Country: USA
Genre: Noir
Pages: 199
I learned that predators don't intentionally choose the weak or old or sick. They kill what they can, which means the slow members of the pack. Thus, they strengthen the very gene pool they're feeding from. The treshold for what is weak, old or sick gets raised, and the strength, speed and instinct of new generations or hunter grow. A beautiful, self-perpetuating system where evolution is the antithesis or entropy.
There is no such thing as a perfect novel. Odd thing though, you will find the word "perfect" a lot in book reviews. Whether it's "pitch-perfect dialogue" or a euphemism like "masterful and controlled", whenever a book reviewer loves a book a lot, (s)he doesn't hesitate to invoke perfection. But hit Amazon's review section and you'll find dozens of people that don't share your enthusiasm for a book. The arguments tend to be crap over there, but once every blue moon, somebody makes a good, negative point about a book you love. There are no perfect novels, but there are perfect matches. David Foster Wallace said that reading is a dialogue in between two consciousnesses and I agree with that. Like in real life, there are authors you get along with better then others. On the page, Craig Clevenger and me are great pals. THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK managed to entertain me, feed my love for literature as a reader and a writer alike and also drag me into uncharted territory. It is truly a great novel.
It's a noir that plays outside the rule book. It's about crime, but there are actually no crimes committed within the timeline of the novel. It happens in an hospital, where John Dolan Vincent is trying to buy his ticket out by playing the risk evaluation. He overdosed on painkillers and he's required to undergo psychological evaluation for suicide risk. But the evaluator doesn't know John. He thinks the person in front of him is named Daniel Fletcher. John Dolan Vincent is a forger, one of the best in the business and the path that brought him to the evaluation room is a crooked downward spiral that began the day he started to play with his identity. There's a reason why he's there and he rather confide in us, his reader (in the form of a first person narration) rather than in Dr. Richard Carlisle, who had for a job to evaluate if John/Daniel needs to be protected from himself.
There's an easy comparison to make, here. Reading THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK will remind you of Chuck Palahniuk. But dig a little deeper and you'll find echoes of Jim Thompson, elements of Gothic fiction and metafiction. The appeal of Clevenger's writing is to how he conciliates these elements and ties them up together without ever sacrificing his story for literary playfulness or some other purpose that has nothing to do with what's on the page. The narrative of THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK is thoroughly noir. It's the recollection of various escapes of an all-star forger, as the reader gradually comes to understand that he ran away from everything in his life. It's the way Clevenger says it, the way he traps John's life in between two evaluation segments that make it so challenging and fun. Reading the novel, I had the strange impression that John Dolan Vincent wrote it as much as Craig Clevenger did.
Maybe you're a woman and God was good to you, and people - men - pay serious cash to look at you. Sometimes you know it, sometimes you don't. Maybe you smiled at one of them while serving cocktails or waiting for an elevator and now he knows where you live, where you work, your phone number, and your cat went missing a week ago, and the police tell you that the note saying "I want to take you with me to the afterlife" doesn't explicitly threaten you and, anyway, you don't have any proof that he wrote it.
So you have to make what you need, whatever papers or documents to say who you want to be. Just don't expect them to stand up to scrutiny unless you're good.
I'm good.
I didn't have the proverbial "oh-my-god, this-is-my-life" moment while reading THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK, but the character of John Dolan Vincent is so well-drawn, I rather had this weird emotional experience where I wanted to be a part of that plot. I kept making alternate developments in my mind before reading them on the page. It's a powerful reaction that used to happen to me a lot when I was a kid. It was surprising and refreshing to experience that again. Such a seducing character, struggling with a thin grasp on reality in a disembodied environment was a winning combination for me. While you can rack it up as a "individuals failed by the system" novel (which there are quite a lot), here the system is the danger to the character and yet John isn't exactly the Robin Hood type. It's a very emotional review, I know but THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK is a novel that raised emotions and a primal form of suspension of disbelief I thought were long buried.
FIVE STARS
Noir Classic