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  • Traveling Carnival
  • John Stazinski (bio)
The Taste of Penny. Jeff Parker. Dzanc Books. http://www.dzancbooks.org. 173 pages; cloth, $16.95.

Late this summer, the blogosphere was all atwitter over an article on The Huffington Post that claimed to reveal the fifteen most overrated contemporary American writers. Both well-known and lesser-known writers took a whipping. Each was given an exemplary sentence or line, followed by a paragraph dedicated to tearing it apart. It is an old and tired argument, an attempt maybe to do to contemporary writing what Mark Twain did to James Fenimore Cooper. But here, of course, the target is too easy, a bull's-eye painted on the broad side of a barn, cluttered with the limp-hanging arrows of B. R. Myers.

Couched in that argument, though, was an even more tedious one, one that any MFA candidate in the last thirty years has confronted. The post's author blames MFA programs for the popularity of what he considers mediocre writing. The fashionable writers, he claims, are those whom MFA students can most easily imitate. This is the same thesis from two decades ago that said MFA programs weren't producing original work; they were churning out "workshop stories." Back then it was Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Ann Beattie whom everyone copied. Now, apparently, it's Denis Johnson and Aimee Bender. It's a silly position. Imitation is always the first form of art; museums are full of students sitting cross-legged and superior, copying the lines of Pablo Picasso on a sketch pad, the young saxophonist wears out her copy of Giant Steps (1960) trying to find John Coltrane's tone, and the beginning writer mimics the sentences of his first inspiration. Eventually, the artist finds a unique voice or gives up trying.

Jeff Parker's first story collection, The Taste of Penny, is a perfect example of this. Parker is a writer who wears his influences proudly. The stories here wouldn't exist without Barry Hannah and Donald Barthelme (both MFA workhorses too often forgotten by those who want to bash the creative writing farm system). But these stories are entirely Parker's own. Like Hannah and Barthelme, Parker mines that thin vein of heartbreak that only exists in the absurdly comic. His gift is in combining and distilling these influences so that the collection feels like a trip through a traveling carnival, each story a ride whose flashing lights distract hypnotically from the danger and speed.

Parker's worlds are always comically off kilter. In the title story, the main character, Sam, accidentally swallows a penny during a DUI stop. He believes having the coin in him disturbs the Breathalyzer enough to let him pass. Sam, like most of Parker's characters, is a mix of neuroses and diffidence, pathetic but lovable. He runs a failing company that hauls away people's garbage and is obsessed with the hideousness of his own fingers, which he marinates in hot sauce to keep himself from gnawing on them. As the penny works its way through his body, it too becomes an object of Sam's obsession, a shiny little symbol of what's wrong with him.

Sam quickly finds himself at odds with another company, Two Men and a Truck, who have started a kind of flyer war, pasting their own photocopied advertisements over Sam's on grocery store bulletin boards. Sam in retaliation calls in a fake job to Two Men and a Truck, an expensive waste of time for his competition. But because none of Parker's characters are particularly bright, Sam does not have the forethought to imagine caller ID, and the story pushes toward a confrontation between Sam and the ex-cops who run the other company.

In the meantime, Sam's downstairs neighbor subtly tells him that from her apartment she can hear him masturbating; the conversation opens an unlikely and humorous dialogue. Later, during a "severe weather" warning, they both hide in the basement of the apartment complex and become entangled in an awkward and ridiculous love scene. The girl asks Sam to touch her, but Sam says that he doesn't "do touch...

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