E-Mail This Article to a Friend Comics and fabulists Hilarious fiction in a hyperreal world BY RICCO VILLANUEVA SIASOCO
	Phoenix Literary Supplement Poetry gets rich: …and the "little" magazine's editor makes daring moves with his millions. By William Corbett. War, by the book: This spring, readers can turn to four new books that draw on real-life conflicts now past – though perhaps not yet over. By J.L. Johnson.

Write what you know.

You’ve heard it your entire life, wisdom given like a bland Communion wafer, all those airless afternoons that your high-school English teacher — sick of listening to your complaints about writer’s block — told you to just put your ballpoint pen to paper and write down your nitty-gritty, small-but-important life. Lately, however, fiction writers have taken this old standby and chucked it out the window like a ratty sofa.

A new crop of writers — wildly original voices such as Haruki Murakami and Judy Budnitz — has channeled an interest in the fantastic, the comic, the surreal, and made it literary. As Grace Paley so articulately stated, these are folks writing about what they don’t know about what they know: babies walking and talking mere seconds out of the womb, and Japanese sexagenarians who literally converse with housecats.

Kafka on the Shore (Knopf, 2005), by Haruki Murakami. If you’ve ever read Murakami’s brilliant novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf, 1997), you know about The Well. A deep, narrow, cool-to-the-touch hole in the narrator’s back yard that appears like a hologram out of nowhere, The Well is a place of quiet repose for the novel’s aimless, unemployed narrator. Unfortunately, Murakami’s new novel, Kafka on the Shore, doesn’t have The Well. But it does have talking cats.

Beyond the fabulist slant, what’s really unique about Murakami’s novels and stories is the subtle quilt work of historical fact, literary fiction, and outright comedy. After the introduction of teenage narrator Kafka Tamura in Kafka on the Shore, for instance, readers are barraged with classified government documents chronicling a mysterious flying object in November 1944. Soon readers enter a world of government interviewers and the voices of the interview subjects themselves: time and space seem not to exist, and readers are left to puzzle out the chronology. As in Wind-Up Bird, Murakami is just as prone to tangents of historical meditation as he is to metaphysical scene-making.

E.M. Forster once wrote, "Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra." Murakami asks readers to pay extra, then offers us payback in spades.

Nice Big American Baby (Knopf, 2005), by Judy Budnitz. What would you do if you were foreign-born, living hand-to-mouth in a desolate border town on the edge of an unnamed-yet-familiar country reminiscent of Mexico, and four years pregnant (yes, you read that right: four years)? What if you were the last of eight children, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, and your mother did not love you but accepted you because your brothers were killed in a war? And what if your one goal in life was to give birth to your child on US soil?

Welcome to the world of Judy Budnitz.

"What if" is a recurring bass line in all of Budnitz’s work. In "Nice Big American Baby," the title piece in her second collection of beautifully odd stories, Budnitz imagines scenes ranging from heartbreak (a young woman pregnant, alone, and desiring her child to be a natural-born US citizen) to absolute fabulism (the walking, talking, Bob’s Big Boy–type child that her body delivers while her floating, disembodied head watches).

Budnitz has a fine eye for detail. She describes an adoption agent "who handled babies as carelessly as basketballs," a gynecologist’s office where employees "don’t talk to you or smile; and when they do the pictures they mash your breast between these two cold glass plates like a pancake."

On the heels of her acclaimed novel If I Told You Once (Picador, 1999), Budnitz joins fellow fabulists Julia Slavin and George Saunders in the movement to burn down the house of realism.

Everyone’s Pretty (Soft Skull, 2005), by Lydia Millet. If you were to ask Dean Decetes, the narrator-pornographer of Lydia Millet’s fourth book, what he wants to do when he grows up (though he’s already a middle-aged loser), he would likely respond, "I want to be famous." That is, when he’s not drinking himself into oblivion or impersonating an emergency medical technician while crashing a neighborhood kegger.

In Millet’s hyperreal world of pornographers, dwarves, and teenage geniuses, Decetes’s goal is not unusual: these are characters who consider Fame (with a capital "F") a pursuit as legitimate as getting married, buying a house, and having the requisite two-and-a-half kids. Everyone’s Pretty brings readers into the heart of a Lite-Brite world where drinks flow freely and Three’s Company–type situations abound. With chapter headings such as "Chapter the Seventh: Burials take place; a sheep is shorn; the Innocent is set free; and an Honest Man is robbed of his Freedom," Millet nods to the slightly biblical and the slightly (but not completely unbelievably) Abbott and Costello.

Millet has an ear for rhythm and repetition — no small task while balancing her hyperreal high jinks. About a rooster: "His beak was nobly arched, his claws sharp, his feathers preened: but the old hen was squawking again, flustered by his virile displays. She pecked like a hen and spat like a camel." In Everyone’s Pretty, you are in the hands of a writer whose diction complements the high-wire world of her players.

Harold’s End (Last Gasp, 2005), by J.T. Leroy, illustrated by Cherry Hood. I’m partial to the names of publishing houses, and with Last Gasp, J.T. Leroy has chosen a publisher with a name that rivals his in-your-face — at times desperate — content. Reading Leroy’s newest, a novella with the tongue-in-cheek title Harold’s End, you wonder if you’ve met the literary love child of a young William Burroughs and postmodern provocateur Kathy Acker. Here’s a writer unafraid to detail enema bags spread "on the hall carpet like roadkill." As a friend once told me (after reading a novel by Henry Miller), you’re going to feel as if you need to take a bath afterward.

Harold’s End is the story of a dysfunctional trio: a young unnamed hustler working the streets of San Francisco; his wealthy, middle-aged john; and, finally, a pet snail. At times, the comedy verges on parody. At the john’s home, for instance, the hustler finds himself propositioned with the aforementioned health-care product:

I look down and adjust my feet. Like tango step instructions, he has white shoe silhouettes glued on the tarp to make sure I stand in the proper place. "Yup."

"Okay. Can you squat some?"

"Yup." I bend my knees some.

"Like a skier, think like a skier!"

The comic contortions of the scene remind us of Burroughs’s Dr. Benway and his back-bending sexual acts, yet Leroy is most definitely grounded in a real world — though one somewhat askew. Leroy’s Harold’s End is comic, hyperreal fiction told with a double edge.

Thank God for hyperrealists like Haruki Murakami and J.T. Leroy, stretching the bounds of magical realism and infusing them with a sense of joie de vivre. Rather than attempting to capture what they know, Murakami, Leroy, and fellow comic writers Millet and Budnitz take out explosives and light the whole damn thing on fire.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco can be reached at mail@riccosiasoco.com