Steel Drivin’ Man

Joe Amato’s Big Man with a Shovel is a retelling of the John Henry folklore as if Jean Toomer wrote it. With an alternating structure of screenwriting-style tough guy dialogue, loose poetry, and prose that shifts from painfully academic to playfully digressive, the novella (clocking in at 160 pages) owes a great deal to the pathway cleared by Toomer. The results are hit and miss.

In the prose sections, Amato’s writing truly shines, particularly in a strange section where the year 1965 feels as if it becomes a character in the book. The section could have come across as a mere Wikipedia-style entry on 1965 factoids, but the inexplicably long list of events, TV shows, cultural icons, etc. of the era leave one firmly grounded in time if not place while simultaneously creating what Gregory Orr likes to call an “incantatory effect.”

When the comma-filled section builds to its finale, the word “antipoverty” and the full paragraph sentence “The term affirmative-action dates back to 1965” leave the reader with an unspoken understanding that the novella is firmly about class struggle, exemplified in the Mamet-like, if one-note, working class dialogue and prosaic fixation on the laborer.

This pension for listing continues throughout the book’s un-indented paragraphs, sometimes to exhaustion, sometimes to mysterious poetic beauty:

We’ll use whatever we can to get our points across: a sledge, pyrotechnics, a [yawn], a rider, a still, a tin ear, JFK’s “great enemy of truth” (1962, at Yale), two parallel lines that converge in the distance. A lick in the balls. A high carbon footprint. The feminization of knowledge work. Écriture flying trapeze. Karaoke Magnets.

Even, dear lord, your cooperation.

And Amato’s style demands cooperation from the reader. Consistently meta-, Amato pulls out all of the postmodern tricks of fragmentation, pastiche, black humor/irony/playfulness, both maximalism and minimalism, and especially poioumenon. The fourth wall isn’t broken. It doesn’t exist in Big Man. Amato pulls the reader out of the narrative so many times that the act of being pulled out of narrative is the narrative.

And part of that narrative is, oddly enough, Amato thoroughly laying out for the reader the novella’s problems. Amato does this in more than one section, explaining the “male gendering stuff” that gets to be a bit old by book’s end or the way that the “work is uneven, ragged even, perhaps deliberately so.”

Near the novella’s end, Amato has the book’s editor (a character in the book), point out, “I get the distinct impression that this writerneedsto turn his narrative inside out.” What this means is that Amato refuses the popular fiction techniques that seem to have such a strong connection in the book purchasing (when it does exist) of working class readers and instead Amato embraces a bourgeois experimental literary style adored by, say, more elite creative writing faculty readers—in other words the story structure that Robert McKee would label as Antiplot. McKee has problems with those who choose the Antiplot structure, arguing in his classic book Story (1997) that “there is no emotional movement” for the audience with such a story structure. My response to reading Big Man with a Shovel was similar; I had no emotional connection to the text, but I did have a strong intellectual response.

The disembodied dialogue throughout could have used bodies, i. e. real character-defining actions where we get a sense of who’s behind the voices with their all-too-similar hyper-masculine bravado (with sprinklings of cliché racist/misogynist interjection that will have some readers wincing and other readers clammering about the realities of such language in whiteboy working class conversations).

Nothing risked, nothing gained. And Amato takes some real chances with the novella, even if too many of those chances fall so neatly into choices that postmodern-loving authors have paved before, but the book does give the sense of an author struggling to do something deeper than what is typically found on...