Every neighborhood has one. The crank. The neighborhood eccentric. The oddball the neighbors tell stories about but don’t actually know. Of course it’s a bit difficult to avoid becoming the source of rumors when it appears that your house is nothing more than a freestanding door isolated in a suburban field. Difficult to help the neighbors see the advantages of natural insulation when all they can imagine is a dark hole filled with spiders and snakes. Such is the predicament of the narrator for Man, Underground who suddenly must face the imaginative dearth and knee-jerk assumptions of his neighbors after they have forced the city to instigate an official review of his underground dwelling. When unsolicited help comes knocking on his lonely door, it arrives in the form of a punk-inspired seventeen year old girl who paints murals as her extracurricular activity. Before the novel is done, Monika, the striped-haired, engineer boot-clad, National Merit scholarly muralist, not only helps the narrator find a path back into the above-ground world, she helps pave the route that allows him to face the past he has fled for this self-imposed basement exile. This darkly comic novel explores both the fallout of the post 9/11 culture where unpredictable violence and omnipresent xenophobia cohabitate and a counter-culture where random acts of kindness might provide hope for change.
Monika appears in our narrator’s life with her own baggage of course, not only the quirkiness of her quite limber imaginative thought process but the anchor of a dysfunctional family trying to cope with the presence of a “vegetable brother.” The candor and energy with which she embraces life despite her family’s tragedy help the narrator face his own baggage, painful memories that include having lost his wife and daughter seven years before. Hoping to offer the narrator assistance in the current city bid to review his home by providing “diversionary tactics” to take the heat off his property by neighbors and city officials alike, Monika initiates a campaign of petty vandalism and yard art “relocation.” When the narrator ventures outside his self-imposed daily regimen by accompanying Monika, he finds the world he has left behind odder than he ever imagined. Odder still, he learns with Monika’s help, that the beauty of a mural depicting loneliness can inspire hope, that friendship can displace selfishness and rigidity, and that kindness can prove transformative. Just as the reality of his thoughtfully constructed eco-home is not what it seems when encountering his cartoonish door, the relationships that emerge in this novel demonstrate that often people are not what one imagines on first encounter, whether those people are teenaged misfits or homeless persons participating in an underworld karaoke night.
Literary comedy; 83,000 words
