[REVIEW] I Am Currently Working on a Novel, by Rolli

200 pages, $21.95

Rolli understands the public opinion of flash fiction as a lesser literary genre. For evidence, look no further than the cover of his latest collection, I Am Currently Working on a Novel. Drawn by the author himself, who is also an accomplished illustrator and cartoonist, the cover shows a tombstone beneath a starry night with the book’s title engraved as an epitaph. It’s a joke that will hit home with any practitioner of an underappreciated art form and the first of many nods to the writers among his audience.

Rolli’s eccentric, whimsical stories exhibit a style and a brand of comedy all his own. “Candy Island,” begins like this: “In case you’ve ever wondered, all us missing kids aged two to six wind up on Candy Island. Candy Island sounds great. But it isn’t. It’s a big, scary island. There are lizards bigger than me. We lost three kids last week.”

This is the way Rolli’s stories operate. One sentence establishes a narrative, a certain plot that readers can see playing out, and then the next sentence turns the first on its head. He pivots and changes directions without a moment’s notice, keeping readers from falling into a comfort zone or slipping into autopilot. There’s an incessant energy here that could be exhausting in a longer format but fits very well in these tiny stories.

In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Stuart Dybek, a contemporary champion of flash fiction, raves about the dynamic qualities of flash, but warns against “too much carte blance. You never want to enter the territory where you think, ‘Well, I can write anything and get away with it.’” Surely that exact thought has crossed Rolli’s mind. Rolli’s writing has a brazen, uninhibited quality that often makes for wonderful, imaginative stories, yet that same freedom sometimes leads him astray.

Take “There’s a Swan in My Scrotum,” for example. The premise is right there in the title. It’s not a clever misdirection. The swan, as you might imagine, causes a myriad of problems for its host, yet the young man develops a sense of pride about his bird. It might be a painful, terrible curse, but it’s his painful, terrible curse. Ownership breeds affection. It’s a theme that’s been beaten into the ground, only perhaps never in such a bizarre fashion. “Life is kind of shitty,” the narrator determines, “but it can be beautiful, too.”

With over seventy flash fictions in I Am Currently Working on a Novel, the few lesser stories get lost amidst a pool of witty, playful ones. In “Thumbs,” a one-pager, the protagonist abruptly performs a self-amputation of his thumbs. “I didn’t appreciate until I didn’t have thumbs. Doors closed. I could close doors but not open them. I got trapped in our bathroom.” Wonderful, how Rolli can poke fun at his own metaphor.

Light and funny on the surface, this story is ripe with ideas about human nature. Rolli toys with our innate resistance toward stability and comfort. It’s that old, strange notion that a life without suffering is somehow less authentic than a tortured existence. And here is another nod to his fellow writers. How often are we told, explicitly or by example, that good writing is the product of suffering? That the prescription for better writing is always more suffering. That only through suffering can you have a meaningful experience. In less than a hundred words, Rolli puts this silly idea to rest.

There is much to love about this collection for a general audience, but these stories will be most rewarding for Rolli’s fellow writers and artists. Self-referential writing is frowned upon by literary snobs, much in the same way serious readers sneer at genre fiction, but is it really such a bad thing? Writers make up a remarkable portion of the reading pool, especially in the small press world. You don’t want to be completely insular, producing art only accessible or meaningful to other artists, but is it wrong to cater to your peers from time to time? Surely not.

***

Thomas Michael Duncan writes fiction, fact, reviews, and the occasional bit of nonsense. He lives with his wife in Lexington, South Carolina.