Confidence Man

by Anthony Dragonetti

Fall lockstep in line with the new faith of frisson, the new New York noise, the hypermodern literature, dispatches of the zoning, medicated mind, the crystal clean conscience, the pathologically hygienic, dietetic, horny male mammal, freighted by ambition, informed by grief and trauma, addicted to creature comforts and committed to fitness, stability and speed. What Anthony Dragonetti has fashioned is no less than a permanent answer to the Lishite school of consecution and craft. A deliberate show of writerly finesse and agility that subverts readerly expectations with exacting cruelty. A poignant meditation on loss, on parasocial relationship dynamics. An anti memoir. Open your heart to the hypnagogic masses getting killed out there in the gig economy. In eighteen stories, dialogue zig zags like radio interference, engrossing textures seduce. A calming voice, Anthony Dragonetti has savored the zeitgeist, distilled social ills and malaise, captured the lens flare and shuffling of perspectives, the chaotic mental tug of war, concocted a bad batch of antidote. Ingest at your own pace, miss at your peril, let it massage and depress your meridians and linger in the limen. Anthony Dragonetti’s CONFIDENCE MAN is a novel/short fiction collection hybrid with one of the most compelling narrators to shatter the fourth wall and tickle the proverbial earworm, a rolling snare. The nature of persona and practiced systematic living is confronted with lucid humanity.

CONFIDENCE MAN is good medicine. Get banged up, fucked up with a dash of thunder peal poetics and majestic prose, fill the holes in your life with this truth: CONFIDENCE MAN is a debut to lace all future American literary tropes with its singular style and invective. A bludgeoning. A reckoning for the American dream.

Genres: Fiction

134 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2020

Reviews

[Maggie Siebert · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it in one go and could focus on little else. this is a very special book, an unsparing anxiety portrait and chronicling of all-too-human misdeeds. read it

[brigid masaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn’t put it down. Confidence Man punches way above its weight class with soft-spoken prose both anxiety inducing and wistful, interspersed with deeply human moments of agony and outrage. A book you’ll lose an evening to, ain’t nothing you can do about it. Really special.

[Keith [on semi hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think we've found our successor to the contemporary New York City writing scene...

[Daniel Eastman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short bursts of manic depression and murderous rage.

[Jason Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

When someone is struck and killed by a bus in one of these stories, it feels like a moment of solace. Behold, the horrors of youth: A metaphysical trenchwork of loneliness and second guessing and self-flagellation and pain. Every facet of existence is tainted--the physical, the emotional, the spiritual. Pain both real and imagined. Pain that seemingly transcends--and even gains strength--past the boundaries of death, past the spirit's facility to interpret the ordeal. Whatever obligation there is for us to persevere feels like grim sarcasm, an arrangement we are free to detest, since we never explicitly agreed to it. There's some solace there--resistance, for resistance's sake. And yet, over time it becomes more and more difficult to resist without identifying an enemy. Despising an advertising job where the chief hardship appears to be a culture of dumb, empty-headed optimism; vigils for deceased family and friends whose spirits loom large enough that they occasionally challenge us from beyond the grave; managing, beneath a haze of medication, a web of arcane technologies that have replaced relationships and made caricatures of otherwise relatively straightforward social constructs. This is nothing like war, where it seems by comparison easy to find empathy and some narrative of redemption. Technology has solved many of our problems, and delivered us into new ones. Like, for example, an inability to recognize what is real. What is happening. An anxious character, having turned to the internet in pursuit of a disease to fit his likely spurious collection of symptoms, must turn to a Google search to corroborate for him what the term "clay colored" means--like, visually. What color is clay? It's fascinating and relatable, and maybe not a problem we had 20 years ago, though impossible to say. And even this thought is another dead end in the labyrinth of emotional self-abuse we sometimes live inside; in one story, a bunch of squirrels get into a house and can't find their way back out. It's an apt metaphor, and a reminder of the way physical reality can redirect us, even when it too has a propensity for being kind of awful. But at least it's real. It's happening.

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. Deep breath. Count to ten. Think happy thoughts. Or, at least, not suicidal ones. Focus on something concrete; something meaningful. Whatever might tether you to the ground; to the world. Maybe pop a pill if they're handy. Maybe swirl them all down the drain. Does it really matter? Does anything? This is the general mood flashing across the 18 short stories that comprise Anthony Dragonetti's Confidence Man, a collection that drops you into the detached, monochrome-dead center of 21st century male depression, and then whirls around you like a disorienting, strobelit tilt-a-whirl full of the happily screaming unafflicted. It's not entirely clear if all these stories are about the same person - the titular Confidence Man - so much as a shifty archetype of modern masculine malaise (the author has referred to them as an anti-memoir), but as you move along, adjusting to their impatient, disinterested pace, they begin to stitch themselves together and slip over your head like a kidnapper's burlap bag - a wearable ride to the dark side.

"The Birthday Party", told via the half-informed perspectives of childhood, plays like a slow-developing snapshot of a family locked into a macabre annual tradition. "Old Damage" jumps forward to a support group adulthood recalling teenage wounds, encapsulating in a scant 3 pages the harsh realities that, sooner or later, turn us all into unreliable narrators of our own lives. "Manifesting," again clocking in at barely 3 pages, scales down to a pinprick the internal rage slow-roasting beneath the sidewalks of everyday existence - hyperfocusing on one indefensible decision - a moment torn off its hinges - and demands you ask of yourself what your rage might be capable of. "The Passenger," by contrast, feels almost like an atonement - a ride-or-die guide to reverse engineering your self-destruct impulses for good. The tour de force title story appears to glide through its predecessors like a guardian angel - perhaps the author himself - and we watch as the final iteration of the Confidence Man gives each of his traumas one last tight squeeze, before releasing them to the past for good. If there is hope for a better tomorrow in these pages - or at least for a consistently manageable and replicable "today" - it's to be found here.

In addition to his unpredictable leaps between age, place, and perspective, Dragonetti also experiments with form to memorable effect - including a disturbing evening recounted piecemeal through hungover dialogue, an exploration of memoric pain expressed through the language of computer prompts, and a literal one-sided conversation between a man and his psychiatrist. These are stories written (no pun intended) with real confidence, from a writer who has clearly put in the hours in the name of making the minutes it takes to read them count. For as scattered as these tight-coiled, hard-compacted tales can sometimes feel - like a pell-mell asteroid field crashing against itself in the violence of the void - there is a force of will that holds them together, and ultimately conducts them to coalesce into a more livable world. For anyone battered by that struggle in the day-to-day - and in today's day-to-day that increasingly feels like all of us - Confidence Man is a tearaway joyride worth taking. Just slip Dragonetti's blackout bag over your head, feel the RPM's climb past 5,000 beneath your feet, and let him take you where you didn't even know you needed to go.

[Toilet Sweat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overconfidence, ma’am. That’s what done clogged your plumbing. You can’t cut timber this thick and expect to flush without a fork and a knife. Breaks my heart, but this mudskipper ain’t going nowhere. He’s a fighter. You’re gonna have to say a prayer and hold tight. In the meantime, piss on it.

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minimalism isn’t the word when the book packs maximum feeling. It’s not minimalism as much as it is... a resigned realism that reeks of hope.

[Matthew Birt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories from a wound, a trauma, a loss. Longing for connection but stayed by fear.

[Mark Broesamle · Rating 2 out of 5]

all the hallmarks of a first book. when you want to be dostoevsky, but you’ve never faced a firing squad