Review of DIRTMOUTH
Posted on March 12th, 2010
Dirtmouth by Alan Singer
What happened to beautiful Cinnabar McDermond? The answer seems clear enough if you listen simply to one voice: “The one who loved her most must be her murderer . . . I will confess the crime.”
But answers and voices are not really so clear or simple in Dirtmouth, a difficult novel about bizarre personalities, toxic relationships, and distorted realities. When you begin reading, you briefly meet an Investigator, someone who interrogates by merely listening to the “confessions” of the two principal characters, the archeologist Kraft Dundeed and his protégé Roscoe Taste. As the long interrogation proceeds, Dundeed says, “I will tell you the truth. Mind it will take some time,” and he says later, “I must lay the facts bare, however painful to us all. Is there anyone who eludes the black lash of suffering in this life? Is there anyone who goes unpunished?”
However, believe Dundeed at your own peril, Taste would warn you. “He is an old man. But I still say he is a killer . . . a spotty-faced, palsy-limbed eighty-three-year-old monster of decrepitude . . . You see this fat man smile . . . Snickering, not sympathizing, as he would have us think. Isn’t that evidence enough you cannot trust him? Think of him instead as a festering pillow of jizz . . . Mountain of lice shit. Mongrelized fart cloud. Sanctimonious elephant stool.”
And so two antagonists expose themselves to the Investigator. They tell stories of archeology, their lives, and their erotic and disturbed memories of Cinnabar, ostensibly as evidence for the Investigator. However, their memories jeopardize the investigation because memory itself “is a mystery, as is everything else in life.”
Alan Singer, author of Dirtmouth, graphically and adroitly exploits mysteries of personal and professional antipathy, grotesque suffering, and Cinnabar McDermond’s perverse fate. But to say Dirtmouth is merely a mystery would be like saying Waiting for Godot is about waiting, or saying Moby-Dick is about whaling. The ineffable power and profound meaning of the novel resonates most notably in the dazzling, mesmerizing ways in which Dundeed and Taste tell their sordid tales. When you read Dirtmouth you may be reminded of Auster, Borges, or Kafka. But more likely you will realize that Singer’s linguistic tour de force is something quite different—something significant and disturbing.
Tags: Alan Singer, Antagonists, Antipathy, Archeologist, Cinnabar, Confessions, Elephant, Interrogation, Lash, Lice, Monster, Murderer, Mysteries, Peril, Perverse Fate, Principal Characters, Realities, Toxic Relationships, Waiting For Godot, Will Take Some Time
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