Ever want to get out of something? How badly? What is the worst thing you've done -- and this of course is between you and your God -- to escape a situation? How big was your lie, how thoughtless was your action? Ok, now compare what you're thinking of to this question: In order to get out of something, did you ever fake having cancer?
That's exactly what our hero, Paul Mauro, does in Matt Marinovich's slicing debut novel, Strange Skies. Paul realizes he doesn't ever want kids while visiting his beleaguered brother and demon-like nephew, who "glares at me greedily with his glittering blue eyes, his damp brown hair swept to one side, Hitler style." Paul's wife unfortunately, wants kids very much. So after Paul gets a lump removed from his arm, rather than telling his wife he has a clean bill of health (the truth), he instead tells her the cancer has spread to his lymph nodes and he has a 50-50 chance of living. (Big, fat messy lie.)
Paul uses his newfound Cancer Card to gain favors, glean attention and have a rioting affair with another cancer patient. At first having a terminal disease seems like a magic panacea, a cure-all that relieves him from all life's drudgeries and responsibilities. Having "limited time" left makes everything more meaningful and beautiful...except that...he doesn't really have cancer. Paul's case is further confused by the fact he meets a woman and her son at the Mpls/St. Paul airport and suddenly finds himself feeling things he never thought possible.
Unapologetically and with rusty-saw bluntness, Marinovich creates a loveable villain in Paul, a character you'd love to hate, except he's so freaking honest and upsettingly real, you forget to. A character that tells you the truth about what he thinks -- even when it's awful.
I've always found it hard to have a normal conversation with my brother's wife when she's breastfeeding. In fact, I find it hard to have a normal conversation with Terry when she's not breastfeeding. Add the breast to the picture, and that saliva-encrusted rug slug she calls her baby boy, and I just go blank. My wife, Lee, I notice, can go on talking as if it were perfectly natural. My older brother, with his thinning blond hair and outdated goatee, doesn't really notice anything anymore. Eric's brain is in some kind of septic kid shock. They have three of them already, and to make ends meet, since Terry doesn't work, he's gambling online fourteen hours a day. Through some quirk of the system he clears about three thousand bucks a month, but his expressions have this strange automatic quality that rarely connect with anything that's being said. No matter what I say, I just feel like I'm dealing him another virtual face card.
We're sitting in a living room in South Orange, New Jersey. You can picture it. An old Victorian with vinyl siding, planted next to two other old Victorians with vinyl siding, a bunch of gruesomely colored toys lying on their sides in the patch of front yard, a dozen New York Times still wrapped tight in blue plastic on the front stoop because they don't have the time to read, or go to the movies, or even take a shower, and then you open the front door, with its depressing frosted glass design, and the smell hits you. Last night's grease fire, which is what Terry has been going on about.
"And all of a sudden I look up," she says, bouncing once on the couch to get her breast in the baby's mouth again, "and the whole stove is on fire."
"Literally," Eric says. He's sitting on a chair near the dining room table, hunched over, with a Sierra Nevada in his hand.
"What happened?" my wife shouts. I love Lee, but she drives me nuts. Disasters just excite her too much. Any kind of disaster will do. Sometimes, enjoying my first cup of coffee, I'll hear a low murmuring and realize that Lee is reading off the names of the latest soldiers who have been killed in action in Iraq. What am I supposed to do with this information? Bad luck is just bad luck. My brother's grease fire. Don't want to hear about it.
But I'm listening. I'm looking at my watch. Terry is still talking. The baby is still sucking. My brother still hasn't taken a sip of his beer.
"His whole head could have caught fire," Terry says. And then something strange happens: Eric smiles, just a little, and I know he wouldn't have minded if his whole head caught fire. It would have hurt, yes, no doubt about it. But he would have finally had a decent reason to escape this misery, if only for a moment, as he ran, flaming, across his own lawn. Free for a few yards, at least, before he collapsed.
With lines that made me laugh so loud I upset my dog, Marinovich exposes many of the dirty little secrets and tangled-up thoughts a citizen is supposed to keep neatly locked inside their head, the untidy un-thinkables we sometimes think, which, when uttered, create an air of intimacy and conspiracy with reader. It's like when a close family member gets Tourette's Syndrome and as much as you'd like to leave them in the Sam's Club parking lot while they're swearing obscenities, you just can't. They're family.
The more honest and awful Paul is, the more you cheer him on and when you're finished reading the book, don't be surprised if this slim 226-page knife blade hasn't loosened your tongue. You're pretty sure you married the wrong person? You can't go on with your ball-crushing job? You'd rather stick an ice pick in your eye than learn to operate a diaper pin? Go on, say it out loud. Marinovich did. Sometimes it feels good to talk dirty.