Satirical, strange ‘Romie Futch’ questions modern age wisdom
FICTION
‘The New and Improved Romie Futch’
By Julia Elliott
Tin House
$15.95, 400 pages
A year after his divorce, fortysomething Roman “Romie” Futch isn’t faring much better than the bucks and mallards he stuffs for a living. Pining for his ex-wife, Helen, has left the small-town taxidermist hollowed out, with a fractured heart and guts stuck in a “pickle bath” of booze and pills. Even his heavy-metal mane has wilted to a pathetic ponytail.
Thus begins “The New and Improved Romie Futch,” Julia Elliott’s genre-hopping debut novel. As in “The Wilds,” her odd and funny story collection that made several “Best of 2014” lists, the author blends heady reflections on futuristic biotechnology with lowbrow goofiness and lots of good, old-fashioned Gothic strangeness. The speculative stuff may be fun and freaky, but the book hits its most authentic notes in describing the anxieties Gen Xers face when middle age approaches.
Romie’s reprieve from his downward spiral comes via an internet ad that asks, “Have you ever dreamed of being a genius?” Lured by the promise of easy cash and a chance to win Helen back, he heads into the “honking, dingy” cluster of Atlanta to find the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience. He and a crew of fellow has-beens serve as guinea pigs for an experiment involving nanobots and “biocomputer transmitters.” After a few weeks of information downloads, Romie and the other lab rats are “clumped at our own elite table, gibbering spastically, our speech peppered with polysyllables and arcane academic cant.”
This premise of artificially heightened intelligence may bring to mind “Flowers for Algernon,” but the similarities to Daniel Keyes end there. Elliott pitches the test subjects’ new, high-falutin’ conversations on topics like “Death in Venice” or Nabokov almost perfectly, equal parts dissertation and “Duck Dynasty.” You can hear a persistent echo of George Saunders in the author’s edgy, jargon-laced prose. The non sequiturs and appetite for absurdity evoke the seriocomedies of Tom Robbins or the druggy candor of Hunter S. Thompson.
Romie’s metamorphosis from bubba to brainiac takes up the first third of the book, just long enough for interest to wane in the nefarious lab setting. His return to South Carolina finds him sober (sort of) and practicing Ashtanga yoga, but the adjustment doesn’t come easily even with a “revamped brain.” The downloads from the lab leave him with headaches and fainting spells, which often segue into extended flashbacks to childhood or his early years of marriage. Elliott digs deep into the “trans-bio ectoplasm” of memory and comes out with the early 1980s nostalgia machine on full throttle. These scenes almost burst at the seams with recollections of the complicated politics of couples skates at roller rinks, “Solid Gold” dancers, half-forgotten Rush cassettes, Revco stores and riding in Camaros. Romie and his gang of “bachelors of a certain age” wax poetic about their lost youth: “We changed the subject, talked about our high school hesher days, those sweet years back at the butt end of another century, before the Human Genome Project geared up and nanotechnology took off, back before the Internet had colonized our minds.”
Intent on rekindling his dormant teenage dream of becoming a sculptor, Romie starts building “absurdist animatronic taxidermic dioramas” by bagging mutant forest animals near a toxic waste disposal site.
The grotesque one-eyed possums and albino frogs underscore the novel’s greater interest in “the poisons of civilization.” As Romie puts it, “Like most twenty-first-century Americans, I was used to drug commercials featuring beautiful women frolicking through fields of sunflowers, high on the latest antidepressant, beatific and radiant despite warnings of blurred vision, decreased libido, and spastic colon.” We’re told that Helen’s father killed himself by swallowing pesticide samples. Romie’s dad fears that “the jungle” of weeds and vines will creep inside and eat him.
And there’s plenty to fear in nature, it turns out. Nearby states have seen an epidemic of feral hog attacks, Romie learns. Accounts of the “porcine demons” tell of a half-ton Hogzilla “goring poodles with his mammoth tusks.” His interest in the cryptid explodes into obsession: “A sacred feeling washed over me, akin to the time Ahab got wind of that legendary albino Moby-Dick.” The analogy proves to be prescient.
Elliott, who teaches English at the University of South Carolina, makes clever use of references to Herman Melville and another Romantic author, Mary Shelley. In one of his more enjoyable outbursts, Romie declares, “With slavering gusts of animal rage, I wrote — howling like a wolf, bellowing like a patchwork creature composed of stinking corpse parts … I was alive!”
The word “patchwork” seems appropriate for this far-reaching, sprawling novel, a work that the author says sprung from “from a failed short story that was too big for its britches.” At almost 400 pages, the britches here still feel stretched to the point of straining. Trimming the laboratory discourse and some fat from the Hogzilla chapters might’ve helped.
It’s curious that the novel should arrive right when “Frankenstein” and “Moby-Dick” are returning in high-profile Hollywood releases. Like those relics of Romanticism, “The New and Improved Romie Futch” contemplates the challenges of maintaining an identity when society is in flux. This slapstick satire of present-day angst threatens to lose its own thesis as the chapters pile up, flexing the muscles of hardy prose but asking the reader to keep stretching their disbelief. The brilliant spectacle almost works, even after the pigs start flying.
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