The Price of the Haircut by Brock Clarke

Published by Algonquin Books on March 13, 2018

The Price of the Haircut is a collection of tragicomic (or in a few cases, twistedly comic) stories that blend humor with perception. After the mayor in “The Price of the Haircut” tells the city that a race riot wasn’t caused by yet another shooting of an unarmed black man by a white cop, but by a quarrel over a barber’s racist remark after he gave an $8 haircut, the white narrator and his friends lament all the bad but expensive haircuts they’ve had. They want to save money and get a bad haircut for only $8, but can they patronize a barber who makes racist remarks? The frivolous logic they employ to wrestle with their moral dilemma is hilarious, but the story’s larger point concerns the willingness of white people to pretend that racism doesn’t exist while agreeing that if it did exist, it would be awful, a point they would happily make in a patronizing and self-congratulatory way to their black friends if they had any.

In the volume’s most bizarre story, “Our Pointy Boots,” young men and women ask the question: “How does the thing that promises to be different, the thing that promises to make you feel good, end up making you feel as bad as everything else?” After they return from war (except for the one who died), the same young men and women just want to march around the Public Square in the pointy boots they thought would make them feel good. This is a tragically funny story that lampoons all the clichés about returning veterans and reminds us that people are individuals, not clichés. Ultimately the story is about the importance of holding onto something that makes us feel good during all those times when feeling good seems very far away. And it’s about the importance of holding onto ourselves if all else fails.

In “The Pity Palace,” a man in Italy is too sad to venture outside of his home because his wife left him for Mario Puzo. After jettisoning the friends who warned him that he needs to go outside if he wants to keep his friends, he has no one to take care of him, compounding his desperate loneliness. His former friends have circulated flyers inviting people to visit the man’s home, which they have dubbed “The Pity Palace,” in order to pity him. Feeling pity for the man makes visitors feel better about their own lives (except for those who complain that he isn’t pitiful enough), which says something sad but honest about human nature. The story’s kicker lies in the growing realization that the man is even more pitiful than he appears to be.

“What Is the Cure for Meanness?” should be a sad story told by a young boy about his mean father and emotionally wrecked mother, and while it is a sad story, it’s also very funny. The son is trying to avoid his father’s meanness and is only partially successful, although he’s more insensitive than mean to his mom. But their life is filled with misfortune — everything the mother cares about dies or leaves — and maybe meanness is the natural response. Still, as the title suggests, meanness might not be inevitable.

The narrator of “Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife” is a research-obsessed husband who is afraid to lose his wife to her congenital heart defect and is instead losing her to his inability to give her the space she needs. That doesn’t sound funny, and it’s not, but the tour of Lizzie Borden’s house (which frat boys have mistaken for porn star Lezzie Borden’s house) is hysterical.

“The Misunderstandings” is narrated by an unemployed man whose takes his unhappy family to dinners at local restaurants, each leading to misunderstandings that lead to more family dinners at other restaurants, all paid for by restaurant owners in sort of a “pay it forward” spirit. Speaking of family dinners, one of my favorite stories in the volume is “That Which We Will Not Give,” a celebration of family stories that are repeated every year at Thanksgiving dinners and other barbaric family rituals.

“The Grand Canyon” is a five-page run-on sentence that describes a moment in a woman’s honeymoon when she considers how to paint the Grand Canyon and whether the painting should include her husband masturbating into it. “Children Who Divorce,” a story about jealousy, imagines that child actors reunite to act in updated, dinner theater versions of their original productions, minded by a doctor who tends to the actors with daily group therapy sessions (the current group suffers from Gene Wilder withdrawal).

Brock Clarke has a knack for creating strange — sometimes bizarre — situations or characters, and finding within them those things that are common to us all. The stories encourage readers not just to laugh, but to understand people and their lives in new ways, to understand how other people are, in fundamental ways, just like us, not matter how unlike us they might be.

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The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke

Published by Algonquin Books on November 4, 2014

After the controversy surrounding the Jyllands-Posten publication of twelve cartoons depicting Mohammed rattles Denmark, Jens Baedrup, the editorial cartoonist for a small Danish newspaper, is ordered to draw a similar cartoon. After a couple of teens burn down his house, the Danish authorities announce that Jens died in the fire and place him into witness protection. Whether Jens' wife will miss him seems doubtful. Lorraine Callahan, a CIA agent who is guarding Jens, decides to send him to Broomeville, New York to work with Matty Klock, the school principal with whom she once had an affair. Matty fires a drunken guidance counselor and gives the job to Jens, who is now known as Henry.

We are told repeatedly that Danes are the happiest people in the world. Americans clearly are not. Lorraine wants to be sleeping with Matty, who still pines for Lorraine although he sort of wants to be faithful to his unforgiving wife Ellen, who wants to sleep with Jens. Also unhappy is a guy named Capo who is monitoring all of these shenanigans for reasons that are not immediately revealed to the reader.

Another plot thread concerns Soren, one of the teens who holds himself responsible for (what he believes to be) Jens' death. Despite his experimentation with arson, Soren is a likable character who enters into an unlikely alliance with another of the novel's central characters.

Brock Clarke gets comic mileage from a Denmark that he portrays as populated by people who feel guilty about the religious stereotypes to which they subscribe while making no effort to overcome them. He also has fun with the unspoken thoughts that race through his characters' brains. As is common with unspoken thoughts, they tend to be ridiculous and are wisely left unspoken. But they are also very funny.

You might need Venn diagrams to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other. None are developed in great depth but they are deep enough to carry a comedy. This is a dark comedy but the story is heartening in many ways, including its depiction of father's admiration of his son. That he admires his son's ability to buy an illicit gun in Copenhagen merely adds to the story's amusement.

For a novel that is marketed as having great political depth, The Happiest People is surprisingly light, yet I did not regard that as a fault by the time I finished reading it. Perhaps it has hidden depths, but I enjoyed it as a fairly superficial look at the ways in which life (and people) can become utterly strange.

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