Afterlife rules initiate supernatural journey
Review by JANET MASLIN
March 26, 2006
'A Dirty Job' ** out of ****
William Morrow, 387 pages, illustrated, $24.95
No one will ever accuse Christopher Moore of gravitas. Moore can impose gallows hilarity on virtually any subject and has already inflicted his brand of good-time ghoulishness upon whales ("Fluke"), the gospel ("Lamb") and Santa Claus ("The Stupidest Angel"). A giant Micronesian fruit bat in tiny Ray-Bans remains one of his books' most emblematic images.
But his latest and wobbliest story, "A Dirty Job," suggests that Moore's gonzo irreverence has its limits. This novel makes light of hellhounds, demons and outlandishly costumed squirrel cadavers (inspired by real dead-animal dolls sculptured by an acquaintance of the author). Though it works hard to wring improbable humor from all of the above, it's a book written in the shadow of death.
Charlie Asher and his wife, Rachel Goldstein, have just had a baby girl named Sophie as "A Dirty Job" begins. Charlie has yet to become accustomed to the word "Daddy." "He had once asked Rachel, 'Who's your daddy?' during sex, to which she had replied, 'Saul Goldstein,' thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn't really like to think about," Moore writes. But the book has barely gotten off this witticism before Charlie realizes he has become a widower.
As Moore acknowledges in an author's note, this part of the book is grounded in reality: The deaths of several loved ones helped to send him down this novel's puzzling, convoluted trail. But reality, grim or otherwise, is still not a big factor here. Once Charlie spots a tall, thin black man in a green suit near Rachel's bedside, the story takes its first tentatively supernatural turn.
The stranger is named Minty Fresh. Somehow, Charlie becomes the recipient of an all-about-the-afterlife instruction book that sounds like something for children ("The Great Big Book of Death"). And then he joins Minty as a death merchant, brokering macabre deals between souls and the earthly vessels the souls inhabit. The vessels can be anything, the odder the better.
If this isn't theology, neither is it really humor: The book's funniest sight gag has to do with a stripper who has no idea that her breast implants hold the essence of her everlasting spirit. Moore must find a way to kill her off, leave the implant idea lighthearted and somehow keep a larger plot in motion. Tall order: No wonder the book winds up filling the sewers of San Francisco with Charlie-baiting harpies and letting those harpies sometimes materialize as giant crows. If you are lost by this point, you needn't feel alone. Moore is temporarily lost, too.
But he is a writer whose irreverence generates immense reserves of good will, if only for the fearlessly nutty range of his imagination.
JANET MASLIN writes for the New York Times.
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