Bindlestiff

by Wayne Holloway

2036. In a ramshackle, backwater United States, Marine Corp vet Frank Dubois journeys from L.A. to Detroit, seeking redemption for a life lived off the rails, in a country derailed from its own manifest destiny.

In present day Hollywood, a wannabe British film director hustles to get his movie ‘Bindlestiff’ off the ground starring ‘Frank’, a black Charlie Chaplin figure cast adrift in post-federal America.

Weaving together prose and screenplay Bindlestiff explores the power and responsibility of storytelling, revealing what lies behind the voices we read and the characters we see on screen.

We open with a simple image of a man mending a hole in his shoe using a cut off piece of rubber and a tube of glue. From there the story explodes into a broiling satire on race, identity, family, friendship, war, peace, sex, drugs but precious little rock and roll.

Bindlestiff.

"If it’s broke, fix it."

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I find a book tiresome, and it isn’t actively offensive on a Hemingway level, my inclination is to blame myself for failing to get it. In this case, I wonder if I took the whole thing too literally when according to the back cover it was intended as satire. The blurb begins, ‘2036. In a ramshackle, backwater United States…’ which hooked me. I was then disappointed to discover that the majority of the narrative is set in 2016 (a shitty year for the UK, US, and the world), around Hollywood. The 2036 sections are largely in movie script format, as the ‘Bindlestiff’ of the title is a film written by some dude who really got on my nerves. In fact, I found the 2016 parts so annoying that they were hard to read. To put off doing so I watched a great deal of netflix (the whole of Russian Doll and a re-watch of The Raid, both of which I highly recommend), then read the remaining 320-odd pages during my no internet day so I could move onto something else.

I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly grated. There’s a lot of self-referential meta business, a bit like Only Americans Burn in Hell, which didn’t have much impact. All the long scenes of people getting drunk in LA bars were unnecessary and unpleasant. And the main female character was a Native American meth-addicted stripper named Lap Dances With Wolves. The fact that she was part of the film script and her role/name seemingly intended ironically didn’t really redeem that. Likewise, the fact that the main character in the movie was a black former Marine didn’t mean that the book had anything meaningful to say about racism. Except that there are hardly any leading roles for black men in Hollywood movies; no shit. There were a few infodump paragraphs of future world-building that hinted at interesting details, however the film script format left precious little space for them. Ultimately, I didn’t appreciate the Hollywood satire and found the whole 2016 framing mechanism tiresome. I’d hoped for a novel set in post-collapse 2036 America, rather than a fragmentary movie script, and everything about the narrator ‘@waynex’ (including his name) irritated me intensely. Guess I'm just not a suitable audience.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

BINDLESTIFF by Wayne Holloway.

This is a marauding, arrogant, inconsistent, savage, brilliant, bloody-fucking-mess of a novel. And I really enjoyed it. But would recommend to pretty much no-one I know. Most people would hate it.

It's partly a dytopian road movie. Partly the writer's Hollywood-bastardised screenplay of the movie. Partly the writer's attempt to get the movie made in Hollywood lunches and money-board meetings. And partly a savage set of essays dismantling modern America, cinena, identity, race and a load more.

Jeez. It's a knackering, head-fuck of a book, the kind of thing you've just got to let yourself be swept away by. But you'd probably hate it, anyway, whoever you are.

The kind of book that makes you glad small presses exist, places that publish novels that push boundaries but will never make anyone a penny. I've been trying to think of something to compare it to and the best I can come up with is The Sellout. It's got that same kind of don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

Phew.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dystopian picaresque told in alternate screenplay / prose narrative form, overstuffed with tangential meanderings on the state of America today, framed within a Hollywood satire on the development of said screenplay. The concept doesn’t quite cohere, and Holloway’s hyper-stylised prose needs a little Ritalin in places, but the novel is a smart, referential treat in its finest moments, crammed with cinematic trivia and allusions. The several Percival Everett mentions throughout suggest the author is attempting some of the thematic and formal plate-spinning that master is known for, bringing to mind Erasure in places, although the author’s black protagonist is more laboured than we’d expect from an Everett joint. It’s good.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Film director Wayne Holloway takes a cinematic approach to novel writing. His debut, Bindlestiff, blends prose with screenplay in a tale set in both present-day Hollywood and a dystopian USA in the not-so-far-away future. A metafictional satire of the movie industry, race and identity in contemporary America, Holloway’s style mixes the drug-fuelled escapades of Hunter S. Thompson with the subversive flair of Colson Whitehead. But despite being original and inventive, Bindlestiff is sometimes too ambitious for its own good. The manic mishmash of genres and self-referential flourishes is not executed as adeptly as it could be. Nevertheless, this is a fresh, riotous and innovative novel, published by a small press who clearly have an eye for exciting new ventures in contemporary fiction.

[Tom Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this is a really great look at the versions of yourself which you want to present versus the ones you’re allowed to under the guise of palatability. At times it tries to do a bit too much, though, and I feel there was space for longer chapters which really explore some of the transitory elements of adaptation that it gets into

[Lulu]

Thought-provocative and thrilling read.