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Girl Factory
Things don't always work out the way they ought to--or do they?--in this unsettling darkly comic novel. Filled with memorable characters, Girl Factory is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling. A yogurt parlor in a corner mall somewhere in the city of St. Nils contains a dark secret in its basement, and Jonathan, the mostly clueless clerk who works there, just wants to fix things once and for all. But, beginning with an early encounter in an animal shelter that leaves three dead, things don’t always work out the way they ought to. Or do they? Filled with memorable characters, including two dogs (one too smart for his own good) and a retired sea captain, this unsettling darkly comic novel is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling. More disturbingly, Girl Factory raises questions about the ubiquitous objectification of women, the possibility for change, and the nature of freedom.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 2008
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251 people want to read
About the author
Jim Krusoe
15 books46 followersJim Krusoe is an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His stories and poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, BOMB, Iowa Review, Field, North American Review, American Poetry Review, and Santa Monica Review, which he founded in 1988. His essays and book reviews have appeared in Manoa, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post. He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund. He teaches at Santa Monica College and in the graduate writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His novel, Iceland, was selected by the Los Angeles Times and the Austin Chronicle as one of the ten best fiction books of 2002, and it was on the Washington Post list of notable fiction for the same year. His novel Girl Factory was published in 2008 by Tin House Books followed by Erased, which was published in 2009 and Toward You published in 2010, also by Tin House Books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
October 21, 2018
from my Secret Santa 2012
Update: Finally got around to reading this one and woah, this was right up my fucking alley. Minus all the animal abuse/deaths. The whole drowning mice thing bothered me more than the fucked up attempts to bring the floating women back to life. That should tell you all you need to know about me.
It's a short, quick read that packs an unbelievable punch.
Update: Finally got around to reading this one and woah, this was right up my fucking alley. Minus all the animal abuse/deaths. The whole drowning mice thing bothered me more than the fucked up attempts to bring the floating women back to life. That should tell you all you need to know about me.
It's a short, quick read that packs an unbelievable punch.
September 14, 2008
Considering the novel’s persistent embrace of the freakish, impossible, and dramatic, most of Girl Factory is surprisingly unremarkable. The novel, slim enough to border on novella, successfully executes (pun intended) an unreal plot, rendering credible some very incredible circumstances. Girl Factory’s narrator, Jonathan, ventures into the basement of the frozen yogurt stand where he is employed. He finds six women suspended in glass cylinders full of liquid, alive but unconscious. He later learns that they are preserved by the lactobacillus acidophilus also found in frozen yogurt, a state similar to cryogenic freeze with the notable difference that the women remain warm and fleshy, somehow closer to being alive. They have no senses and cannot move, however. They are frozen in time beneath a frozen yogurt joint. By the way, they are also young, beautiful, and nude.
Jonathan gets some background on how the women got there from his boss, Spinner, who owns the yogurt stand and apparently orchestrated the preservation of the women. He assures Jonathan that the women have contracts and that the arrangement is “money in the bank” for them. However, before Spinner can fill Jonathan in on all the details of who, what, when, where, and most importantly, why, he is shot by two mysterious black-suited customers, leaving Jonathan on his own to run the yogurt stand and figure out a course of action.
Sentence-by-sentence, Girl Factory’s narrator Jonathan carries us through death, theft, and attempted resuscitation. At first, we’re swept along with him because like him we’re fascinated by the oddity in the basement and intrigued by the mystery behind it. The prose that takes us on this investigation is terse and lucid, which tempers the confusing landscape of the events it navigates; in general, the tight reign that Krusoe keeps over sentences that depict fantastical events is one of Girl Factory’s greatest strengths. Rather than spin out wildly into esoteric vocabulary and nested clauses, Girl Factory’s sentences carry the novel along precisely because they are most restrained when their subject matter is most sensational. Consider this paragraph from an early scene, in which Jonathan first discovers the women in the basement:
“A chill went down my back. I walked over to the next glowing tube, maybe three yards away, and found and flipped the toggle switch. Once again the light flickered and the glass slowly grew brighter to reveal another naked woman, a beautiful black-haired young lady with thin wrists and ankles, skin the color of toast when the toasters is set on THREE, and long, slender toes and fingers. I imagined her to be a Latina, though of course I had no way of knowing for certain. Then, as if I were in the middle of a complicated dream, I walked from cylinder to cylinder, turning on the light of each to reveal its contents. My fears proved only too well founded. Each cylinder contained a woman: the blonde, the Latina, an Asian, a dark-skinned woman, and, set slight apart from the rest, one who looked like an Eskimo (Inuit, I think, is the correct term), all young and waiting for something.”
Jonathan’s narration toes the line between trustworthy and untrustworthy. On the one hand, he can and does distinguish between his imagination and reality (see his comments on the woman he imagines to be Latina, above), and he professes a compassion with people around him that sounds downright sane. On the other hand, we increasingly suspect that despite his measured logic and normal-seeming behavior, he is actually mad. He can be self-absorbed one moment and unselfconscious the next. What is most concerning, though, is that once Jonathan commits to save the women by bringing them back to waking life, he remains undaunted while woman after woman dies, and he never questions his ownership over the situation.
{SPOILER ALERT}Somehow, as woman after woman dies, I don’t feel outraged, nor do I lose interest in the narrator’s quest. That’s an accomplishment for which Krusoe’s strong voice writing deserves credit. But as the narrator persists in the face of disappointment after disappointment, I cease to identify with him, and my interest takes the form of a long shrug. I’m not sure I’d feel such an imperative to wake the women up after several deaths trying. Unfortunately, Girl Factory establishes a clear plot pattern and then sticks with it all the way to the end. It goes like this: Jonathan attempts to revive a woman using quasi-science that parallels the quasi-science of the acidophilus preservation.When a resuscitation attempt fails, he tweaks it slightly and tries again, using the evidence proffered by previous tries. As this pattern continues, the dynamism of Jonathan’s tightrope walk between reliability and insanity fades. Unfortunately, Krusoe doesn’t draw on magical realism’s potential to surprise and astonish until the very last scene of the novel, when it is too late.
This weakness alone debilitates Girl Factory’s pleasures. But worse, the novel fails to deliver on its thematic promise, which is written into its very title: it fails to shed any light on girls. Girl Factory raises big questions about gender and power structures and then leaves them unanswered. It’s so unsatisfying. The basement is full of women and women only; but what this might mean or imply is left untouched. The gender of the suspended bodies has meaning only inasmuch as it registers in Jonathan’s mind, and he neither asks nor answers the questions their gendered captivity raises. Why only women?
There are so many possible avenues down which I expected Krusoe to take us with the suspended women set-up. To give just one example, why would young, beautiful women give up their freedom and allow themselves to be stared at in the nude in exchange for monetary benefit? The novel could speak volumes about a whole industry of sex workers and all manner of nude models, but it does not. There is an enormous echo chamber of implications regarding objectification, oppression, the male gaze, etc., just waiting to be tapped by Girl Factory. But the novel doesn’t really go there. We stay firmly in Jonathan’s mind, and he stays firmly focused on his quest, painfully uninterested in gender or its myriad meanings, absorbed in his own frustrated desire for connection.
Gender registers in the narrator’s mind only as an agent of universalization. First of all, when the narrator gazes at the naked women, they prompt recollections to his past relationships. He refers to one of them as Mary Katherine because she looks just like his ex-girlfriend. These flashbacks, and his (perhaps sexist) fondness for the women actually spur him to do good, to try to resuscitate them. Does the fact that our gazing narrator ultimately kills all the women constitute a critique of objectification? Does it offer any new insights on the male gaze? I don’t think so. If anything, it encourages complacency toward patriarchical arrangements. Girl Factory offers Jonathan to us as an object for empathy. An eccentric loner, he meant only to do good.
Gertrude, Spinner’s husband, is Girl Factory’s only living, breathing woman. What does she do? She asks clueless questions about what goes on at the yogurt joint, she joins a support group called Spouses Without Spouses, and she bakes pies incessantly. Prompted by the group’s tenet that moving on requires not only support but also new challenges, she turns the space over to a new romantic interest, Matt, who has half-baked plans to re-invent it as a restaurant and jazz club. In short, she’s totally incapable of independent action.
The text withholds frameworks for thinking about race, too. All that’s offered, ultimately, is a kind of “It’s a Small World” logic. The women represent their races tropaically – suspended as they are in liquid, they cannot speak for or against the stereotypes of their race. Mute and unmoving, they cease to be individuals. The final nail in the one-dimensional coffin is hammered at the moment of each of their deaths: when each woman’s body is laid in the dumpster, surrounding trash forms a final resting place that resembles her ethnographically typical abode. Styrofoam around the Inuit woman resembles an igloo; foam and cans around the Latina woman look like an adobe hut. These images conclude chapters. The first few times, they are an expressive justaposition of domestic serenity with the tragedy of death. But as the pattern continues, the images stop echoing profoundly and begin to sound hollow and perverse. They’re as overly determined as the universalization that informs them.
Ultimately the novel’s weakness lies in its mixed logic – the logic of unabashed magical realism which governs its beginning and end, and the scientific, experimental type of reasoning with which the narrator considers the women for most of the body of the text. Fatal, too, is the mixture of fascination and disinterest with which Girl Factory treats girls.
Jonathan gets some background on how the women got there from his boss, Spinner, who owns the yogurt stand and apparently orchestrated the preservation of the women. He assures Jonathan that the women have contracts and that the arrangement is “money in the bank” for them. However, before Spinner can fill Jonathan in on all the details of who, what, when, where, and most importantly, why, he is shot by two mysterious black-suited customers, leaving Jonathan on his own to run the yogurt stand and figure out a course of action.
Sentence-by-sentence, Girl Factory’s narrator Jonathan carries us through death, theft, and attempted resuscitation. At first, we’re swept along with him because like him we’re fascinated by the oddity in the basement and intrigued by the mystery behind it. The prose that takes us on this investigation is terse and lucid, which tempers the confusing landscape of the events it navigates; in general, the tight reign that Krusoe keeps over sentences that depict fantastical events is one of Girl Factory’s greatest strengths. Rather than spin out wildly into esoteric vocabulary and nested clauses, Girl Factory’s sentences carry the novel along precisely because they are most restrained when their subject matter is most sensational. Consider this paragraph from an early scene, in which Jonathan first discovers the women in the basement:
“A chill went down my back. I walked over to the next glowing tube, maybe three yards away, and found and flipped the toggle switch. Once again the light flickered and the glass slowly grew brighter to reveal another naked woman, a beautiful black-haired young lady with thin wrists and ankles, skin the color of toast when the toasters is set on THREE, and long, slender toes and fingers. I imagined her to be a Latina, though of course I had no way of knowing for certain. Then, as if I were in the middle of a complicated dream, I walked from cylinder to cylinder, turning on the light of each to reveal its contents. My fears proved only too well founded. Each cylinder contained a woman: the blonde, the Latina, an Asian, a dark-skinned woman, and, set slight apart from the rest, one who looked like an Eskimo (Inuit, I think, is the correct term), all young and waiting for something.”
Jonathan’s narration toes the line between trustworthy and untrustworthy. On the one hand, he can and does distinguish between his imagination and reality (see his comments on the woman he imagines to be Latina, above), and he professes a compassion with people around him that sounds downright sane. On the other hand, we increasingly suspect that despite his measured logic and normal-seeming behavior, he is actually mad. He can be self-absorbed one moment and unselfconscious the next. What is most concerning, though, is that once Jonathan commits to save the women by bringing them back to waking life, he remains undaunted while woman after woman dies, and he never questions his ownership over the situation.
{SPOILER ALERT}Somehow, as woman after woman dies, I don’t feel outraged, nor do I lose interest in the narrator’s quest. That’s an accomplishment for which Krusoe’s strong voice writing deserves credit. But as the narrator persists in the face of disappointment after disappointment, I cease to identify with him, and my interest takes the form of a long shrug. I’m not sure I’d feel such an imperative to wake the women up after several deaths trying. Unfortunately, Girl Factory establishes a clear plot pattern and then sticks with it all the way to the end. It goes like this: Jonathan attempts to revive a woman using quasi-science that parallels the quasi-science of the acidophilus preservation.When a resuscitation attempt fails, he tweaks it slightly and tries again, using the evidence proffered by previous tries. As this pattern continues, the dynamism of Jonathan’s tightrope walk between reliability and insanity fades. Unfortunately, Krusoe doesn’t draw on magical realism’s potential to surprise and astonish until the very last scene of the novel, when it is too late.
This weakness alone debilitates Girl Factory’s pleasures. But worse, the novel fails to deliver on its thematic promise, which is written into its very title: it fails to shed any light on girls. Girl Factory raises big questions about gender and power structures and then leaves them unanswered. It’s so unsatisfying. The basement is full of women and women only; but what this might mean or imply is left untouched. The gender of the suspended bodies has meaning only inasmuch as it registers in Jonathan’s mind, and he neither asks nor answers the questions their gendered captivity raises. Why only women?
There are so many possible avenues down which I expected Krusoe to take us with the suspended women set-up. To give just one example, why would young, beautiful women give up their freedom and allow themselves to be stared at in the nude in exchange for monetary benefit? The novel could speak volumes about a whole industry of sex workers and all manner of nude models, but it does not. There is an enormous echo chamber of implications regarding objectification, oppression, the male gaze, etc., just waiting to be tapped by Girl Factory. But the novel doesn’t really go there. We stay firmly in Jonathan’s mind, and he stays firmly focused on his quest, painfully uninterested in gender or its myriad meanings, absorbed in his own frustrated desire for connection.
Gender registers in the narrator’s mind only as an agent of universalization. First of all, when the narrator gazes at the naked women, they prompt recollections to his past relationships. He refers to one of them as Mary Katherine because she looks just like his ex-girlfriend. These flashbacks, and his (perhaps sexist) fondness for the women actually spur him to do good, to try to resuscitate them. Does the fact that our gazing narrator ultimately kills all the women constitute a critique of objectification? Does it offer any new insights on the male gaze? I don’t think so. If anything, it encourages complacency toward patriarchical arrangements. Girl Factory offers Jonathan to us as an object for empathy. An eccentric loner, he meant only to do good.
Gertrude, Spinner’s husband, is Girl Factory’s only living, breathing woman. What does she do? She asks clueless questions about what goes on at the yogurt joint, she joins a support group called Spouses Without Spouses, and she bakes pies incessantly. Prompted by the group’s tenet that moving on requires not only support but also new challenges, she turns the space over to a new romantic interest, Matt, who has half-baked plans to re-invent it as a restaurant and jazz club. In short, she’s totally incapable of independent action.
The text withholds frameworks for thinking about race, too. All that’s offered, ultimately, is a kind of “It’s a Small World” logic. The women represent their races tropaically – suspended as they are in liquid, they cannot speak for or against the stereotypes of their race. Mute and unmoving, they cease to be individuals. The final nail in the one-dimensional coffin is hammered at the moment of each of their deaths: when each woman’s body is laid in the dumpster, surrounding trash forms a final resting place that resembles her ethnographically typical abode. Styrofoam around the Inuit woman resembles an igloo; foam and cans around the Latina woman look like an adobe hut. These images conclude chapters. The first few times, they are an expressive justaposition of domestic serenity with the tragedy of death. But as the pattern continues, the images stop echoing profoundly and begin to sound hollow and perverse. They’re as overly determined as the universalization that informs them.
Ultimately the novel’s weakness lies in its mixed logic – the logic of unabashed magical realism which governs its beginning and end, and the scientific, experimental type of reasoning with which the narrator considers the women for most of the body of the text. Fatal, too, is the mixture of fascination and disinterest with which Girl Factory treats girls.
May 2, 2008
At first glance you might think that Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe is just another story about a lovable loser. Or, maybe it is another one of those unreliable narrators. Or maybe it is a subtle political statement about the objectification of women. In fact, it might be all of these things. But to me it is about the role of perception and self-deception in our lives.
Allow me to steal PW's plot summary:
In the basement of a Southern California yogurt shop one hot summer night, Jonathan, a down-on-his-luck fro-yo slinger, discovers several young, beautiful naked women encased in glass and suspended lifelessly in a milky mixture. Jonathan's boss, Spinner, catches him nosing around and reveals his experiment: acidophilus, yogurt's active culture, has the uncanny ability to preserve and nourish life, he explains, and the women bobbing before Jonathan's wide eyes are making "an investment in their future." When foul play suddenly makes the women Jonathan's wards, he has to see if he has the right stuff to care for them-and perhaps free them.
This is a succinct plot summation and it gives you an idea of the comic nature of the story. But the real focus of the novel is Jonathan's inability to do anything right and the flawed perception and self-deception that is at the root of his problems.
Jonathan is certainly an unreliable narrator. He presents each of his actions and decisions as rational and well intentioned even as each ends in disaster and failure. At the start of the story, Jonathan sets out to save a dog unjustly imprisoned and facing euthanasia. Despite his good intentions, however, this rescue attempt ends in death and mayhem and the release of a dangerous and vicious dog.
Once he finds the women in the basement, Jonathan once again proceeds with a plan to rescue them and once again things end badly. This is a pattern in his life. In fact, one of the women suspended in yogurt resembles a girlfriend Jonathan may or may not have left on the side of the road in Mexico.
Jonathan as lovable loser provides some comic moments. You have to chuckle as he tries to manage the increasing mess he has made of his life with only the feeblest of mental and social skills. As things come crashing down around him he seems convinced he is just one lucky break away from solving his problems.
What made Girl Factory more intriguing, at least for me, was whether Jonathan was really a bumbling idiot or whether there was something a little more sinister at work. Is he just stupid - unable to see his lame ideas and rationalizations for what they are - or is he really a sort of psychopath who rationalizes his violence by acting like everything is just an honest mistake or misunderstanding?
Jonathan beans an employee at the dog shelter with a crowbar, plays a role in the death of the women in the yogurt shop basement, and might have abandoned his girlfriend in the middle of nowhere while on a road trip in Mexico. You don't have to be a conspiracy theory nut to wonder if the bodies pilling up around Jonathan are more than just accidents.
And all of this is wrapped up in this comic, almost absurd, story about women suspended in yogurt and whether Jonathan can resuscitate them with some combination of soap and water. Krusoe never reveals the answer to any of the questions but lets the reader attempt to work it out on their own.
And let's be honest, Krusoe may take things to an absurd level, but I think we can all admit that perception plays a huge role in our lives and it isn't always easy to spot the difference between harmless rationalization and dangerous self-deception.
However you come down on what the story is really about, Girl Factory is certainly entertaining. And short enough to be considered a novella, with a quick and engaging style, it is a quick read. Its wry humor and insightful descriptions of human nature and American culture will bring a smile to your face and occasionally a chuckle.
But I bet it will also leave you pondering what it was really all about.
Allow me to steal PW's plot summary:
In the basement of a Southern California yogurt shop one hot summer night, Jonathan, a down-on-his-luck fro-yo slinger, discovers several young, beautiful naked women encased in glass and suspended lifelessly in a milky mixture. Jonathan's boss, Spinner, catches him nosing around and reveals his experiment: acidophilus, yogurt's active culture, has the uncanny ability to preserve and nourish life, he explains, and the women bobbing before Jonathan's wide eyes are making "an investment in their future." When foul play suddenly makes the women Jonathan's wards, he has to see if he has the right stuff to care for them-and perhaps free them.
This is a succinct plot summation and it gives you an idea of the comic nature of the story. But the real focus of the novel is Jonathan's inability to do anything right and the flawed perception and self-deception that is at the root of his problems.
Jonathan is certainly an unreliable narrator. He presents each of his actions and decisions as rational and well intentioned even as each ends in disaster and failure. At the start of the story, Jonathan sets out to save a dog unjustly imprisoned and facing euthanasia. Despite his good intentions, however, this rescue attempt ends in death and mayhem and the release of a dangerous and vicious dog.
Once he finds the women in the basement, Jonathan once again proceeds with a plan to rescue them and once again things end badly. This is a pattern in his life. In fact, one of the women suspended in yogurt resembles a girlfriend Jonathan may or may not have left on the side of the road in Mexico.
Jonathan as lovable loser provides some comic moments. You have to chuckle as he tries to manage the increasing mess he has made of his life with only the feeblest of mental and social skills. As things come crashing down around him he seems convinced he is just one lucky break away from solving his problems.
What made Girl Factory more intriguing, at least for me, was whether Jonathan was really a bumbling idiot or whether there was something a little more sinister at work. Is he just stupid - unable to see his lame ideas and rationalizations for what they are - or is he really a sort of psychopath who rationalizes his violence by acting like everything is just an honest mistake or misunderstanding?
Jonathan beans an employee at the dog shelter with a crowbar, plays a role in the death of the women in the yogurt shop basement, and might have abandoned his girlfriend in the middle of nowhere while on a road trip in Mexico. You don't have to be a conspiracy theory nut to wonder if the bodies pilling up around Jonathan are more than just accidents.
And all of this is wrapped up in this comic, almost absurd, story about women suspended in yogurt and whether Jonathan can resuscitate them with some combination of soap and water. Krusoe never reveals the answer to any of the questions but lets the reader attempt to work it out on their own.
And let's be honest, Krusoe may take things to an absurd level, but I think we can all admit that perception plays a huge role in our lives and it isn't always easy to spot the difference between harmless rationalization and dangerous self-deception.
However you come down on what the story is really about, Girl Factory is certainly entertaining. And short enough to be considered a novella, with a quick and engaging style, it is a quick read. Its wry humor and insightful descriptions of human nature and American culture will bring a smile to your face and occasionally a chuckle.
But I bet it will also leave you pondering what it was really all about.
October 28, 2014
Jim Krusoe writes my kind of beach book: relentlessly inventive and crazed with plot-lines, but a little on the light side; and well written so that my consciousness is focused simultaneously on the story and the writing itself, a split that keeps the mind sharp and limber as the body lounges and swims. But his books also suffer, at least in my readerly critical brain factory, from their very entertainment value, and even in how well they are written, for his plots are so air-tight and the stream of his imagination so logical (however 'out there' his plot twists and imagery) that they lack the necessary spaces and ambiguities my own imagination needs to be more deeply engaged in a book - reading starts to feel like a game in which you guess what the writer will come up with next, rather than being overpowered and immersed in the verbiage, or sent into reveries. It's as if the books are hard-wired brains lacking perilous synaptical gaps. Yet, still, I've now read two of his novels and both have exhilarated me and offered moments of silent chuckling and wide-eyed wonder, so they are not meager fare, and there's enough twistedness to offset the occasional cutesiness of his substantial powers of invention.
Anyway, this is the story of a very average schmo who works at a yogurt parlor and discovers that his boss has lovely naked women preserved in tanks filled with an acidophilus solution in the parlor's vast and mysterious basement, and all the excitement and troubles that ensue upon this discovery.
Anyway, this is the story of a very average schmo who works at a yogurt parlor and discovers that his boss has lovely naked women preserved in tanks filled with an acidophilus solution in the parlor's vast and mysterious basement, and all the excitement and troubles that ensue upon this discovery.
July 18, 2008
An unusual and hilarious read, Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe is the tale of a hapless, often bumbling yogurt store employee who stumbles upon a secret in the business's basement--the bodies of six women bobbing in suspended animation chambers. Think of cryogenically frozen people, only in this case the active ingredient in the mix is acidophilus, a component of yogurt.
Jonathan, our hero (and I use the term loosely,) becomes responsible for the survival of the women when Spinner,the owner of the yogurt shop, is beaten to death by two shady men. Spinner's death is largely Jonathan's fault. In fact, Jonathan seems to be responsible for a number of unfortuanate incidents despite that he always operates with altruisitic intentions. He can't seem to do anything right. The first mishap is when he tries to release a dog from the local animal shelter, frees the wrong animal, and the dog mauls several Boy Scouts to death. Oops. Yes, "oops" seems to be the word when it comes to Jonathan. However, he realizes the responsibility he has to these women and he tries valiantly to release the prisoners from their yogurty containers, with disastrous results.
I love the tone of this book. The humor is everpresent, surreal, and absolutely wonderful. Case in point: through trial and error, Jonathan realizes that the key to unfreezing the women lies in the healing properties of Dawn Anti-bacterial Dishwashing soap. I have no doubt that some readers won't understand this story and will be perplexed by the unlikeliness of the plot, but those readers will be missing the point entirely and they can't be helped. For readers who like quirkiness and satire, this is your book. I can't wait to read more by Krusoe.
Jonathan, our hero (and I use the term loosely,) becomes responsible for the survival of the women when Spinner,the owner of the yogurt shop, is beaten to death by two shady men. Spinner's death is largely Jonathan's fault. In fact, Jonathan seems to be responsible for a number of unfortuanate incidents despite that he always operates with altruisitic intentions. He can't seem to do anything right. The first mishap is when he tries to release a dog from the local animal shelter, frees the wrong animal, and the dog mauls several Boy Scouts to death. Oops. Yes, "oops" seems to be the word when it comes to Jonathan. However, he realizes the responsibility he has to these women and he tries valiantly to release the prisoners from their yogurty containers, with disastrous results.
I love the tone of this book. The humor is everpresent, surreal, and absolutely wonderful. Case in point: through trial and error, Jonathan realizes that the key to unfreezing the women lies in the healing properties of Dawn Anti-bacterial Dishwashing soap. I have no doubt that some readers won't understand this story and will be perplexed by the unlikeliness of the plot, but those readers will be missing the point entirely and they can't be helped. For readers who like quirkiness and satire, this is your book. I can't wait to read more by Krusoe.
February 23, 2008
"Girl Factory" by Jim Krusoe is another master stroke from this modern master. A story about a man who works in a fast-food yorgurt place, which unknown to him the owner has a series of women in floating tanks underneath the shop. Why they are floating in tanks is not clear to him, but nevertheless in the narrative there is also a dog that is human-smart.
So yes the world is slightly goofy. But Krusoe reminds me of (I can hear some moaning now) classic Boris Vian narratives. Vian's world is pretty much the representation of his surroundings (Saint Germain-des-Prés) - but Krusoe's story could take place anywhere in the Valley and is actually more small-town like. Yet Krusoe writes about the nature of death in a very light way where you feel the essence of someone passng away. It's a hard mixture to nail down, and Jim does a fantastic job. He's great! In twenty years from now The New York Review of Books (if it is still around) will be re-issuing all his classics.
The book is coming out in May 2008. It's a fantastic read!
So yes the world is slightly goofy. But Krusoe reminds me of (I can hear some moaning now) classic Boris Vian narratives. Vian's world is pretty much the representation of his surroundings (Saint Germain-des-Prés) - but Krusoe's story could take place anywhere in the Valley and is actually more small-town like. Yet Krusoe writes about the nature of death in a very light way where you feel the essence of someone passng away. It's a hard mixture to nail down, and Jim does a fantastic job. He's great! In twenty years from now The New York Review of Books (if it is still around) will be re-issuing all his classics.
The book is coming out in May 2008. It's a fantastic read!
August 24, 2008
I guess I'm too much of a literalist to really love this book. I got a kick out of some of it, I had great hope for the story early on, and I felt a sort of sympathy for the main character who is kind of a regular guy, smart in some ways, dense and naive in others and just kind of grinding out a regular, unremarkable, dull existence. An so, since the story really goes nowhere, I guess I'm trying hard right now to tell my professor of literature what the author is trying to tell us here.
Is he saying how bizarre life is, how regular people fall into traps that can get them in trouble? Is he trying to show us how random and meaningless life really is? I guess you'll have to figure it out for yourself.
Still, I enjoyed reading it like I would an extra long and readable short story and yet as hard as I try, I didn't find anything too profound or excellent about the book like others have.
Is he saying how bizarre life is, how regular people fall into traps that can get them in trouble? Is he trying to show us how random and meaningless life really is? I guess you'll have to figure it out for yourself.
Still, I enjoyed reading it like I would an extra long and readable short story and yet as hard as I try, I didn't find anything too profound or excellent about the book like others have.
Read
August 11, 2008Donald Barthelme, Charles Portis, and Tim Burton decided to meet at a yogurt store one afternoon to write about something. This is what they contrived.
Michel Gondry would be smart to get Krusoe's number. Someone should send it to him.
Michel Gondry would be smart to get Krusoe's number. Someone should send it to him.
January 2, 2009
I thought it was going somewhere... then it didn't.
May 9, 2009
Frozen-yogurt shop employee Jonathan is oversmart and underemployed, and very early on in the novel "Girl Factory" by Jim Krusoe (Tin House: 196 pp., $14.95 paper) we realize he's also not quite right. After he learns about a hyper-intelligent, military-bred dog at a local shelter, he determines that he will be the one to rescue the animal: "I went back inside to find a jacket, and it was really more as an afterthought than anything that I took along a crowbar, slipping it up my sleeve so as not to alarm anyone."
His trip to the shelter ends in disaster, but Jonathan escapes notice and returns to his quiet routine, doing nothing more exciting than walking to his job at Mister Twisty. His boss, Spinner, is the only person he might (at a stretch) call a friend. Jonathan is a good employee. He doesn't mind not being allowed into the basement, which seems to emit a powerful hum. But one day, alone with the key, he discovers Spinner's secret: young women in a state of suspension, floating in a yogurt-based life-sustaining fluid.
Life-preserving yogurt bacteria? A modern-day Frankenstein selling low-fat desserts? Jonathan, who interprets his surroundings through metaphors that burst unhinged with style -- each suspended woman was "like a helpless museum-goer struck by a paralyzing gas that had been pumped into the ventilation system as part of a million-dollar robbery exactly at the same second she was standing there in front of a painting" -- may be the perfect hero for this surreal world.
But he is hardly a reliable narrator, and there are hints of fissures in Jonathan's tale-telling. When Spinner explains his project, it's with the fullness and detail of a Bond movie supervillain. Each time Jonathan talks to the Captain, a neighbor, he stands silently and hysterically immobile, flashing back to a chronically unlucky past. Jonathan isn't all there, clearly, but what exactly is missing?
Jim Krusoe pulls off a balancing act between science fiction and subjectivity in this playful, funny novel. And he makes sure you'll never look at Pinkberry quite the same way again.
Reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008.
http://www.latimes.com/features/print...
His trip to the shelter ends in disaster, but Jonathan escapes notice and returns to his quiet routine, doing nothing more exciting than walking to his job at Mister Twisty. His boss, Spinner, is the only person he might (at a stretch) call a friend. Jonathan is a good employee. He doesn't mind not being allowed into the basement, which seems to emit a powerful hum. But one day, alone with the key, he discovers Spinner's secret: young women in a state of suspension, floating in a yogurt-based life-sustaining fluid.
Life-preserving yogurt bacteria? A modern-day Frankenstein selling low-fat desserts? Jonathan, who interprets his surroundings through metaphors that burst unhinged with style -- each suspended woman was "like a helpless museum-goer struck by a paralyzing gas that had been pumped into the ventilation system as part of a million-dollar robbery exactly at the same second she was standing there in front of a painting" -- may be the perfect hero for this surreal world.
But he is hardly a reliable narrator, and there are hints of fissures in Jonathan's tale-telling. When Spinner explains his project, it's with the fullness and detail of a Bond movie supervillain. Each time Jonathan talks to the Captain, a neighbor, he stands silently and hysterically immobile, flashing back to a chronically unlucky past. Jonathan isn't all there, clearly, but what exactly is missing?
Jim Krusoe pulls off a balancing act between science fiction and subjectivity in this playful, funny novel. And he makes sure you'll never look at Pinkberry quite the same way again.
Reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008.
http://www.latimes.com/features/print...
July 17, 2021
I think I missed something important in this book. I missed the message it was meant to deliver - the message that so many others seemed to get rather clearly. The only real questions it raised for me were these:
Who killed Spinner and why?
How did the trash collectors not see the dead bodies in the dumpster?
Was it Mary Katherine? Or not?
Where did the women come from?
What was up with the old men?
What happened to the last two women? Are they still in the cylinders?
Where's Buck now?
Who owns Mr. Twisty's now?
Is Jonathan extinct? If so - am I sad or glad about that?
I gave it 3 stars because much of the story was novel and entertaining. It was absurdly funny. Krusoe has a clever imagination with quite a few loose ends. But I really think that was all there was to this book. An extraordinary imaginative adventure that still failed to stir up any excitement in the ordinary mundane character of Jonathan. His ability to accept his own fate and failure was almost stunningly unremarkable. But the objectification of women? Really?
Who killed Spinner and why?
How did the trash collectors not see the dead bodies in the dumpster?
Was it Mary Katherine? Or not?
Where did the women come from?
What was up with the old men?
What happened to the last two women? Are they still in the cylinders?
Where's Buck now?
Who owns Mr. Twisty's now?
Is Jonathan extinct? If so - am I sad or glad about that?
I gave it 3 stars because much of the story was novel and entertaining. It was absurdly funny. Krusoe has a clever imagination with quite a few loose ends. But I really think that was all there was to this book. An extraordinary imaginative adventure that still failed to stir up any excitement in the ordinary mundane character of Jonathan. His ability to accept his own fate and failure was almost stunningly unremarkable. But the objectification of women? Really?
April 18, 2008
A bizarre little book from Tin House that pairs a shaggy dog story with an unreliable narrator. The set-up pretty much tells you everything you need to know: a man who works in a yogurt shop discovers a secret basement in which beautiful young women are trapped inside of tanks, flaoting in suspended animation. For all its strangeness, it has a fairly predictable plot. The writing is simple and straightforward but done in a way that’s darkly funny as well. While I wasn’t spellbound by the prose, it’s done in a mode that’s almost Kafkaesque. I don’t want to over-hype the book, because much of it is rather flat, but it’s a comic flatness, like David Lynch directing his actors to act badly. I imagine that when Krusoe reads it at Vermin this summer he’s going to bring the house down.
May 31, 2008
This is a funny book, written by a poet that has a great voice and knack for the absurd. The plot, or rather the story, has to do with a yogurt parlor employee who discovers some strange goings on in the basement of said parlor (the title of the book should give you a hint). Who would've guessed yogurt had such life-sustaining qualities or that dishwashing liquid had the power to wake the almost dead? And although I wasn't sure where the story would end up I didn't really care because of the author's voice. Nonetheless, I fully enjoyed the last few pages. Cracked me up. And this was published by the most excellent Tin House.
Read
October 6, 2009I've decided it would be useful to create a gave-up-the-ghost shelf for those occasions when I have the nagging feeling that I may have tried to read something but I'm not sure if I have. That way I'll save myself the gas mileage of repeated drives down literary cul-de-sacs. Which is to say, most of the books in this category could as easily be filed under "no comment," since it's pretty much a given that I didn't stick with them long enough to weigh in on them. It's chemistry; sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Maybe I could also label this shelf "putting the i in subjective!" So, yes, this is the first addition to said shelf, and indubitably not the last.
August 14, 2008
This book is incredibly engaging, mystifying and thought provoking on many levels -- not to mention hilarious. At the conclusion of what felt like a journey to another planet, I was the one left feeling like an alien!
June 6, 2008
Great book! You can check out my long review in The Quarterly Conversation here: http://www.quarterlyconversation.com/...
June 16, 2008
To be honest...I tossed it with about fifty pages to go. The was creepy to begin with and it just got to be too much.
December 1, 2008
asks a whole bunch of questions but never answers them. horrible ending.
April 10, 2019
After a good first chapter, the book stalls with a whole new plot that really fumbles around in the dark for a long time. While the book has plenty of fun and weird elements, none of them seem to serve any purpose. Our main character is an unreliable narrator, so everything he tells us in probably a lie, which makes the entire book feel more than a little pointless.
The book leaves most (all?) questions unresolved. It is hard not to finish the book thinking, what the hell was that all about?
I guess the biggest criticism is that it got boring. The writing style is somewhat childlike, in a way. And it's hard to tell if the author intended it to be that way, because that's who the main character is, or if it's just badly written. Either way, the writing plods along somewhat dully.
I feel like the book would have been better if there was more weird and crazy elements, or if they'd been explored in a more weird way. It's strange that the book is both very quirky, while also very pedestrian.
I finished it with a sad sense that there were some really interesting pieces here, but I wish they'd been assembled and developed better. I am curious enough to wonder if the author will improve with time. I would tell him to get weirder and crazier with his stuff. It's when the narration makes sense that it is at its dullest.
This is my typical poor review of a novel where I critique it while simultaneously trying to give nothing away.
The book leaves most (all?) questions unresolved. It is hard not to finish the book thinking, what the hell was that all about?
I guess the biggest criticism is that it got boring. The writing style is somewhat childlike, in a way. And it's hard to tell if the author intended it to be that way, because that's who the main character is, or if it's just badly written. Either way, the writing plods along somewhat dully.
I feel like the book would have been better if there was more weird and crazy elements, or if they'd been explored in a more weird way. It's strange that the book is both very quirky, while also very pedestrian.
I finished it with a sad sense that there were some really interesting pieces here, but I wish they'd been assembled and developed better. I am curious enough to wonder if the author will improve with time. I would tell him to get weirder and crazier with his stuff. It's when the narration makes sense that it is at its dullest.
This is my typical poor review of a novel where I critique it while simultaneously trying to give nothing away.
July 23, 2019
Incredibly funny and incredibly well-written. I would read this book over and over again. It’s an easy, and fun read. Readers must keep in mind: this is a satire. There are societal criticisms that beg to excavated, but even the surface is rich with comedy and beautiful, figurative language. To appreciate this book, one must master the art of dissecting literature—sometimes it’s silly, unnecessary, and tedious, but this all adds to its witty, and altogether, smart structure.
February 3, 2023
Jonathan is an employee at a yogurt shop and discovers a disturbing secret in the basement. His boss has several women in containers seemingly in suspended animation, preserved somehow by acidophilus. Several strange occurrences ensue but the story really goes nowhere. I believe the author was trying to make a point about the objectification of women and about societies inability to change , fell flat . Was not as good as his book Towards You
January 28, 2018
Quirky with an almost incomprehensible 'silly-seriousness.' Give it a go! It's only 200 pages and will certainly entertain on many levels.
June 21, 2019
It's really just a crap story.
February 7, 2009
*SPOILERS*
The problem definitely wasn't the premise - narrator lives in the sort of joyless, work-driven and solitary America that we've all been swallowing as pre-requisite in every third work of American fiction since Fight Club and The Corrections, and that continues here. Everyone is weird, disconnected from eachother, eccentric but also more or less lost. If the background sounds boring it's because it is, and most of the bits about how solitary male blunders to boring job and then comes home to watch TV and eat microwave dinners in thoughtless silence have been done to death already. This doesn't get interesting until the guy finds a bunch of girls floating in vats in the basement of the frozen yogurt store where he works. The proprietor of the place lives just long enough to clue him into the existence of a vast but foggy conspiracy to keep these girls in suspended animation and tell him that they're in on it and have chosen their own pickling as a form of deferred stock investment and anticipate being extracted as millionaires.
Once he's gone and all of the details about how the girls are to be maintained gone with him, the narrator has to try to figure out how to keep the girls alive. Deciding that these girls might, more likely than not, have been the victims and not the clients of the whole situation (and probably wanting to keep one of the suspended-animation hotties for himself), dude sets about trying to wake the girls up. By now, things are falling apart as much for the book as for the narrator. He's sloppy in his thinking and frustratingly unanalytical in his execution, and everything he does just makes everything worse. His remorse is epic and the subject of much go-nowhere exposition, but his actual decisions are unrealistic even set against the limited intellectual expectations the author has laid out for him. (His failure to inquire anything of the anonymous but seemingly clued in and even friendly old men who come periodically through the basement is one of the most frustrating experiences of the book)
My real problem wasn't the main plotline as much as the diversions into the possibility that this whole thing was one of those ultimately lame, "maybe this is all a hallucination of our subtextually psychotic main character" plot-twists. The author can't hold the line on telling the story of a guy who finds a bunch of girls floating in yogurt in the basement of his shop and suffers because there is truly nothing he can do for or about them, so he branches out into anecdotes about talking dogs developed by the government and gone rogue and ex-girlfriends who may or may not have remanifested as girls in tubes. I was sighing through the back half of the novel (which felt rushed as to the actual issue of the girls in the tubes and languid about everything else) because I thought one of those "GOTCHA" moments was on the other side of every page and the revelation that the narrator was actually the architect of the whole project was inevitable.
Thankfully, that didn't happen. Nothing did. The book peters out with a long navel-gaze about the nature of responsibility and another surreal and stupid appearance from the talking dog.
At best, this is a meditation on responsibility, maybe, or futility. But that gives it too much credit. Better to say that this is a book with one cool idea (girls in tubes at the bottom of a frozen yogurt shop), nine or ten lesser good ideas with no substantial bearing on the first (strange old men who leave bills on the table and never speak, the subculture of grieving, the persistence of rats, the danger of bureaucrats, the Johnny Cash style inevitability of getting caught when you've been bad) and a few terrible ideas (talking dogs, lazy public defenders) all jammed together to say nothing in particular about not much at all.
The problem definitely wasn't the premise - narrator lives in the sort of joyless, work-driven and solitary America that we've all been swallowing as pre-requisite in every third work of American fiction since Fight Club and The Corrections, and that continues here. Everyone is weird, disconnected from eachother, eccentric but also more or less lost. If the background sounds boring it's because it is, and most of the bits about how solitary male blunders to boring job and then comes home to watch TV and eat microwave dinners in thoughtless silence have been done to death already. This doesn't get interesting until the guy finds a bunch of girls floating in vats in the basement of the frozen yogurt store where he works. The proprietor of the place lives just long enough to clue him into the existence of a vast but foggy conspiracy to keep these girls in suspended animation and tell him that they're in on it and have chosen their own pickling as a form of deferred stock investment and anticipate being extracted as millionaires.
Once he's gone and all of the details about how the girls are to be maintained gone with him, the narrator has to try to figure out how to keep the girls alive. Deciding that these girls might, more likely than not, have been the victims and not the clients of the whole situation (and probably wanting to keep one of the suspended-animation hotties for himself), dude sets about trying to wake the girls up. By now, things are falling apart as much for the book as for the narrator. He's sloppy in his thinking and frustratingly unanalytical in his execution, and everything he does just makes everything worse. His remorse is epic and the subject of much go-nowhere exposition, but his actual decisions are unrealistic even set against the limited intellectual expectations the author has laid out for him. (His failure to inquire anything of the anonymous but seemingly clued in and even friendly old men who come periodically through the basement is one of the most frustrating experiences of the book)
My real problem wasn't the main plotline as much as the diversions into the possibility that this whole thing was one of those ultimately lame, "maybe this is all a hallucination of our subtextually psychotic main character" plot-twists. The author can't hold the line on telling the story of a guy who finds a bunch of girls floating in yogurt in the basement of his shop and suffers because there is truly nothing he can do for or about them, so he branches out into anecdotes about talking dogs developed by the government and gone rogue and ex-girlfriends who may or may not have remanifested as girls in tubes. I was sighing through the back half of the novel (which felt rushed as to the actual issue of the girls in the tubes and languid about everything else) because I thought one of those "GOTCHA" moments was on the other side of every page and the revelation that the narrator was actually the architect of the whole project was inevitable.
Thankfully, that didn't happen. Nothing did. The book peters out with a long navel-gaze about the nature of responsibility and another surreal and stupid appearance from the talking dog.
At best, this is a meditation on responsibility, maybe, or futility. But that gives it too much credit. Better to say that this is a book with one cool idea (girls in tubes at the bottom of a frozen yogurt shop), nine or ten lesser good ideas with no substantial bearing on the first (strange old men who leave bills on the table and never speak, the subculture of grieving, the persistence of rats, the danger of bureaucrats, the Johnny Cash style inevitability of getting caught when you've been bad) and a few terrible ideas (talking dogs, lazy public defenders) all jammed together to say nothing in particular about not much at all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 17, 2013
It seems like the gold standard for weirdness is David Lynch. Jim Krusoe isn't David Lynch, but he's definitely in the same ballpark. Both are experts at identifying and amplifying the strangeness of everyday life, but whereas Lynch's fantasies often turn sinister, Krusoe's remain mostly lighthearted. "Girl Factory" is no exception. The novel's protagonist is an easygoing, unambitious dolt named Jonathan who lives alone in an apartment and clerks at a frozen yogurt shop. He begins noting a number of old men coming into the yogurt shop, unlocking a door at the back, and descending into a basement the shop's owner has forbidden Jonathan from entering. But one day the owner falls ill and Jonathan is handed the shop keys--including the key to the cellar. Curiosity gets the better of him, and he heads downstairs to discover a number of women (sleeping? dead?) encased in glass tanks. Here I'm picturing Luke Skywalker defrosting after his brush with the wampa, with one notable difference: the women in "Girl Factory" are young, beautiful, and naked, so apparently the old-timers are engaging in some sort of lurid peep show. They watch the floating girls for awhile and leave a hundred-dollar bill as payment when they depart. Why only old men? How did the codgers discover the girls in the first place? Why is the book called "Girl Factory" when girls are not being produced but merely preserved? These questions are never fully answered. Jonathan gets caught snooping, but then the store owner dies unexpectedly and Jonathan is allowed to keep running the shop. "Girl Factory" seems to be built on this premise: what would you do if you discovered a bunch of girls held in giant vats in the basement of a yogurt shop? I think it's safe to say most of us would call the cops and bolt for the door. But not in Krusoe's world. Jonathan is drawn to one of the girls, who just happens to look exactly like his ex-girlfriend, and feels compelled to rescue her from her present state. (He has discovered that the girls are indeed alive and frozen in time by a yogurt preservative.) Again, how these particular girls arrived at this point is never made clear, though Jonathan has his theories. This is not a book for those seeking answers; rather it is, in every sense, a diversion. It distracts readers with the uniqueness of its plot but also very consciously diverts, or at least distorts, reality. Jonathan is not exactly a scientist, so his attempts to revive the girls have some unexpected (or maybe not?) consequences which I won't get into here. Krusoe tempers his weirdness with humor. His fiction probably aligns most closely with the fabulist or near-fabulist work of writers like George Saunders, Judy Budnitz, or Aimee Bender, but all in all he's not exactly like anyone else, which is a good thing.
January 9, 2014
This book is fun to read, with its fantastic, yogurt-filled plot. It delves into feminist questions (all those creepy guys gaping at the women) and questions about sanity (is our narrator certifiably crazy?). These are good questions, and, along with the worry of who will live and die, make for a compelling read.
I think there's more to this story, though. Throughout the book, Krusoe puts our narrator on the precipice of a few binary oppositions:
free / caged
active / inactive
life / death
hero / villain
savior / dangerous psychopath
powerful / powerless
genius / dunce
Jonathan's stated desire is to be the hero who fights for the freedom of the trapped women, to be the champion for life. By the end, however, Jonthan's use of power and lust for the glory of being the genius-savior have turned him into a crazy guy who tortures animals and women, and his search for freedom has left him in a cage -- happily trapped, powerless, and inactive as he waits contentedly for his own death.
At first glance, the ending seems Huck Finn-like, closing a complete and utterly depressing circle. Jonathan is still crazy, and nothing has improved. The women all died. He didn't even get the satisfaction of creating a new yogurt flavor. Looking at it more closely, though, the end of the book leaves Jonathan, ironically, in a much more comfortable place than the beginning. In the first chapter, Jonathan was outside the cage, believing confinement and euthanasia to be the ultimate injustice. He's determined to take action to fight, to act on his conviction. In the end, as he sits in confinement, waiting for euthanasia himself, he's come to see the cage as protection, comfort, ease. He's realized that the responsibility of ethical action is too much for him. He couldn't do it right, so it's better for him to be prevented from his own ethical dilemmas. It's easier for everyone this way.
I think there's more to this story, though. Throughout the book, Krusoe puts our narrator on the precipice of a few binary oppositions:
free / caged
active / inactive
life / death
hero / villain
savior / dangerous psychopath
powerful / powerless
genius / dunce
Jonathan's stated desire is to be the hero who fights for the freedom of the trapped women, to be the champion for life. By the end, however, Jonthan's use of power and lust for the glory of being the genius-savior have turned him into a crazy guy who tortures animals and women, and his search for freedom has left him in a cage -- happily trapped, powerless, and inactive as he waits contentedly for his own death.
At first glance, the ending seems Huck Finn-like, closing a complete and utterly depressing circle. Jonathan is still crazy, and nothing has improved. The women all died. He didn't even get the satisfaction of creating a new yogurt flavor. Looking at it more closely, though, the end of the book leaves Jonathan, ironically, in a much more comfortable place than the beginning. In the first chapter, Jonathan was outside the cage, believing confinement and euthanasia to be the ultimate injustice. He's determined to take action to fight, to act on his conviction. In the end, as he sits in confinement, waiting for euthanasia himself, he's come to see the cage as protection, comfort, ease. He's realized that the responsibility of ethical action is too much for him. He couldn't do it right, so it's better for him to be prevented from his own ethical dilemmas. It's easier for everyone this way.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2009
This short novel follows the adventures and tribulations of a lonely yogurt store clerk who discovers that his boss is keeping a number of beautiful young women in suspended animation in the basement of his yogurt shop. At times witty, at times exacerbating, this book is an excellent example of the state of the modern novel. It dances around deep issues in a light-hearted way, refusing to commit to a serious exploration of meaning. The narrator has no respect for the sanctity of human life, except when those lives are directly related to him, at which point their sanctity is all he can think about. That and developing new yogurt recipes.
This book reminded me of the work of director Quentin Tarantino, except with more absurdity. It was fun. I think a book club could find lots of things to discuss here, lots of places to begin a discussion. However, I think the book would come up short as the discussion moves toward the middle or the end.
I'm hard put to imagine anyone not enjoying this book. But I'm also hard put to find a reason to recommend it...a reason to grab someone's arm and look into their eyes and say: "You've got to read this book."
This book reminded me of the work of director Quentin Tarantino, except with more absurdity. It was fun. I think a book club could find lots of things to discuss here, lots of places to begin a discussion. However, I think the book would come up short as the discussion moves toward the middle or the end.
I'm hard put to imagine anyone not enjoying this book. But I'm also hard put to find a reason to recommend it...a reason to grab someone's arm and look into their eyes and say: "You've got to read this book."
July 27, 2011
Krusoe's strangely compelling voice, where absurdity is met with a nonchalant expectation, is what makes this satire sing. The narrator, who works in a fro-yo joint named Mr. Twisty, discovers and ends up taking care of six naked, nubile young women preserved in glass chambers using the same active cultures used to produce yogurt. Whle taking aim at both men and women in our youth and sex obsessed culture, Krusoe's real target is the sense of entitlement, the lack of empathy and disconnection from other humans that engender a society so fixated and the resulting lack of moral engagement. Both hilarious and disturbing, Krusoe weaves a dark tale that takes its absurdity in stride, placing the narrator's choices firmly in the author's satirical crosshairs. Girl Factory shares many similarities in voice and thematic content as the more recent Toward You, but Girl Factory coheres much more cogently and perhaps toward a more purposeful end.
April 13, 2015
Jonathan is a mild-mannered frozen yogurt shop employee. He lives alone and hasn't had very much luck romantically recently. Then, one night, he finally gets a peek into the basement of Mister Twisty's. There are women suspended in yogurt. Jonathan's boss explains the women are part of a study of the ability of yogurt's bacteria to defy the aging process. When a sudden death leaves the women in Jonathan's care, he bumbles through.
What I love about this novel is that Jonathan is the most passive "hero" I've read in a long time. Things happen to Jonathan. When Jonathan tries to make things happen, he mostly fucks it up, then quickly rationalizes what's happened and goes back to his humdrum routine. It's especially interesting to see this in a male, as opposed to female, character. In fact, the main female character (who isn't submerged in yogurt goop) is full of ideas and initiative compared to Jonathan.
This is a weird little book, but amusing.
What I love about this novel is that Jonathan is the most passive "hero" I've read in a long time. Things happen to Jonathan. When Jonathan tries to make things happen, he mostly fucks it up, then quickly rationalizes what's happened and goes back to his humdrum routine. It's especially interesting to see this in a male, as opposed to female, character. In fact, the main female character (who isn't submerged in yogurt goop) is full of ideas and initiative compared to Jonathan.
This is a weird little book, but amusing.
May 24, 2023
Our book club read GIRL FACTORY back in 2008 and we still talk about it! I decided to reread it—and it’s just as weird and brilliant as I remembered. It’s so difficult to explain this one, but let me try… Jonathan, a quirky and earnest narrater who works in a yogurt shop, ventures down into the basement and discovers the owner keeps naked women suspended in glass cylinders filled with acidophilus. Soon, they are in his care and he has to decide what to do with them. Oh it’s cringy and funny and bizarre and you’ll keep wanting to say, “No, Jonathan!” But you have to read it. It’s so good. I’ve never stopped thinking about this one.
I know it’s a 15-year-old book, but like Ann Patchett says—if you haven’t read it, it’s new to you.
I know it’s a 15-year-old book, but like Ann Patchett says—if you haven’t read it, it’s new to you.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews