here is a kind of sweet sickness at the heart of the experience of reading Laughin' Boy in 2005; I think this sick sweetness in the gut is nostalgia. Bradley Denton's fifth novel, which is more savage and (I think) far angrier than anything he's yet published, reads like a near-future SF novel written just before the end of the last century and set in the year 2000. The America of Laughin' Boy is hagridden by the chimaera of millennial change, and remains traumatized by the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which took 168 lives. It is as funny as anything by Kurt Vonnegut, as learnedly entranced by trash as anything John Kessel or Scott Bradfield ever wrote up to 1999, as gonzo as Norman Spinrad in his pomp of yore. It sickens the reader with longing for those days.
There are two clear possibilities here. Given the grotesque dying spasms of commercial midlist publishing in the Western World, a process which has been talked about for decades now but which seems in 2005 to be destroying careers in earnest at last, it may be the case that Denton did in fact draft Laughin' Boy in 1999 or so, as a State of the Nation on the Verge of Millennium tale, but couldn't place it until now. Or (it seems less plausible somehow, but hey) maybe the book is a deliberate attempt to recreate the SF tonus of a world before the penny dropped.
If the first possibility is the case, then we have to read Laughin' Boy as though we were still hoping that the new century would simply be louder than the last; if the second possibility is the case, then we need to praise Bradley Denton for his impersonation of a 20th-century writer, and see what he hoped to accomplish in this costume. Certainly, if Laughin' Boy is an impersonation, it's superb, though pretty eccentric. If it is in fact a 1999 novel, we can learn by reading it a bit about how strange we have become since then. Because the domestic horrors it depicts glow with a kind of weird innocence: Laughin' Boy himself, and The Racist Ranger, and Porno Girl, and egregious media Talents, and Survivalist factions, and dunderheaded FBI agents who have no Church of Homeland to sanction their stupidities.
Over and above any specific details, the real 1999 thing about Laughin' Boy is its raised voice. It's as though, in 1999, a satirist had to protest too much or be drowned out. I think it is different now. I think my own experience of 9/11 was typical enough. It was not outrage or disbelief or surprise that I felt, watching the Towers fall on live TV; it was a sudden, ashen recognition that gripped the bowels like a virus, a realization that the premonitions most of us had felt—the dreadful warnings implicit or explicit in so much of the "fantastic" fiction we had read for decades, and in almost any SF movie that had anything to do with the future coming down—needed no longer be argued. It was no longer necessary to shout aloud that the end of things was possible. Because we recognized the end of things. Laughin' Boy comes from (or re-creates) a time just before then. It raises its voice to be heard.
Comedy amid the carnage
The lucky thing for us, of course, is that the shout of Bradley Denton is a glorious noise to witness. We are in Wichita, Kan., in the spring of 2000, at a festival in a park, where a depressive divorced milquetoast named Danny Clayton finds himself in the middle of a massacre—masked members of the White Warriors for Jesus, Deceased (or WWJC) have just butchered 86 people. Danny is uninjured, but covered with blood. In the midst of the carnage, the dreadfulness of the world crosses his wires, and he breaks into spasms of painful, involuntary, raucous laughter. Unfortunately, a camcorder operated by a dying man captures Danny "laughing his ass off." He becomes an instant pariah, horrible things happen to him, usually (Denton is an American satirist talking about America) in the name of God. Then a man-and-wife pair of radio therapists persuades the FBI to house Danny and them while they attempt to "cure" him of his disability; the FBI, aware that Laughin' Boy's media prominence will deeply offend whoever commissioned the massacre, wishes to protect Danny while at the same time staking him out like a goat streaked with honey, to attract sectarian revenge.
Royce, one of the agents assigned to protect him, also suffers a dysfunctional response syndrome, a pattern of behaviour that seems tied to the egregiousness of modern America. Though he is a decent striving liberal, he is known as The Racist Ranger because he is only able to speak in a mercilessly camped-up parody of the black dialect Mark Twain gives Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Unfortunately, his FBI boss (whose life he has saved) is black:
Armstrong exhaled. "Rob Royce," he said. "I didn't think they'd send you."
The handsome man stood. "Lawsy, Allan, honey," he said. "Is dat ennyway to say howdy to de fren whut done save yo' mis'ble life?" ...
"Do me a favor, Rob," Armstrong said. "Just don't speak, right?"
"Dat's gwyne to be mos' pow'ful diff'cult, dad fetch it," Royce said. "I's been assigned to yo' detail, en I'se s'posed to consult wid you on de sp'sifik stattegee to ketch dem what done blowed up de carnival down by de river sho'."
And on, and on. It is quite extraordinarily funny, and it never stops, the whole point of the affliction being that it cannot stop; and the whole point of a genuine or faux 1999 novel about the State of the Nation being to rub our ears in the junk noise and anguish of America.
The third victim is Porno Girl, a 32-year-old virgin lawyer compelled constantly to view the hardest possible porn or go mad, but who can't stand to be touched. The threesome is soon known as The Odd Squad, and Laughin' Boy rather gingerly begins to nose into territory more compulsively explored in a movie like Kinka Usher's pretty hilarious Mystery Men (1999), about a team of inept superheroes, or by Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (1999) (Tourette's syndrome is mentioned in Laughin' Boy, though only in passing), or by Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (*2000*), all these works being interjaculatory: works full of voices and/or roles that cross-talk the fractals between life and performance.
But Denton is not really much interested in this region of the fantastic. Except for six substantial "Episode" sequences, which convey the modest storyline to a slightly spoofish climax in an airport, Laughin' Boy is told exclusively through—and takes as its targets for satire—paraphrases of video clips, printouts of chat sites and newsgroup sites and other Internet stuff, renderings of various sorts of sound bite, and transcripts of "therapy" sessions between Danny and the publicity-mongering radio psychologists who have him between their teeth until he shakes loose. Much of this is extremely sharp—the shouting-match "debates" between right-wing ideologues and liberal simps horrifically reminded this reviewer why he no longer watches the news on television—and all of it is noisy.
It is designed to be.
There is nothing ashen about Laughin' Boy, which is one of the funniest novels of the past decade. The mass murderers are spectacularly dealt with. The FBI redeems itself. Danny is cured of his intolerable laughter—which may be akin to the cosmic laughter of some Maker of us all, but which hurts a guy like hell—and he may find love again (with Porno Girl). The Racist Ranger is able to achieve buddy talk with his black boss. The new century might not have been as bad as all that if that's as bad as it was going to get, we begin to feel, as this historical novel—as this SF novel out of the irredeemable past—this wake-up call to a world which did not happen comes to a smooth halt, as though saying to its readers in 2005: "Wish you were here. Wish you were back here in a world you could shout about. Bye-bye."
