That There's a Fancy Rope

Before I get to today's book review, here's a heads-up as to what I'm going to read next: 

So you can look forward to that happenin' book review. I know you all get out there on Saturday nights and go to your crazy Pragmatism house parties and kick it up pragmatically at your wild Pragmatism nightclubs. I'm pretty sure this forthcoming book review will draw the crowds. To Phillip, who kindly loaned me this book: I've had your book for less than ten hours and already there is bike grease on it. I'm sorry. 

What did I just finish reading today? This:

And why should you care? Well, I'm not sure you will. But after thinking about it, I've decided I maybe care. Here's why.

At first I wanted to compare this novel to meeting an old friend you haven't seen for a year. Let's say you plan to meet this friend at a restaurant, and when you arrive at the restaurant, the friend is already at the table, and you talk for a couple of hours, and when you get up you realize he's been in a wheelchair the entire time and hasn't mentioned one word about his now being confined to a wheelchair.

After finishing the book, I don't want to talk about it like that at all.

Some people have called the prose in this novel "clean" or "muscular." They might be wrong. Actually, I can't imagine how muscular prose might read. It would be hard and dense and watching itself flex in the mirror all the time. Rutkowski's prose isn't like that at all. In fact, much of the book reads like a manual that explains how to plug in your toaster. I don't mean that as an insult.

What surprised me most about the book was how all of a sudden, about two thirds of the way through, it becomes a novel about bondage. No, not bondage as we are used to seeing it in literature, where the slaves are in bondage or the women are in bondage or the foreigners are in bondage. Yes, I'm talking about bondage in the That's-What-She-Said way. As in: Quick! I'm feeling lusty! Let's find the nearest drug store and buy the first thing we see that will allow me to lash your ankles to the garage door, which I will then open and close with you attached while I wear a ski mask. Bondage.

The funny thing is that when I reached that part of the book, I started to think that the reason that the book had, to that point, been kind of plain, was that the narrator was going to become a serial killer, and "clean" and "muscular" prose would, in retrospect, be totally calm and creepy. That's not at all what happened.

What does happen is that eventually the narrator meets a woman who is into swinging from her ankles upside-down and rather enjoys the paddle. Then the book no longer mentions bondage. Whatever those two are up to, it becomes none of the reader's business, and the book continues on to other things. These characters are not vilified for being weirdos.

People who might enjoy this book: fans of simple language that is not excessively and affectedly delicate, flash-fiction enthusiasts, and readers who are hanging upside-down.