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Donny Punani.
It felt good to have an enemy.
When you had an enemy, someone who hated you as much as you hated them, you knew they were thinking about you. So you lived your life as if you could almost see each other by some kind of telepathic hate rapport, as if some curtain would occasionally pull back in their mind's eye and they'd see you when you were living extra large.
It's easy to write a bad novel. The only quality it requires is the patience to sit through several hours of typing. That and maybe taking yourself way too seriously. It's why literature is fulfilling in a way other art forms seldom are. It connects people. Spending several hours with a book makes you feel like you know the authors and when it clicks between you two, it's like forging (or rekindling) a meaningful friendship. I've had a great time with Cody Goodfellow's novel REPO SHARK, but I'm still not sure what to think of him afterwards, except that he must be quite intense at parties. I wouldn't say it's a novel that steps off the beaten path. It rather does a three hundred pages-long interpretative tribal dance solo on it.
REPO SHARK is the story of elite repo man Zef DeGroot, tasked with repossessing a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle taken to Hawaii by a karaoke-singing gangster named Donny Punani. The concept is simple: fly in, located the bike, repossess the bike and leave the island with it. Hawaii isn't such a friendly place to results-driven professionals like Zef, though. It's not easy to get what you want when everybody else wants you to relax and buy things. Far from his beloved hometown of Las Vegas, Zef has to face the greatest challenge of his career: repossess a bike not from one man, but from an entire shitty philosophical paradigm.
I'm slowly getting the hang of this bizarro fiction thing. It's a rebellion against the creative limitations of genre fiction, but not necessarily against the form. It's often humorous because it uses absurdity to put its themes in perspective and it in cases like REPO SHARK, it aims to highlight the absurdity of a certain genre. Cody Goodfellow could've told that story a hundred different ways that would've been more boring, but he chose not to really make it about the bike. REPO SHARK is about two forms of capitalism colliding: the self-made money making professional and the ethereal money sucking dream factory that are resort factories. It sounds a little theoretical like that, but in practice it's a refreshing way to deliver hardboiled fiction.
REPO SHARK is the story of elite repo man Zef DeGroot, tasked with repossessing a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle taken to Hawaii by a karaoke-singing gangster named Donny Punani. The concept is simple: fly in, located the bike, repossess the bike and leave the island with it. Hawaii isn't such a friendly place to results-driven professionals like Zef, though. It's not easy to get what you want when everybody else wants you to relax and buy things. Far from his beloved hometown of Las Vegas, Zef has to face the greatest challenge of his career: repossess a bike not from one man, but from an entire shitty philosophical paradigm.
I'm slowly getting the hang of this bizarro fiction thing. It's a rebellion against the creative limitations of genre fiction, but not necessarily against the form. It's often humorous because it uses absurdity to put its themes in perspective and it in cases like REPO SHARK, it aims to highlight the absurdity of a certain genre. Cody Goodfellow could've told that story a hundred different ways that would've been more boring, but he chose not to really make it about the bike. REPO SHARK is about two forms of capitalism colliding: the self-made money making professional and the ethereal money sucking dream factory that are resort factories. It sounds a little theoretical like that, but in practice it's a refreshing way to deliver hardboiled fiction.
Seen in this light, Honolulu was like Vegas with an even bigger desert and no fucking action. It had no recognizable spine like the Strip, but a jumble of towers and the shelves of greenery-infested hillside studded with gleaming estates like the displays of a jewelry store - it had the same feel of a fragile bubble in an alien and hostile environment. He saw the same look on many people's face, the same faces you saw everywhere in Vegas or LA when they got bit in the ass taking it for granted - pockets picked, luggage swiped, cameras, iPhones and iPods and wheelchairs, when they realized that this splendid, beautiful where so many lived was nobody's home.
So, if you're looking to read a crime novel about a Harley-Davidson motorcycle being repossessed, REPO SHARK is going to make you miserable. In fact, the cover art should tell you everything you need to know about this book before picking it up. I mean, just look at the fucking thing. If it doesn't scream "Fuck this retarded culture, I have a job to do,'' I don't know what does. Anyway, nothing about REPO SHARK is conventionally thought or executed. I kept picturing it as a cartoon, as I was reading along, which is once again unspeakably refreshing. Cody Goodfellow is not trying to compete with anybody with REPO SHARK. He is mocking a genre he obviously loves and needless to say, the man has a terrific - and slightly twisted - sense of humor.
Cody Goodfellow, if I understood correctly, has a rather large and loyal cult following. After reading REPO SHARK, it's not difficult to understand why. Not only the man handles absurdity like Raylan Given handles firearms, but he can go from serious to side-splitting funny in half a page. Goodfellow understands that satire is rooted in serious - and sometimes not so tangible - issues and that's why his writing (well, at least REPO SHARK) is both hilarious and profoundly satisfying. REPO SHARK operated within its own, idiosyncratic paradigm and it might turn some readers off because it's going to snake around whatever expectations you might have going it. But hey, who the fuck wants to write THE BIG SLEEP all over again, right?
Cody Goodfellow, if I understood correctly, has a rather large and loyal cult following. After reading REPO SHARK, it's not difficult to understand why. Not only the man handles absurdity like Raylan Given handles firearms, but he can go from serious to side-splitting funny in half a page. Goodfellow understands that satire is rooted in serious - and sometimes not so tangible - issues and that's why his writing (well, at least REPO SHARK) is both hilarious and profoundly satisfying. REPO SHARK operated within its own, idiosyncratic paradigm and it might turn some readers off because it's going to snake around whatever expectations you might have going it. But hey, who the fuck wants to write THE BIG SLEEP all over again, right?
