Ragged; or, the Loveliest Lies of All by Christopher Irvin
My rating: 4/5 cats
during my 2 weeks of illness, i managed to drag my lung-rattling corpse of a self out of bed exactly once – to go see this guy
read with this guy, Angel Luis Colón
at the mysterious bookshop. in the rain. the RAIN.
i may have been playing up my woe for sympathy or humor. but it was definitely woe-making to have antibiotics prevent me from enjoying the bounty of beer and wine.
overall, totally worth it. i mean, as long as i didn’t infect everyone who was there. s’everyone okay?
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a couple years back i read this author’s book Safe Inside the Violence, which i legit enjoyed even though 1) i still have a wobbly relationship with short stories and 2) it was one of those daisy-chain situations where an author-friend of his suggested it to me after i’d read his book, which had in turn been suggested to me by a different mutual author-friend and it seemed like i was crowd-surfing in a very small room. but occasionally, good things do come from being passed around a room fulla dudes: sometimes you get a son named greg, and sometimes you get to read some great books!
with one positive reading experience in his favor, when chris irvin offered me an arc of his new book, i was already predisposed towards reading it, but when i read the description, zero convincing was needed.
It’s Wind in the Willows and Fantastic Mr. Fox meet Fargo in Christopher Irvin’s signature slice-of-life crime style.
and then an ADDITIONAL blurb by paul tremblay (who is somehow also in this dude-room), name-dropping even more temptation with:
RAGGED is a vivid fever dream, mixing Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson, Watership Down, and Jim Thompson.
i would add to that list Each Day a Small Victory, which was itself called “wind in the willows meets pulp fiction,” and probably didn’t influence the writing of this book, but is another great novel about animals who talk like people but don’t feel bad about eating their neighbors.
this book has more humanity layered on top of its animal characters than that one – language is spoken, clothing is worn, and there’s a stronger sense of community, where creatures of all stripes shop at the same store, attend school together, and do feel a little bad about eating a neighbor. that’s not to say this is some richard scarry utopia where everything’s grand,
there are plenty of conflicts and resentments veining this world – a mutually-observed division between mammal and not-mammal, a disdain for the criminal class “vermin” who live in the rubbish heap on the wrong side of the river under the exiled raccoon maurice, and some pervasive species-based stereotyping, as one character needs to be reminded,
”Not everything a fox says is a lie.”
it’s just a great all-around story. it has strong characters (including sir george washington, the most badass toad of all time), and it inhabits its own brand-new genre i am calling literary crime fantasy, but there are also shades of mystery, medical thriller, and smalltown drama. the nod to Fargo is actually perfect, whether that means the movie or the show to you – it’s understated and even in tone, there’s an everymandog character who gets in over his head with some baddies, and then misunderstandings, coincidences and a series of ill-conceived secret-covering lies snowballs into consequences and regret. and some bodies, naturally. all it’s missing is the musical score.
also, and i don’t know how to write this freely without all the spoiler ninnies screeching at me, but this is the second book this year that i have read culminating in a View Spoiler » <— spoiler for this book (and linguistically inaccurate to boot), the other one being View Spoiler » <— spoiler for another book that is only a spoiler if you have already clicked the first spoiler tag, haven’t read that book, or consider “something that happens in the book” to be a spoiler, instead of its more rational and precise usage.
in any event – this book is great. you should totally read it. my only regret is that the artwork isn’t in the arc, and i’m dying to see it. chris did send me a couple of samples in an email, and cal looks like a sadder version of mcgruff.
or this statue near rock center
but i can’t wait to see all of it.
and now i have!
