GUEST REVIEW (AND INTERVIEW): THE BOY DETECTIVE FAILS

The Boy Detective Fails
By Joe Meno
Punk Planet Books
328 pp. (paperback)
$14.05

GUEST REVIEW BY JIM RULAND

Joe Meno is going to get me fired, maybe. After hearing Joe read an excerpt from his novel Hairstyles of the Damned at the first ever Vermin on the Mount, I decided to incorporate a section in my composition classes. The episode I chose features a confrontation between a motherless punk rocker with impulse control issues and a model-beautiful student body president who thinks she knows everything. The confrontation is built up to such a degree that when the two finally bump into each other in the hallway it’s like Mothra meeting Godzilla. The words exchanged between the two girls are so filthy that I can’t bring myself to quote them here, much less repeat them in class.

When the day comes when a horrified parent demands an explanation this is what I’ll say: Joe Meno writes about the rollercoaster that is adolescence with an intensity that speaks to the emotional truth of the situation. The characters may not be likable, but they are as real as they come.

Meno doesn’t disappoint in his new novel from the Akashic imprint, Punk Planet Books, The Boy Detective Fails. Meno’s fifth book and fourth novel opens with a lengthy vignette from the boy detective’s career as a child crime-solver. Bill Argo, along with his sister Caroline and his best friend Fenton, solved a number of improbable crimes that fall somewhere between Scooby Doo and Encyclopedia Brown. When Billy goes off to college to study criminal law, his sister commits suicide. Billy’s inability to solve the mystery of her death drives him to the brink of insanity and he is sent to St. Vitus Institute for the Infirmed and Mentally Ill.

The story picks up ten years later. Billy is 30 years old and still hasn’t gotten over his sister’s death, but now he must deal with the real world. He moves into Shady Glens Facility for Mental Competence and is enlisted by a pair of neighborhood kids, Effie and Gus Mumford to help them find the killer of their pet bunny Mumford. It sounds like an after-school special drenched in irony, but Meno plays it straight and for an astonishing 330 plus pages we follow the adventures of the self-doubting, Ativan-popping detective, and an all-pervasive sadness hangs over the novel.

He follows the strange darkened path past the Jolly Roger roller coaster—now only a wire catastrophe, its schooner-shaped cars leaning crowded against a crushed snow cone machine.

This isn’t a loss-of-innocence novel; it’s a novel about how to deal when your innocence has been smashed to smithereens.

Some of the mysteries are solved (the case of the brown bunny, the case of the vanishing lady) some aren’t (Why are buildings all over the city disappearing? Why does snow fall whenever Billy flips a switch inside his room?). The solutions, however, are seldom as interesting as the mysteries, yet The Boy Detective Fails is worth reading for the ruminations on the nature of evil. When Billy asks his nemesis, Professor Von Golum, why people do evil things, he responds:

We are immoral by design, and so when we act evilly, we are only revealing our most basic selves, the simplest, most convenient action, to fend for oneself and oneself only. To do right—to act justly, the put the needs of someone else above your own—now that is an act of true mystery. It is completely unnatural—a gigantic step beyond the jungle instincts of man and a leap into the unknown wisdom of silent grace which lurks, harbored in the small vessel of mankind, within us all.

It’s poignant because it’s true, and that’s a lot scarier than any ghost.

Quiztunes for Joe Meno:

Did you know you're the reason for Vermin on the Mount? That without you, Joe, Los Angeles would be verminless?
I had no idea. It’s something I’m proud of now. I think it’s great you’ve managed to keep a reading series like that going. There are so many cities, big cities like Philadelphia or Washington DC, that really struggle to have any kind of literary scene. As a writer, it’s a lot easier to go somewhere like Portland or Seattle or New York, because there’s this built-in audience who is used to going to readings. A lot of time, people come to shows and they’re really terrified because they’ve never been to a reading before. They think that you’re going to be condescending or overly intellectual, that they’re not going to “get it.” Everything we’re doing at readings is about wanting to make a connection to the people who show up, putting on a show the way the best bands you’ve ever seen put on a show.

Why did you tell Judith Regan to suck it in the acknowledgements section of Hairstyles of the Damned?
I talked a lot of about this when Hairstyles came out and I don’t want to seem like I’m still complaining about the same thing but: Judith Regan personifies what is wrong in book publishing and corporate media in general. She got her start in publishing at the National Enquirer and was then hired to do Drew Barrymore’s autobiography and it was a big success and publishers began putting out a glut of tell-all books by TV and film stars, all of which sold incredibly well. She is responsible for a kind of book culture where books are now aimed at women who read fashion magazines and men who watch professional wrestling. Which is fine. I think there ought to be books for everybody. But what’s happened is that these books, these very commercial, celebrity books are far outselling fiction and serious non-fiction and so now the whole system is geared towards profit instead of merit, publishing the literary equivalent of Entertainment Tonight. I think books change people’s lives. I understand they are a product but they shouldn’t be seen as interchangeable with magazines and TV. In the end, do we want books that ask questions or books that repeat the same information we are already being bombarded with? Do you want a culture of sameness, of monotony, or do we want media that challenges us? I want to write books unlike other books I see out there.

Few writers capture the language of adolescence like you do. Is this something you consciously strive for or is it something that comes naturally to you?
I hope all the dialogue I write sounds natural, not just the adolescent characters. I think adolescents make great characters because they’re between worlds, and the best characters in literature are usually between a number of worlds. Their language reflects that. It’s dramatic and awkward and has a certain sound that seems really interesting to me. After writing Hairstyles, I don’t think I’ll be returning to those characters for some time. In my new book, The Boy Detective Fails, there are a couple of younger kids, and their language is pretty fun; Effie is an eleven-year-old science fair genius, and so her way of talking is very shy but very intelligent. Her younger brother, Gus, has taken a vow of silence and speaks with notes he carries around. The notes are very detailed, though, and so his language is very exaggerated, too.

The boy detective grows up in a town with a plastics factory. Is this the same factory that appears in one of your stories in Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir?
When I was nineteen, I worked in a plastics factory in southern Illinois for about six months. It was, without a doubt, the worst, most depressing job in my life. For some reason, plastic factories always seem to appear in my stories. So yeah, I guess it’s always the same factory even when it’s not. The other thing, in this new book, that was important was the sense of place, a kind of crumbling, post-industrial town, like Patterson, New Jersey, where you can see the skeletons of these factories along the skyline. There is something very sad and very American about that image to me.

What is your all-time favorite young adult novel? (If you have more then one, maybe the one that was essential when you were young, and one that you love even more now)
Of course the book that I read when I was a teenager that changed my life was Catcher in the Rye. I went to an all-boys Catholic school and I had the unique feeling that it had been written for me. The other one would have to be The Outsiders, which S. E. Hinton wrote when she was like seventeen or something crazy like that.

You've toured with Todd Taylor before. Have you ever seen him misbehave in some wild or embarrassing way?
I’ve toured with Todd twice before and you would think that spending like every waking moment with someone for a week at a time, there would be something embarrassing happening every couple of hours, but Todd is like one of the most balanced people I ever met. To that point, once we were driving from San Jose to Portland, which is a long drive, up through the mountains, and out of nowhere it started to snow, and I mean snow, like blizzard snow. It was a total whiteout. Todd was driving and was the most calm person I ever saw. Instead of pulling over, he just kind of got really quiet and drove right through it. I was in the passenger seat thinking “We are so dead” and Todd just asked me to put something rocking in the CD player, so I chose Rocket from the Crypt’s “Live from Camp X-Ray” and he drove the whole way through the storm like that. I think of that moment any time I hear a song from that record.

Next: Todd Taylor’s Shirley Wins

Comments

[denise hamilton]

i wish i could go to to VOTM tonight!! I'm dying to meet Joe. Hairstyles was the funniest most poignant book I read all last year. The scene where the plastic bags filled with yellow stuff get chucked around at football stars made me spit out my coffee. The whole book was just brilliant and pitch perfect. i haven't yet read Boy Detective, looking foward to it.
Denise

[dusti chuang]

I chose "Boy Detective" for my neighborhood book club's October selection, and I'm looking forward to our discussion.