[REVIEW] The Fun We’ve Had, by Michael Seidlinger

Lazy Fascist Press

168 pages, $11.95

Review by Joseph Michael Owens

It’s nearly impossible to imagine Michael Seidlinger’s pen ever stopping. He’s already published more books than the majority of writers are likely to in their whole careers. The key feature of nearly everything Seidlinger writes is that it’s almost certainly guaranteed to be different than the last book he wrote. The only constant in Seidlinger’s writing—besides the shining quality of the prose—is change. Indeed, the only given is that he doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

There’s often a feeling of uncanny detachment between the reader and Seidlinger’s work. It has a tendency to draw you in and allows you to only get precisely as close as Seidlinger wants you to, to see the work at a specific distance that he’s determined. Like an expert filmmaker, Michael Seidlinger is the writer, director, cameraman, and producer of these written scenes. 

Matthew Revert’s fantastic cover art actually does a great job setting up The Fun We’ve Had. There’s a strange old man who looks a little like an undertaker and a young woman—lovers, we come to find out—adrift upon an assuredly large (and probably endless) body of water…afloat, adrift in a coffin. You don’t get—nor, would I argue, do you need—any more setup than that.

Surface turned murky, upsetting the balance, screaming out different voices, all of which, sounding together, from his ears could only sound like an incoming storm…. Soon, he thought, the coffin would sink. They would have to swim. Maybe, he worried that he wouldn’t know how to swim when the time came. Maybe he’d sink to the bottom. Who would sink first? Him or her?

Two entities afloat in a vessel upon the sea rings bells reminiscent of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, but the similarities between the two novels pretty much end there. Elements of Pi’s spirituality are replaced with gallows humor and philosophical musings. Where the reader is forced to take the word of Pi in Martel’s unfolding narrative, the POV in The Fun We’ve Had stays nicely balanced between the older man and young woman.

Fittingly, author Peter Tieryas Liu (Bald New World and Watering Heaven) recently wrote, “Seidlinger’s works are like rogue waves that wipe away expectations, draupners that decimate, devour, and envelope.” This is so very true, and then some. Seidlinger expertly layers in metaphors with care and affection to produce a story about relationships that—like the endless sea—has immeasurable depth. The iceberg analogy, while fitting, might be a bit too obvious here, however. The amount of empathic detail and pathos the reader is treated to are elements often lost in even the best experimental fiction. Seidlinger seems to easily tread the line between genuine mastery and solipsism that’s rare this side—the mortal side—of Murakami and Calvino.

The only way to rouse her would be to admit what they’d have to do.

“I love you,” in this case, meant letting go.

Seidlinger toys with readers’ expectations and common conceptions of what minimalism really is. There is not much actual dialog, the setting is spartan, and we’re forced to spend most of the time between the covers of this book viewing the narrative through the lens of the narrator. Yet despite this dearth of filler information, Seidlinger manages to produce a story that feels fully-featured, realized. The two characters don’t even have names. But really, what would a name even matter when you might as well be the last two people alive? In 185 pages, Seidlinger only gives the reader what’s truly needed, and not a syllable more.

Let yourself be immersed in the prose here. The story unfolds in a rhythmic way that’s not unlike rolling waves in water beneath you. Let yourself be inundated and then washed away in Seidlinger’s endless sea.

***

Joseph Michael Owens is the author of the ‘collectio[novella]’ Shenanigans! and has written for [PANK], The Rumpus, Specter, HTMLGiant, & others. He is also the blog editor for both InDigest Magazine and The Lit Pub. You can find him online at http://categorythirteen.com as well. Joe lives in Omaha with four dogs and one wife.