[REVIEW] Infinity's Jukebox by Matthew Burnside

32 pages, $4

Review by Corey Pentoney

Matthew Burnside’s newest collection of short stories is, in a word, a trip. A trip into the tentatively constructed heart of a boy who’s trying to understand his father, a trip into the remnants of what love means to a man who lost his wife, a trip to the very heart of literature. The beautiful thing is that you’re not alone on your journey. You have the jukebox to guide you. It wasn’t until I finished the last story, “Literary Short Story: A Mad Lib,” that I began to understand the purpose of the inward-spiraling epigraph and the nickel that is glued in the center. “To replay human existence—fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?” he writes. Almost every story in this collection felt strangely familiar to me, but with an odd and often beautifully compelling twist.

For example, the first story, “Passengers,” quickly calls to mind the drug-fueled rambling adventures of Hunter S. Thompson, but just when you begin to say “I’ve heard this all before,” Burnside hits you over the head with an iron skillet to remind you that you haven’t, to take a closer look. Sometimes he achieves this with sentences as blunt instruments, the proverbial punches at the end of the story to make you rethink what you just read. Sometimes, and I believe more successfully, he brought me around with a stunning turn of phrase or detail that left me spinning like a coin on the countertop. My favorite story in the collection, “On the Benefits of a Lego Heart…,” achieves this by offering a unique glance into a familiar landscape: the heart of the abandoned child. This phrase at the end: “the way anything good could only ever be bought with equal but opposite suffering,” forced me to pause and re-evaluate the entire story. “Revival” does much the same for a man who has lost his wife, and is looking to escape his pain with a woman with “tarantula eyelashes” and a “tomahawk gaze.”

I admire Burnside’s creativity, but I found that sometimes it bordered on incomprehensible. “Procession of the Dogface Lepers,” had me stumped, besides a seeping feeling of loss and melancholy. “Pan’s Lobotomy,” never seemed to get where it was going, as all the characters appear to be trapped in a mind plagued by drugs. But perhaps that was the point. Regardless, the stories remained entertaining in the sense Michael Chabon says writers must strive for: to engage the reader in a conversation in one way or another. To communicate. To make you think.

Burnside manages, at his best, to be prosaic and inspiring, and, at his worst, engaging. Never was I bored as I read Infinity’s Jukebox. An author who displays his quirkiness on the page as freely as Burnside does is not only rare, but hard to pass up. I look forward to seeing how he—and his writing—grow, and if I had to do it all over again, I’d gladly push the nickel into the slot and give myself over to the tide of Burnside’s playlist.

***

Corey Pentoney is currently an English adjunct at Jefferson Community College who enjoys chasing snowflakes through starlit evenings and imagining what kind of meat they serve in the afterlife. If he had a million dollars, he would spend it on building and making the world’s biggest waffle.