PYM

[intertribal]

PYM by Mat Johnson is a whole bunch of awesome (as pgtremblay promised it would be).  It is, basically, the kind of science fiction/fantasy* that I really enjoy and get a lot out of.  That is:

• Well-written.
• Written with passion.  I don't know how to describe this really, I just know it when I see it.
• Overflowing with sharp, biting, often-funny social commentary

Comments

[intertribal]

Yeah - it's funny, because when I was first reading it I was just like, "wow, this is really amusing - that's not what I was expecting" - in part because the narrator doesn't find any of it funny except in a so-bad-I-have-to-laugh way, so you're not really laughing with anyone, you're laughing at the absurdity of the situation as well as, truly, Johnson's comic voice. Some of it is sort of what my comic voice tries to be, but I'm not very good at it.

This is the first time I laughed out loud. This character, a bus driver, is referencing a bombing that doesn't play any role in the story except in this anecdote: "Then boom. Passed the bomb site right on the left side, blew half my passenger area's windows straight out. Couldn't hear nothing in my ears for hours. Right then, I drove straight home, dog. I mean straight - didn't even let the people off my bus, didn't brake for red lights, didn't stop till I got to my apartment. Ran upstairs, I don't know what those people in the bus did."

And then you get to a point where you realize this is definitely absurd and funny (at the same time as it's heartfelt and painful - it's an odd combo).

[asakiyume]

Ha! That's great.

I think absurd and funny *can* go together with heartfelt and painful. I saw that in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. It seems to be silly hijinks (though with more plot and content than the hitchiker's guide books, IMO), and then, zot! You realize you've been slipped bits of pathos and stuff that leaves you thinking. I *cried* in places reading that book.

--I mean, I think Pym is a totally different sort of book; I'm not trying to draw an equivalence. Just saying that I think those sets of characteristics can go together very effectively (and even though they're not things I usually look for--or generally think I want--together).

[intertribal]

Oh, definitely! Catch-22, one of my favorite books of all time, is precisely that, and precisely because it's about politics and power (which are sort of by definition absurd, funny, heartfelt, painful). I remember laughing in horror a lot at the chapters about Milo Minderbinder, the enterprising war profiteer (Milo the Militant, Milo the Mayor), and then crying at the end when Aarfy kills a hotel maid and Snowden dies in an airplane.

I think Pym might be sort of the opposite of that because the absurdity is more what gets slipped to you and the Srs Business is more what's on the surface. I think, though I might be wrong.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I get the impression from both you and Paul that the ratios are reversed (re: absurd and serious). Well, one of these days maybe I'll actually read it!