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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - Copyright The Onion
- - - - Ben Greenman
Like much of the content-light, concept-heavy literary effluvia that crops up in Dave Eggers' McSweeney's quarterly publication and Internet spin-off, Ben Greenman's debut collection Superbad consciously erases the lines separating fiction, metafiction, ironic postmodern satirical fiction, and that elusive thing that those who are unfamiliar with Eggers' work might call "real life." Superbad, which reprints Greenman pieces from McSweeney's and The New Yorker alongside new works, does offer a few traditional short stories. But they're overwhelmed and outnumbered by the sometimes hilarious, sometimes baffling snippets that range from recognizable parody to experimental style exercises. Some of the pieces analyze, review, or document themselves or other nonexistent pieces; one of the simplest and catchiest is the endlessly recursive "Blurbs," which collects putative excerpts of reviews of "Blurbs" itself. ("'The central conceit—a humor piece composed entirely of blurbs about that humor piece—reads like a Mobius strip tied around Jorge Luis Borges's finger.' —The Boston Globe") Greenman uses that sort of circular structure to powerful effect elsewhere, as in the impressive "What 100 People, Real And Fake, Believe About Dolores," a collection of opinions that actually define their subject's history in a deceptively linear style. But even his more straightforward parodies tend to loop in on themselves. One Superbad highlight, a series of incomplete librettos for current-events musicals like "Elian!" and "Microsoft!," seems like relatively conventional humor, until Greenman himself pops up in the final installment, as a character being manipulated by other characters into writing the musical in which he's starring. It can be difficult to tell whether there's anything but dead air at the eye of Greenman's stylistic hurricanes, though the humanism he exhibits in his traditional stories offers reason to hope that he's not just being clever for the sake of cynical virtuosity. Regardless of intent, the contents of Superbad are wickedly funny and curiously effective. Self-aware, self-referential, and occasionally just self-indulgent, Superbad pulls off an impressive hat trick by convincing audiences not to analyze it nearly so much as it analyzes itself. —Tasha Robinson - - - -
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