Review: "The One-Eyed Man" by Ron Currie

After giving it some thought, I can’t think of a living writer who so effortlessly and covertly blends together sadness and humor like Ron Currie. Like an easier to swallow David Foster Wallace, he presents people, men most of the time, who find themselves ousted from a world that they either don’t understand or doesn’t understand them. They struggle to find a place in the world and get their voices heard; usually losing friends, lovers and pints of blood in the process and Currie documents this with a humorous yet un-ironic emphatic streak that make his stories very funny and very moving. His most recent novel, The One-Eyed Man, sort of completes a little bit of trilogy on the process of grieving, another human emotion that he seems to have mastered in novel form. His first novel, Everything Matters, dealt specifically with the end of the world, his second novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, where Currie, casting himself as the main character and fakes his own death, had sections dedicated to his dying father and in this novel, about a pathological know it all who might have a death wish has the death of the protagonist’s wife as a driving force behind the novel’s ever escalating action (I see a pattern of the grief forming at more and more intimate places, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Currie’s next book has the author staring down his own death). It is typical for a book like this to have a strange opening, and it does, since a broken crosswalk sign triggers all of the book’s main action. As K, our narrator, waits for the sign to go that will never come, he witnesses a robbery in progress of the coffee shop he has just exited. He knocks on the window and the perp, instead of shooting the scared barista, he shoots K instead. We soon find out the kind of person K is through what brought him to that coffee house in the first place. After the death of his wife from a long bout with breast cancer, he becomes obsessed with finding meaning in life, to the point where the label on a bottle of hand soap and bumper sticker on the car of a xenophobe will lead to hostility and violence. This habit of his is made public as he accepts an award for bravery, and through that, him and Claire, a disillusioned woman 10 years younger than him, become reality TV stars in a world that is increasingly hostile to their ideas being question, one that is out of whack and terrifyingly real. K is hard character to like, but next to someone like his producer Theodore, he is the voice of reason this odd world deserves. The book moves along smoothly, getting more aggressive and scary, and when the book’s main characters find themselves in a hale of apocalyptic gunfire, it makes sense and feels appropriate, as does the somber ending, which lets us know that sometimes, we have to rely on hope to get through life. This is powerful stuff disguised as screwball antics and bouts of shocking violence, and few do it better than Ron Currie.

Rating: 5/5