Benjamin Norman Pierce

This novel is a very rare treat indeed. It would be easy enough to square it up, and perhaps file it away with magical realism--and it certainly succeeds, in terms of both material and effect in that regard. Yet there is more here, a uniquely American grit, and a specifically Southern eye for a fine yarn, and not just a fine yarn but the kind of regionalist writing that brings you in to the place and among the people there--and even then, there is more than that. For Sherrill is a fine prose poet, and every page twists and turns with the language with that special permission of invention, that special permission to make an exact literary bulls-eye HERE and NOW about THIS--but nearly all poems stop after they have gotten there--the poems in this novel overlap, stop and return pages later, and they all participate in weaving a whole narrative cloth that, when seen whole, proves to the body of a remarkable tapestry--colorful, in many places grotesque, filled with the pastels and grays that show the basic anguish of being alive, individual, different--and with a conclusion that is well worth what has already been a miraculous journey full of sights, conversations, backroads that all are a main vein in the end.
The main character, the Minotaur, is perhaps the most naturally sympathetic monster in literature, exceeding John Gardnerr's Grendel in having the same wants, and barriers to those wants, the deeper needs behind any mere biological drive, that may well be the essential commonality of all sentience, at least while we are encased in meat. Inarticulate bursting with things to be said, even if the Minotaur rarely knows just what those would be if he could speak a complete sentence--numbed and isolated, but with yearning and an awareness of his lost connection despite, behind, and beyond his numbness and isolation. The crisis in this novel, and it's resolution are real, real in a way that the contrived challenges and catharsis of our large movies can mimic but never convey. Sherrill, that master prose-poet, is able to speak for this deep but muffled beast and all of it not only rings true--it hits where we live because it plainly came from where the author lives.
Sherrill has a quietly masterful metaphor to convey this: the Minotaur is now a short order cook specializing in--steak. He never over-draws on this, never loses sight of it, never misses a twist or turn upon it, and knows when it has played it's role.
Nor is it all grim gray and brown--here is a world with color, wacky incidents, and a number of characters that have not only tones or "messages" of their own--but LIVES of their own, connections and schisms of their own, all providing a backdrop--and too often, a source of muffled observation and baffled insight by the Minotaur.
Amidst all of this, Sherrill makes you laugh--you never know when--and often when he has just hit you in the gut with what has just happened to, or failed for, the Minotaur.
Atop all of that, by way of a delicious gravy--if you have worked in kitchens, if you live in that subculture--far beyond the celebrity muggings of Bourdain, here is a novel that finally shows our world--that makes you say--this is by one of US.The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette BreakThe Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

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