size goth chick with Suicide Girl ambitions and Bible quotes on her MySpace page.Pendarvis’ not-so-lovable losers aren’t sons of FIRPO so much as backwoods relations who, thanks to cable television and the Internet, exult in the same flotsam and jetsam of lowbrow culture that the rest of us do. In Saunders’ milieu, this is cause for outrage, but in Pendarvis’ purview, it provides occasions for humor of the most ribald sort, particularly when the prohibitions of Christianity are brought to bear. The tension between these forces makes lines like “Oh, Laura Prepon [of That ’70s Show fame], you have the wide enticing face of a beauteous harlot. You have a vulva like a velvet boat” screamingly funny, not because they are shocking or vulgar, but because of the moral cost to the loser who dreams them up. Therein lies the love. But is it literature with a capital “L”?Heavens, no, but Your Body Is Changing is bad and dorky to the bone, and likely the funniest book you’ll read all year.(Exerepted from review published in the L.A. Weekly, June 20, 2007:[http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/boo...])
Loved this. The relative low rating is, I don't know, due to maybe a few too many easy shots taken throughout the book? Easily in the George Saunders vein and pretty sharp on all kinds of levels of human failure -- there will be no shortage of that to poke fun of for aspiring writers as far as anyone can see. But in the end -- is that what we're always looking for? This guy is walking the line and the book is good for laffs and some pride-checking, I just fear the idea of reading it and coming away thinking something like, "Gawd, people are so stupid!" Which, hey it's true, but what's the point? I don't think that's his intention, but the boundaries aren't always that well-maneuvered. Good book, regardless!
Do You like book Your Body Is Changing (2007)?
"This is contemporary literature!" I shouted at Ben, after he quite forcefully laughed at segments of "Outsiders." Yeah, "The Mysterious..." was more LOL-ful for me, but this was... I still can't find the word. Worldy. Like... the worlds were so... realized? It was like I was in them worlds that each of them stories occupied. And I recognized my own world, just on the other side of the page-glass. I dunno... I feel affected. Blessed, even. Special thnax to Peter Berghoef for loaning me this number. Way to do that!
—Eric T. Voigt Voigt
This is a very funny, very out-of-the-ordinary collection of short stories (7 stories and the novella-length title story). Most of Pendarvis' characters make Ignatius J. Reilly look like a guy you'd take home to Mama. The stories are wild and whimsical and Pendarvis' imagination rarely slows to less than a gallop (leading to lots of tangential forks in the narratives that somehow end up fitting just fine). If you can conceive of finding rotting teeth funny, this book would be fun for you. Also, the cover is one hell of a conversation-starter on the subway. My favorites were "Roger Hill" and "Tollbooth Confidential." The title story, about a fundamentalist 14-year-old boy who is developing a breast as he goes on a mission to get to New York in order to fulfill what he believes is Jesus' order to save a girl in a coma by making out with her, is also pretty awesome.(Full disclosure, I've met Jack Pendarvis a couple times and think he's great.)
—Emily
