Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Magic Realism
Pages: 252
Order FIGHT SONG here
Yet, Bob has fallen into the most predictable trap that exists in middle-age: he's devolved into a function. He does the stuff he has to do. He buys the stuff he has to purchase. He goes places to keep peace, waddles down the path of least resistance. He's devoid of identity. He's a thing.
The greatest thing one will learn into adulthood is how much of a wrecking ball life can be and that nobody can help. Not everybody grows old gracefully, some are even gradually more disgusted as they look into the mirror. There is an industry based around middle age, including entertainment. FIGHT SONG would fall into this category, because it has something to say about the subject and that its preoccupations may elude younger readers. I was in perfect dispositions to read FIGHT SONG, as I am starting down the barrel of the gun of domestic life. The novel required patience and some mulling over, like most satire that means something beyond the obvious derision, but it's an uplifting experience that celebrates the chaotic nature of our existence.
Bob Coffen (sic) has a situation most would envy. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and children and works at a video game company. Yet, he's not happy living the happily ever after of most young men. His marriage is struggling, his children don't respect him and he's become a fat and lonely man people love to ridicule. Bob's life changes once his ferocious and borderline psychotic neighbor Schumann pushes him in a bush of oleanders with his SUV. Something breaks inside Bob, who chases Schumann down for confrontation. That will kick off the most bizarre seventy-two hours in his life, where he will meet a gang of happy misfits and will be forced reevaluate the way he lives.
FIGHT SONG is a novel that swims shark infested waters. There are a lot of assholes who write condescending fiction about men's middle age crisis, who simplify the issue as a temporary spoiled child tantrum, that will end whenever the protagonist realizes how lucky he is and goes back to his life. Truth is, it's a stage of life like many others where you go through major questioning and it deserves to be treated with respect. Some people (men and women both) commit suicide over regret of their life choices sometimes. Fortunately, despite being hilarious and revolving around satire, FIGHT SONG treats middle-age crisis with the utmost serious and respect.
A week ago Tuesday: Coffen has been minding his own tawdry business on the internet - wife and kids sleeping the night away. He was another half-drunken, lonely, sad, suburban father sitting in his study, inappropriately conducting fevered searches re:the shaving habits of certain coeds who were okay with strangers witnessing the upkeep of their neither regions. Coffen gawked and googled and swigged vodka on the rocks from a sweating tumbler and munched nacho cheese Doritos, and a rhythm developed between these motions - gawking, googling, slurping, munching.
The reason why FIGHT SONG is so respectful to the process is that it sticks to its story. Didactic, judgmental narration never kicks in. It's over-the-top through and through and therefore, Bob's experience is mirrored in a very sympathetic life. He went down the rabbit hole for a week-end. It's strange, alienating frightening and exhilarating all at once. Never really throughout the novel, there is significant moral progression with Bob and I liked it. Not once, Mohr puts Bob's existential queries as simplistic whim. They're just showing him the way to a strange and beautiful adventure. I had my issues with the said adventure lasting a week-end, the exact formatted size of domestic life freedom, because Bob didn't risk all that much, but it's a stylistic choice that was consequent with the universe he created. I have my opinions on how the concept could have been better used, but it's vapid nit-picking once the novel is out.
Not everybody will see what I see in FIGHT SONG. Joshua Mohr has a particular type of in-your-face satire that commands you attention and steers you towards slapstick ridicule without any hidden agenda. It's not a natural instinct to give a longer thought process to a fundamentally humorous novel. You tend to laugh and put it aside (unless it's Tucker Max, then you read it again and laugh some more). But there is more than first degree humor to FIGHT SONG. There is immediacy and a certain dose of melancholia that ties emotional bind between writer and readers. In that regard, FIGHT SONG does was very little books do. It finds an emotional connection to readers, just not all readers. It works a targeted demographic. FIGHT SONG will be available for sale on February 12 and author Joshua Mohr will drop by Dead End Follies for a chat a week after that. It's a unique novel, that fell in the cracks somewhere between the feel-good novel and the cautionary tale and became something of its own.
FOUR STARS