Crazy Love

Fever Chart
by Bill Cotter
2009, McSweeney's

One of my favorite Christmas gufts last year was a subscription to McSweeney's publishers. McSweeney's is best-known for their literary quarterly which was founded by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, amongst other things.

For a hundred bucks (it was a present, I shouldn't know that!) I get shipped the next ten books that the publishing arm of McSweeney's releases.

Jerome Coe, the hero of Bill Cotter's novel (and my tenth and final McSweeney's book) Fever Chart, really loves romance novels. He hunts them down from spinning racks in convenience stores and reads and re-reads them compulsively. I, personally, am far less of a sucker for romantic novels than I am for films, but color me surprised when by the end of Fever Chart despite eits lurching, dizzy narrative proves to be just that.

Compulsively is an appropriate term for the novel because Jerome, one discovers, is a frequenter of mental institutions. As a ward of the state, Jerome is medicated and strapped and distrusted and neglected by the institutions who assume the responsibility of caring for such characters. When these institutions fail him, Jerome lets himself loose upon the world without pharmacological aid and seeks the opposite of the sterile, bright institutions of his youth: the hostels, waffle houses, bars and convenience stores of New Orleans.

New Orleans is an appropriate setting for such a narrative, as the bustling, hectic, lawless cityscape proves to be an ideal complement to Jerome's lawless and equally hectic emotional entropy.

The novel follows a similar pursue-stall-repeat pattern in Jerome's lovelife. He is prone to falling in love with ghosts, as those who befriend him characterize them, and ghosts cannot love you back. There are no less than six romantic interests, by my count, in the three hundred pages of the novel and with only two of these does he have regular social contact. (Both decidedly unavailable: one a lesbian, the other not single.)

Jerome continually falls for some distant idealized woman, stalks her, masturbates into socks and then loses interest when the woman becomes available.

This pattern of romance indicates a larger emotional paralysis. Jerome is passive (he lets one of his doctors molest him with no protest), he is unmotivated (he loses jobs with little remorse), he is fearful (he refers repeatedly to a fear of being "stompered" [your guess is as good as mine]), he is complacent (he elects to live as a hermit for a year in fear of meeting his friends but does not have the sense to leave New Orleans).

Jerome's delusions of romantic and sexual grandeur work ostensibly as both a manifestation of his emotional resistance to these habits and as evidence of his acquiescence to them. His romantic obsessions demonstrate a will to break from this entropic pattern of inertia but he is routinely enslaved by it.

Until...

Well, suffice to say the book is definitely a romance and that Mr. Coe (who, by the way, earns himself a Zagat-worthy reputation as a grilled cheese chef by the end of the book) finally meets his match in the guise of a character whose manic nature is a catalyst for his self-destructive nature. I'll avoid spoiling the charming progression to full fledged romantic hero, though.

Mr. Cotter's style is a bit cloying (remember "stomper"? It must be used about sixty times in the book) in that I Heart Huckabees kind of way.

A representative section of dialogue reads:

"Are you going to sell it?" I asked.

"I went down to Poski's. He offered me four-fifty in store credit."

"That doesn't seem fair."

"It isn't. I mussed up his hair and took his SORRY WE'RE CLOSED sign. Popski is one of those folks who looks especially funny with mussed hair....In the beginning, I'm going to market my coins here, in with the pies. Everybody contemplating pie can contemplate rare coins in the meantime."

"I bet you get rich."

"That Mr. Murdoch seems to think so. He's an expert in numismatics and marketing."

As you can see, it's a little twee.

But all the twee tendencies in the writing aside, the book caught me rather offguard by the end and I was pretty much sold on the whole romantic angle. It was, like Mr. Coe himself, a somewhat unnerving and deeply flawed but ultimately charming read.