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Tollbooth
Jimmy Saare collects tolls on the New Jersey Parkway. He's had a mental snap has set him away from his pregnant wife, Sarah, and uncontrollably towards the 19 year-old Gena who leans seductively against the Officetown copy machine. As Jimmy pursues his desire for Gena, he is unexpectedly entangled with the strange manipulations of an anarchistic teenager, Kid with Clownhead, who wants to start his own destructive cult when he grows up."A gloriously deranged, endless original adventure through ordinary bat country" - Drunk Monkeys“A tantalizing joyride of contemporary American dysfunction …”- Zygote in My Coffee"Because of his strange, unconventional (yet truthful) characters, Bud Smith's odd landscape of stories are, more often than not, the most disarming of any around." - Up the Staircase“At the intersection of the mundane and the surreal you’ll find Bud Smith. Poetic, profane and bizarre, Smith’s characters and the world he creates simultaneously attracts and repulses; just when you think you’ve got the characters pegged they do something wonderful like shitting in a box or disgusting like falling in love. Outrageous and frighteningly real, Bud Smith’s writing is always beautifully written and wildly entertaining.” – Martha Grover, Author of One More for the People.“There are two types of tollbooth operators and people who think there are people who aren’t tollbooth operators. Bud Smith’s Tollbooth is about you, whether you like it or not. You most likely do not work in a tollbooth but chances are you do know what it’s like to work a mind-numbing job. Chances are you also know what it’s like to make life-changing mistakes. And I hope to goodness and back that you also know what it’s like to take a risk that will possibly change everything for the better. Tollbooth has all of these things, but you probably know that already because you’re in it.” Aaron Dietz, author of SuperTollbooth, the debut novel from Bud Smith, author of the short story collection Or Something Like That, is laugh out loud literary fiction, and continues Bud Smith's deeper examinations of what happens "when regular people's lives explodes into the beautifully absurd". Follow Jimmy Saare through car fires, ghostly visitations, the reckless pursuit of his fleeting fantasies, into the tug of a looming destructive cult, as "normal" gets derailed through his search for his own place in the wilds beyond common New Jersey. A simple cage isn't for everybody.
313 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 7, 2013
6 people are currently reading
338 people want to read
About the author
Bud Smith
17 books480 followersBud Smith is the author of Teenager (Tyrant Book), Double Bird (Maudlin House), WORK (CCM), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press), among others. He works heavy construction, and lives in Jersey City, NJ.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
December 18, 2015
“Bud Smith takes us on a gritty, hilarious ride with human insanity: ‘Can I have a receipt?’ blasts back from every car. Smith explores the dark forces that collide and coexist in all of us. The mundane is eerily depicted in the hell of a job that keeps base emotions at the surface and yet Tollbooth submerges us in the strangeness and humor that keep us getting out of bed each day. Don’t miss this one! It’s as disturbing as it is entertaining.” –Meg Tuite, author of Bound By Blue
March 7, 2014
Bud Smith’s 2013 release Tollbooth is one of the most entertaining, refreshing and compelling novels I’ve read in a long time. The protagonist, Jimmy Saare is a toll collector on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. It opens with Jimmy saving the lives of a mother and daughter by pulling them to safety from the flaming wreckage of their vehicle after a horrific accident. It’s Jimmy’s second day on the job. Although this is a real event in the life of Jimmy Saare, toll collector, it’s also an important piece of metaphorical foreshadowing.
The story takes off from there like a bull exploding out of the chute at a rodeo, twisting, turning, bucking wildly and it doesn’t stop until it’s over. Tollbooth takes the reader on a wild ride through the interior psychological landscape of Jimmy, his hallucinatory break with reality, a marriage in the midst of crashing and burning, an impossible obsession with a nineteen year old sales clerk and his involvement with a bizarre cult and the exterior physical landscape of the Garden State Parkway, coastal New Jersey, strip malls, Iceland, and a commercial fishing trawler all the way to the gates of Hell and back again on an unexpected path to redemption.
I think Tollbooth is a wonderful book. The voice and writing set the stage for an effortless and compelling read. It’s also totally original and just plain brilliant. There’s humor, mystery, eroticism, the good, bad and ugly of human nature, mysticism, magic realism, characters I care about and “diamonds in the rough” passages of absolutely gorgeous, lyrical, poetic prose.
Although the book is an acrobatic mash-up of different genres including realism, magic realism, absurdist black humor and surrealism, none of those labels really do justice in accurately describing Tollbooth. For all of the twists and turns and forays into other worldly realities, it’s also a classic love story and solid, old school storytelling. But don’t just take my word for it. You really should see for yourself.
The story takes off from there like a bull exploding out of the chute at a rodeo, twisting, turning, bucking wildly and it doesn’t stop until it’s over. Tollbooth takes the reader on a wild ride through the interior psychological landscape of Jimmy, his hallucinatory break with reality, a marriage in the midst of crashing and burning, an impossible obsession with a nineteen year old sales clerk and his involvement with a bizarre cult and the exterior physical landscape of the Garden State Parkway, coastal New Jersey, strip malls, Iceland, and a commercial fishing trawler all the way to the gates of Hell and back again on an unexpected path to redemption.
I think Tollbooth is a wonderful book. The voice and writing set the stage for an effortless and compelling read. It’s also totally original and just plain brilliant. There’s humor, mystery, eroticism, the good, bad and ugly of human nature, mysticism, magic realism, characters I care about and “diamonds in the rough” passages of absolutely gorgeous, lyrical, poetic prose.
Although the book is an acrobatic mash-up of different genres including realism, magic realism, absurdist black humor and surrealism, none of those labels really do justice in accurately describing Tollbooth. For all of the twists and turns and forays into other worldly realities, it’s also a classic love story and solid, old school storytelling. But don’t just take my word for it. You really should see for yourself.
December 5, 2022
When you live in the Garden State, you pay tolls. In Bud Smith's TOLLBOOTH, we follow the saddest sack possible, the toll collector on The Garden State Parkway. The result is a character study of a broken man trapped in the tollbooth of his life.
Smith's writing is lean and mean. Every word packs a punch. Every sentence is laced with emotional baggage for the reader to bear. A character that could easily be dispised in the hands of a less crafty writer is somehow empathetic through Bud Smith's eyes.
I enjoyed the chapter numbering, a countdown of exit numbers on The Garden State Parkway with a side trip to Iceland. Speaking of which, that side jaunt was jarring. It felt like a different book. Unnecessary. But, we get back to the US and find out way back to Jersey by the end.
This is my second Bud Smith book. It's safe to say I'm a fan. He writes meaningfully and minimalist. He writes human stories that are a tad inhuman to live. It's all real. Bud Smith is blue collar lit.
Smith's writing is lean and mean. Every word packs a punch. Every sentence is laced with emotional baggage for the reader to bear. A character that could easily be dispised in the hands of a less crafty writer is somehow empathetic through Bud Smith's eyes.
I enjoyed the chapter numbering, a countdown of exit numbers on The Garden State Parkway with a side trip to Iceland. Speaking of which, that side jaunt was jarring. It felt like a different book. Unnecessary. But, we get back to the US and find out way back to Jersey by the end.
This is my second Bud Smith book. It's safe to say I'm a fan. He writes meaningfully and minimalist. He writes human stories that are a tad inhuman to live. It's all real. Bud Smith is blue collar lit.
September 20, 2013
Just like the crazy people speeding through the tollbooth, I sped through this book! Here's my blurb/review:
"At the intersection of the mundane and the surreal you’ll find Bud Smith. Poetic, profane and bizarre, Smith’s characters and the world he creates simultaneously attracts and repulses; just when you think you’ve got the characters pegged they do something wonderful like shitting in a box or disgusting like falling in love. Outrageous and frighteningly real, Bud Smith’s writing is always beautifully written and wildly entertaining."
"At the intersection of the mundane and the surreal you’ll find Bud Smith. Poetic, profane and bizarre, Smith’s characters and the world he creates simultaneously attracts and repulses; just when you think you’ve got the characters pegged they do something wonderful like shitting in a box or disgusting like falling in love. Outrageous and frighteningly real, Bud Smith’s writing is always beautifully written and wildly entertaining."
August 13, 2013
Bud Smith is my favorite writer, hands down. He does not disappoint with Tollbooth. His unique characters and odd, surprising stories are all on full display here. Bud Smith brings us into a world that could only be found in a small box in the middle of a Jersey highway. Highly recommended!
September 17, 2013
There are a lot of book reviews that include phrases like “Hang on for a wild ride,” or “Everything in this book was unexpected” or something equally fantastic. I can’t say anything like that or you might be tempted to group TOLLBOOTH in with the other books about which those platitudes have been uttered. I mustn’t tell you that everything in this book was unexpected or outrageous or utterly, gloriously insane. I found myself thinking that the best comparison that I could possibly make is that TOLLBOOTH is what might have happened if Hunter S Thompson had written Fight Club and left out all the structured anarchy and commercialization and helpful plot points that give Fight Club a popular appeal for consumption by those so bored with their own lives that they’re left desperate for insanity. But that’s a terrible comparison to include in a review because TOLLBOOTH can’t really be compared to anything. It’s on it’s own plane.
Perhaps I can give you a more accurate comparison by telling you that I was simultaneously delighted and disgusted throughout most of the book. It was utterly fascinating, like watching an emergency tracheotomy that’s so grotesque you can’t look away, or maybe someone jumping from a burning building, only to leave a black puddle on the sidewalk below. But it’s an alluring tracheotomy/ leap of desperation; Perhaps one served with decadent chocolate cake.
Everything keeps moving, and the only time I set down the book was so I could scream “WHAT?!?” at the cover, or occasionally to give a hasty summery of the plot to my roommate, who I can only assume probably feared that I was interspersing my reading with an acid trip. Jimmy’s descent into insanity, chaperoned by his wife’s dead mother Dolly and the voyeuristic anarchist Kid with the Clown Head, drives the plot of this particular novel. However, I suspect that if fictional characters are allowed to exist independent of a novel but in the same plane of existence in which the story takes place, then Jimmy always has been and always will be insane, outside of the confines of the black-and-yellow cover of TOLLBOOTH. The story is his sick fantasy, though I’m not sure whether it’s the plot that’s indulgent or the narrator imposing his fantasies on the reader, and I quite like it that way. I have no idea what’s meant to be real and what isn’t, only that Jimmy is very miserable and very in love. He’s devoted to and despises his wife, and seems to have a similar relationship with his own life, his tollbooth, his sanity, his madness, this crazy fucked-up world.
This, I think, is one of the more impressive qualities of TOLLBOOTH. It’s a story laced with passion, whether that passion presents itself as exuberant joy or extreme derision or the tastelessly mundane three-and-a-half-foot space we occupy in life. A story of passion is far greater, far more relevant, far scarier than a love story, and that’s what I loved about TOLLBOOTH.
Perhaps I can give you a more accurate comparison by telling you that I was simultaneously delighted and disgusted throughout most of the book. It was utterly fascinating, like watching an emergency tracheotomy that’s so grotesque you can’t look away, or maybe someone jumping from a burning building, only to leave a black puddle on the sidewalk below. But it’s an alluring tracheotomy/ leap of desperation; Perhaps one served with decadent chocolate cake.
Everything keeps moving, and the only time I set down the book was so I could scream “WHAT?!?” at the cover, or occasionally to give a hasty summery of the plot to my roommate, who I can only assume probably feared that I was interspersing my reading with an acid trip. Jimmy’s descent into insanity, chaperoned by his wife’s dead mother Dolly and the voyeuristic anarchist Kid with the Clown Head, drives the plot of this particular novel. However, I suspect that if fictional characters are allowed to exist independent of a novel but in the same plane of existence in which the story takes place, then Jimmy always has been and always will be insane, outside of the confines of the black-and-yellow cover of TOLLBOOTH. The story is his sick fantasy, though I’m not sure whether it’s the plot that’s indulgent or the narrator imposing his fantasies on the reader, and I quite like it that way. I have no idea what’s meant to be real and what isn’t, only that Jimmy is very miserable and very in love. He’s devoted to and despises his wife, and seems to have a similar relationship with his own life, his tollbooth, his sanity, his madness, this crazy fucked-up world.
This, I think, is one of the more impressive qualities of TOLLBOOTH. It’s a story laced with passion, whether that passion presents itself as exuberant joy or extreme derision or the tastelessly mundane three-and-a-half-foot space we occupy in life. A story of passion is far greater, far more relevant, far scarier than a love story, and that’s what I loved about TOLLBOOTH.
August 13, 2013
There are two types of people: tollbooth operators and people who think there are people who aren't tollbooth operators. Bud Smith's Tollbooth is about you, whether you like it or not. You most likely do not work in a tollbooth but chances are you do know what it's like to work a mind-numbing job. Chances are you also know what it's like to make life-changing mistakes. And I hope to goodness and back that you also know what it's like to take a risk that will possibly change everything for the better. Tollbooth has all of these things, but you probably know that already because you're in it.
October 8, 2013
Bud Smith’s new novel Tollbooth is funny, relatable, and entirely original — really, it is — following a long-suffering tollbooth jockey in New Jersey as he daydreams through his job, laments his unhappy marriage, falls in love with a young, local cashier, and becomes obsessed with befriending a clown-paint wearing anarchist teenager, all of which leads Jimmy “Tollbooth” Saare deeper into the insane rabbit hole that might either be the average workaday world we all inhabit or a complete mental breakdown of his own creation – or both.
One of the great aspects of Bud’s novel is his ability to take a normal situation, be it working in a tollbooth, making copies at an office supply shop, or getting Chinese food with your wife, and weave a surreal narrative into the mix without losing the plot. At no point in the novel does anything feel too 9-to-5 bland or too absurd to not possibly happen to the right unlucky schmuck in real life. There were many moments where I thought, “Alright, this is getting weird, and it’s going to go way off the tracks now,” but he always loops in another true epiphany, another understanding about what it feels like to be unsatisfied in modern America. It’s a careful balance that Bud manages very well.
I also had the worry in quite a few spots that events were getting to the point of being unresolvable, as Jimmy Tollbooth’s descent becomes shockingly chaotic at times, even to the point where he finds himself committing grand larceny, arson, and assault, but again, Bud steadies the ship, keeps the plot moving, keeps Jimmy on his feet. And some of the funnier moments in the book are when chaotic events are inflicted upon him without his involvement at all, potentially ruining his life, career, relationships, and he shrugs it off, even encourages these events, and runs headlong into the horrors of adulthood waiting for all of us with reckless abandon.
This isn’t a book to analyze so deeply that you’ll have to think, “Would this really happen?” It’s a book to laugh with, to fear with, and to use as a mirror to help you look at your own life and wonder, “Shit, is this all there is?”
Like all great characters of darkly-humorous fiction, be it Heller’s Yossarian, Bukowski’s Chinaski, or Palahniuk’s unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, Bud Smith’s Jimmy Saare makes choices you’ll root for and choices that will make you groan, and that’s the sign of a truly independent character, someone who is growing on their own and challenging the reader to stick with him, to see where this is going. And the journey does not disappoint. Not every string is tied together by the end as neatly as you’d hope, or at all, and that’s okay. That’s LIFE. I was impressed by the way Bud handled tricky key scenes toward the end with realistic awkwardness and dialogue, issues unmentioned, issues thrust into one another’s face, and a sense of moving ahead that is neither Hollywood simple nor lacking in emotional resolve.
One of the great aspects of Bud’s novel is his ability to take a normal situation, be it working in a tollbooth, making copies at an office supply shop, or getting Chinese food with your wife, and weave a surreal narrative into the mix without losing the plot. At no point in the novel does anything feel too 9-to-5 bland or too absurd to not possibly happen to the right unlucky schmuck in real life. There were many moments where I thought, “Alright, this is getting weird, and it’s going to go way off the tracks now,” but he always loops in another true epiphany, another understanding about what it feels like to be unsatisfied in modern America. It’s a careful balance that Bud manages very well.
I also had the worry in quite a few spots that events were getting to the point of being unresolvable, as Jimmy Tollbooth’s descent becomes shockingly chaotic at times, even to the point where he finds himself committing grand larceny, arson, and assault, but again, Bud steadies the ship, keeps the plot moving, keeps Jimmy on his feet. And some of the funnier moments in the book are when chaotic events are inflicted upon him without his involvement at all, potentially ruining his life, career, relationships, and he shrugs it off, even encourages these events, and runs headlong into the horrors of adulthood waiting for all of us with reckless abandon.
This isn’t a book to analyze so deeply that you’ll have to think, “Would this really happen?” It’s a book to laugh with, to fear with, and to use as a mirror to help you look at your own life and wonder, “Shit, is this all there is?”
Like all great characters of darkly-humorous fiction, be it Heller’s Yossarian, Bukowski’s Chinaski, or Palahniuk’s unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, Bud Smith’s Jimmy Saare makes choices you’ll root for and choices that will make you groan, and that’s the sign of a truly independent character, someone who is growing on their own and challenging the reader to stick with him, to see where this is going. And the journey does not disappoint. Not every string is tied together by the end as neatly as you’d hope, or at all, and that’s okay. That’s LIFE. I was impressed by the way Bud handled tricky key scenes toward the end with realistic awkwardness and dialogue, issues unmentioned, issues thrust into one another’s face, and a sense of moving ahead that is neither Hollywood simple nor lacking in emotional resolve.
August 13, 2013
the plot here is simple: a man with a pregnant wife finds himself filled with inertia. the inertia is broken by an erotic interest in a very young girl and a new hero who acts upon his anarchist impulses. the simplicity of the plot allows the moral subjectivity of the content to blossom fully in the head of our protagonist: he knows what he's doing is reprehensible, but it is always a question of inertia vs. movement; is it worth ones soul to keep moving, always forward, even if forward is backward, sideways, up or down. the tollbooth is his prison cell while the world speeds by, the same way that his wife is his prison cell as the world speeds by, the same way that he is his own prison cell as the world speeds by. this novel is about a prison break, a character study about the people in prison and the people helping those inprison to break out of prison, but its also about wondering whether or not breaking out of prison is just.
i hesitate to call bud smith a moralist, even though this book largely about morality because goddamnit it's also funny, and obsessive and blessed with an energy that could fuel ten novels. so we'll say he's a moralist, but also a comedian and regionalist. and a race car driver and a pro wrestler and a werewolf, always a werewolf.
i hesitate to call bud smith a moralist, even though this book largely about morality because goddamnit it's also funny, and obsessive and blessed with an energy that could fuel ten novels. so we'll say he's a moralist, but also a comedian and regionalist. and a race car driver and a pro wrestler and a werewolf, always a werewolf.
September 21, 2013
Bud Smith has written a story so compelling you will greedily devour it in one sitting and still think about the characters weeks later. His gift of writing very complex humanity into the weird, the marginalized and the downright unlikable is one of many reasons why his style will tell you just as much about yourself and the characters in your own life as the protagonists. The pacing is turnpike fast to hold even the most distracted reader and keep them riveted, with so many plot twists you could never see coming until it all falls beautifully together as deftly placed puzzle pieces.
Get your copy signed if possible, our Novel Writing class thinks he'll be very famous someday.
Megan Corry
Harvard University
Get your copy signed if possible, our Novel Writing class thinks he'll be very famous someday.
Megan Corry
Harvard University
September 15, 2014
Basically, shit happens and keeps happening. The plot takes maniacal risks and dangerous detours; characters are smashed and scattered, like a Hal Hartley movie (Henry Fool comes to mind). Yet, through it all, Sara and Jimmy, two highly damaged people, are left with a chance at something—not a typical lovey-dovey something, either—something a bit off. Something true...
Read more of this review at Sundog Lit:
http://sundoglitblog.wordpress.com/20...
Read more of this review at Sundog Lit:
http://sundoglitblog.wordpress.com/20...
September 1, 2015
Powerfully alive...Smith is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties...He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life as a tollbooth operator, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a marriage, and happens, in different forms, to everyone....There is something ceaselessly compelling about Smith's book.
October 29, 2013
Where to begin? How about on page one -- with an explosive, fiery car crash? AND IT GETS BETTER AFTER THAT. Bud Smith comes out swinging and never stops in this wholly original, darkly funny, and deeply poignant book. Aspiring authors, take note: if you want to learn how to write a novel, study Bud Smith. End of review.
March 20, 2019
"Fuck the past and all of the chains it wrapped around my heart and the webs the spiders spun around me while I was idle. Fuck what the werewolf moon did to my brain as I laid in wait for it to rise again so that I could head oblong towards oblivion. Fuck all the yawns of suburbia, the myths, the legends—the folklore of eternal life. Instead, war cry into the wind, we're all gonna die. There's no excuse for not kicking up the icing on birthday cakes while dark angels traced my life in doomed flight. Fuck the future, it meant nothing. I say bomb blasts to anybody who denies me. I say: I'm ripped apart down my spinal column anyway, I'm a thousand shards of ribs, I'm wayward planets thrown out of orbit—lost of magic. I'm on my way down.
Timing it just right, I released the videotape from my fingertips. It exploded against the side of the tollbooth: streams of film marked a black passage behind me, shards of plastic landed in the basket, loops of magnetic tape and sticker decal rapped against the toll window. I screamed in the face of some poor substitute girl. She lost her breath, falling over in tears.
I was four miles up the highway by the time she closed the booth, walked into the building, told Larry she needed to go home. She couldn't explain what it was she'd seen; it was too horrible."
Timing it just right, I released the videotape from my fingertips. It exploded against the side of the tollbooth: streams of film marked a black passage behind me, shards of plastic landed in the basket, loops of magnetic tape and sticker decal rapped against the toll window. I screamed in the face of some poor substitute girl. She lost her breath, falling over in tears.
I was four miles up the highway by the time she closed the booth, walked into the building, told Larry she needed to go home. She couldn't explain what it was she'd seen; it was too horrible."
March 18, 2019
I don't understand all the 5 star reviews. The story was weak as was the writing. I finished it yesterday and some things that stood out: He said things like "I walked passed the car". It's past, not passed. And he often used past and present tense in the same sentence. Something like, "I opened the door and grab the shovel." I can't get past those errors. Was it artistic license? Doubtful. People compare him to Scott McClanahan, but I don't see it.
January 2, 2021
Beautiful and strange.
January 14, 2022
Really enjoyed this one.
December 16, 2013
Jimmy Saare sits in his New Jersey tollbooth day after day, telling the furious, impatient world the obvious: that the toll is 35 cents. He’s comfortably cocooned in this space—3.5 x 3.5 feet. It’s a cell that imprisons but also protects him from the real world. Jimmy doesn’t like the real world.
Bud Smith’s Tollbooth is a solid, astonishing marriage of hyper- and magic realism, a chaotic ride with a lovable loser in the driver’s seat. Jimmy Tollbooth, as he’s later renamed, is miserable. He’s trapped by his pornographic obsession with women. He’s trapped by his “dangerous nostalgia” for his own youth. He’s trapped in a “spiderweb of a tollbooth”. He’s trapped—but I guess you’ve got that by now—most of all by marriage and impending fatherhood.
“Being married is like getting in a car crash—you can’t control what happens.” True, Jimmy is hardly in control of his marriage, but Jimmy’s marriage is just another adult rite of passage that Jimmy can’t cope with (fatherhood is actually the problem). Marriage is sane and ordered; insanity is freedom. The car crash is a fitting simile for all this. Cars and car accidents play a central role in this vivid, often explosive narrative. But there’s another level to this leitmotif: All the crashes in the story turn out to do some good in these characters’ lives, and I think this is also a central theme in Tollbooth: of “replenishment and destruction,” that “it’s always good when things get torn down.”
And things do get torn down in Tollbooth—burned down mostly, yet things are also sunk, shot down, defaced and crushed. But I’ll stop calling these things things and call them what they really are here: the past. Jimmy is so determined to hold on to his youth that he stalks a nineteen-year-old with an American Beauty-esque, one-tick-away-from-serial-killer passion and builds a shrine to her in the woods, plastering the walls with a Frankenstein’s monster type of collage of her head on the bodies of naked women. Jimmy calls this place his hideout, the type of clubhouse he used to build when he was a child. The moral to this story isn’t hard to find.
Growing up, at least for Jimmy Tollbooth, is a trap that he can’t stop brooding over. Smith effortlessly enters the under-challenged, over-sexed psyche of Jimmy, filling his mindless monotony—his “hard-ons and do-nothingness”—with a brilliant, beautifully constructed dialogue between the balding, aging Jimmy and the fantasies of his youth.
One of the best strokes in this narrative is when Smith brings this inner dialogue into the exterior by giving Jimmy’s child a voice. Speaking to Kid with Clownhead, the teenager who’s blackmailing him into understanding his life better (tearing it down so that it can be rebuilt), Jimmy explains his struggle:
“When you grow up, you’ll see how hard it is to grow up. You’ll see how un-fun it is to settle.”
“Sob, sob, sob.” [Kid with Clownhead] shrugged.
Kid with Clownhead is an infuriating character. It’s the kid who knows how, and has the technology, to manipulate adults. He’s the prodigy who can hack any system, deliver the goods. He has minions. He’s the sort of Godfather kind of kid who has a talent for pulling strings, convinced that he’s doing it for the good of his prey. And in the end—once he destroys quite a lot—does some good in Jimmy’s life.
Kids are everywhere in this novel, pulling at Jimmy, throwing rocks at Jimmy, taunting him, driving him out, controlling him. Jimmy hates kids, but he can’t seem to get out of their woods. He doesn’t want to be a father, but he can’t keep this from happening either. It’s no wonder he runs off to Iceland. Yes, Iceland.
So many surprising turns in this story keep the narrative barrelling forward, careening maybe in places, but this is Jimmy’s idea of freedom, his method of seeking truth, and his only defense against adulthood. I don’t usually say this, but I highly recommend this one.
____________________________________
Christopher Allen is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). He has work in, or forthcoming in, Indiana Review, SmokeLong Quarterly’s Best of the First Ten Years anthology, Prime Number Magazine and many others. He’s the managing editor of Metazen.
© 2013, originally published at Metazen.
Bud Smith’s Tollbooth is a solid, astonishing marriage of hyper- and magic realism, a chaotic ride with a lovable loser in the driver’s seat. Jimmy Tollbooth, as he’s later renamed, is miserable. He’s trapped by his pornographic obsession with women. He’s trapped by his “dangerous nostalgia” for his own youth. He’s trapped in a “spiderweb of a tollbooth”. He’s trapped—but I guess you’ve got that by now—most of all by marriage and impending fatherhood.
“Being married is like getting in a car crash—you can’t control what happens.” True, Jimmy is hardly in control of his marriage, but Jimmy’s marriage is just another adult rite of passage that Jimmy can’t cope with (fatherhood is actually the problem). Marriage is sane and ordered; insanity is freedom. The car crash is a fitting simile for all this. Cars and car accidents play a central role in this vivid, often explosive narrative. But there’s another level to this leitmotif: All the crashes in the story turn out to do some good in these characters’ lives, and I think this is also a central theme in Tollbooth: of “replenishment and destruction,” that “it’s always good when things get torn down.”
And things do get torn down in Tollbooth—burned down mostly, yet things are also sunk, shot down, defaced and crushed. But I’ll stop calling these things things and call them what they really are here: the past. Jimmy is so determined to hold on to his youth that he stalks a nineteen-year-old with an American Beauty-esque, one-tick-away-from-serial-killer passion and builds a shrine to her in the woods, plastering the walls with a Frankenstein’s monster type of collage of her head on the bodies of naked women. Jimmy calls this place his hideout, the type of clubhouse he used to build when he was a child. The moral to this story isn’t hard to find.
Growing up, at least for Jimmy Tollbooth, is a trap that he can’t stop brooding over. Smith effortlessly enters the under-challenged, over-sexed psyche of Jimmy, filling his mindless monotony—his “hard-ons and do-nothingness”—with a brilliant, beautifully constructed dialogue between the balding, aging Jimmy and the fantasies of his youth.
One of the best strokes in this narrative is when Smith brings this inner dialogue into the exterior by giving Jimmy’s child a voice. Speaking to Kid with Clownhead, the teenager who’s blackmailing him into understanding his life better (tearing it down so that it can be rebuilt), Jimmy explains his struggle:
“When you grow up, you’ll see how hard it is to grow up. You’ll see how un-fun it is to settle.”
“Sob, sob, sob.” [Kid with Clownhead] shrugged.
Kid with Clownhead is an infuriating character. It’s the kid who knows how, and has the technology, to manipulate adults. He’s the prodigy who can hack any system, deliver the goods. He has minions. He’s the sort of Godfather kind of kid who has a talent for pulling strings, convinced that he’s doing it for the good of his prey. And in the end—once he destroys quite a lot—does some good in Jimmy’s life.
Kids are everywhere in this novel, pulling at Jimmy, throwing rocks at Jimmy, taunting him, driving him out, controlling him. Jimmy hates kids, but he can’t seem to get out of their woods. He doesn’t want to be a father, but he can’t keep this from happening either. It’s no wonder he runs off to Iceland. Yes, Iceland.
So many surprising turns in this story keep the narrative barrelling forward, careening maybe in places, but this is Jimmy’s idea of freedom, his method of seeking truth, and his only defense against adulthood. I don’t usually say this, but I highly recommend this one.
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Christopher Allen is the author of Conversations with S. Teri O’Type (a Satire). He has work in, or forthcoming in, Indiana Review, SmokeLong Quarterly’s Best of the First Ten Years anthology, Prime Number Magazine and many others. He’s the managing editor of Metazen.
© 2013, originally published at Metazen.
August 20, 2013
There's a fine line between genius and perversion, and Bud Smith knows how to bury bodies on both sides of the border to exploit a reader's natural state of curiosity. Tollbooth is an unapologetic, unflinching, and sardonic look at human relationships in and with a world which drives its inhabitants to mid-life crises by brainwashing them into wanting all the wrong things. If you've read his book of short stories, "Or Something Like That," you're familiar with Smith's talent for misdirection; readers are never quite sure where or what the destination is until they get there. Happily, this does not change with Tollbooth. Characters, conversations, paragraphs, pages, and chapters will, at each and every step, bring a new surprise. Readers will end up places, in the book and in their own heads, they never knew existed . . . and they'll be damned glad they went.
January 28, 2014
This is a very familiar kind of story, done in a very unfamiliar way. We've all seen stories about a screwup, a guy in a horrible job at a point in his life where he could lose the woman he loves because he isn't ready to move forward. Such a story usually involves a build towards redemption where he grows up and finally realizes is life. "Tollbooth" isn't that simple, though. Jimmy Saare is a good guy for the most part though kind of a screw up as you might expect, but he's also more of a bastard than such a story usually presents. Nor is his wife the usual idealic good and only wronged by Jimmy kind of person. They're both far more mixed than that, and so is the story. There are no easy redemptions here, though there are some sorts of redemptions. The final story is a great deal more complex than I expected, and correspondingly a great deal more emotionally satisfying.
November 25, 2015
A sleek combination of that Catcher in the Rye feel with the fluid and brash sexuality of Bukowski or Burroughs. At one turn you're laughing and the next you're cringing at what these characters call their lives. The book is successful in serving as a window into a generation and also exposing monotonous jobs as entirely ridiculous traditions for our capitalist selves.
September 10, 2014
Whoa, weird I never wrote anything about this (since I read it in March). Anyway, this is a funny, dark, and occasionally strange book. In particular, there's a very meta moment near the end that's just great, and I remember being really fond of how bleak it was.
October 17, 2013
I had a few good things to say about this book. You can read my full review here: http://www.screamingwithbrevity.com/t...
June 9, 2015
Fantastic. Highly recommended.
March 1, 2024
This one has a lot of heart. A lot of imagination. Excellent sentences and paragraphs. A few editing errors, but nothing distracting. Beautiful book.
Round down 4
Round down 4
March 28, 2015
A weird, weird look at Jersey.
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