The Book of Jokes by Momus

No one wants recording artists to try changing mediums. For every Ice Cube-in-Boyz-in-the-Hood, there’s a dozen Jessica-Simpson-in-Dukes-of-Hazzards. And movies are one thing, but novels? You can’t just show up and look cool when it comes to a novel. Let alone a novel with a high concept (narrated alternately by a father and his son) that centers on a family and a world where reality is dictated by jokes. So it was with trepidation that I approached Scottish multi-genre musician Momus’s debut novel The Book of Jokes. And it is with happy surprise that I can report the book is filthy, profane, frequently disgusting, and utterly delightful.

If the concept underlying the novel is a bit of a strange one to wrap your head around, here’s something by way of illustration: the son’s four uncles, respectively Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English, go hunting together regularly. On one such trip, the Englishman falls to the ground, apparently hit by buckshot, and the other three panic – each calls emergency services on his own cellphone, and each tries to explain the problem in a native language none regularly speaks.

“Now, sir, calm down,” came the reply, over all three phones, to all three men. “We’d better use English. The first thing to do is make sure your friend is really dead.”

There came three loud bangs – one, two, a short delay filled with horror, and then a third (The Irishman). “Done!” chorused the uncles. “Now what?”

No, that air of the ridiculous never lifts from the book. But Momus’s prose, clean and blunt and unadorned, lends even the most ridiculous situation (the above would likely not reach the top ten) a grounded sense of plausibility that allows for easy suspension of disbelief. This is an absurdist world that one can easily become immersed in, with the stylistic choices Momus makes simultaneously making the situations he describes seem more realistic and, perhaps by extension, more humorous.

Like any good comedian, Momus realizes that the best jokes get better with repetition, and so the novel is built around recurring incidents that gain power and impact over time. The central one, or at least the most prominent, concerns the father’s uncontrollable lust for one of the animals on the family’s farm.

Holding the goose Rebecca under his arm, my father strode into the farmhouse kitchen. “This is the pig I’ve been fucking,” he declared. My mother looked up, surprised. “That’s not a pig, that’s Rebecca the goose!” “I wasn’t talking to you,” snapped my father.

As this incident is reconfigured or retold throughout the novel, Momus draws ever greater humor and poignancy from it, building to a conclusion that pulls together seemingly-unconnected threads and images to create the narrative’s strongest joke and most indelible moment. The Book of Jokes is at its best when manipulating expectations, skirting farce and incongruity. It falls considerably shorter if you approach it expecting well-rounded, fully-realized characters. With few exceptions, Momus refuses to delve into the psyches of his two narrators, let alone the large supporting cast (a joke late in the novel emphasizes just how many characters were introduced for a single scene.)

But this seems to be the trade-off: by not rendering his characters completely believable, Momus is able to use his limited space – the novel doesn’t quite reach two-hundred pages—to explore them as deterministic pawns who become aware of the boundaries of the universe in which they exist. Some may simply try to ensure that the punchlines always land in their favor, some may try to break free from or rewrite the entire joke; if this sounds suspiciously metafictional, well, it eventually is. But Momus keeps the jokes coming, even as he addresses the significance of family in shaping children’s lives and the plausibility of predestination via an increasingly self-aware narrative.

And perhaps that’s the power of comedy, a power that Momus seems fully aware and in control of: a joke can address the same themes and raise the same questions as drama, and it can simultaneously entertain. Of course, only the best jokes are able to maintain that tightrope act between playfulness and profundity – yet though it’s not flawless, The Book of Jokes is full of them.

Reviewed by David Sheffieck

The Book of Jokes by Momus
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009
Paper, 200 pp, $13.95
ISBN-10: 1564785610