Book Review: Deadpan

Deadpan follows the misadventures of a vaguely antisemitic West Virginia Buick dealer who wakes up one day transformed into the world’s most popular Jewish comedian and compelled to perform stand-up routines. Steeped in magical realism, the narrative confronts the incandescent issues of our day: identity, intolerance, tribalism and the redemptive force of humor. The novel’s unfettered comical sensibility is a vivid testament to Mark Twain’s dictum “against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” Set during the world-wide oil crises of the 1970s, the narrative alternates between locations in West Virginia, Las Vegas, Washington, Tehran, and Sinai.

Deadpan by Richard Walter will be published on March 10, 2024. Heresy Press provided an early galley for review.

I am always looking for new authors, so this independently published novel certainly hit that box. The description intrigued me enough to check it out.

The dictionary defines deadpan as "marked by or accomplished with a careful pretense of seriousness or calm detachment; impassive or expressionless". The definition applies certainly to this story. It is also a term used to describe some comedy; comedy plays a part in this story as well.

This short novel took a little bit to get into. The opening is very disorienting, providing a feeling of confusion similar to that which the protagonist Bridges is experiencing. But, with each chapter, that swirling starts to fade as details begin to present themselves. It is like one of those toy slide-puzzles we had as kids in the 70's that took a bit of work to get the pieces to start to fall into their proper place.

Don't let the length fool you; for a shorter book it packs a lot in. It does not spend time on exposition or world-building; the reader is expected to connect some of the dots themselves. The story bounces around from three or so narrative viewpoints. Where it gets tricky is that some of these take place in different time periods and different parallel worlds. There is no indicators at the start of each chapter (some books will give a name or description beneath the chapter number to differentiate things). The reader just has to get into the flow and pay a lot of attention.

In the first half, there is a chapter I really enjoyed. Bridges finds himself on a panel with four famous figures from comedy. Walter manages to perfectly nail the dialogue in this scene; I could easily hear the comedians speaking these words in their classic, iconic voices. Clearly he is a comedy fan.

In the end, the story made more sense to me. Now that I got it, this might be a book that I'll have to revisit to see what additional details a second read might illuminate.