Of irks & quirks

‘One More Thing’, a collection of humorous stories by writer and actor B J Novak, captures the rhythms of contemporary conversations.Michiko Kakutani reviews the book.

In one of the longer entries in his funny debut collection of stories, B J Novak describes a writer and translator named J C Audetat, who has a gift for “the off-the-cuff vernacular of his day” — or what might be called “the poetry of everyday conversations.”

The same might be said of Novak, whose athletic imagination and ear for “the language of his own time and place” (that is, the vernacular of that 21st-century genus of young, hip Americans, known to frequent urban habitats on the East and West Coasts) are showcased in this volume. Novak is best known as an actor and writer for the Emmy Award-winning comedy series The Office, and has also done stand-up comedy. He notes that this book “developed alongside a series of public readings in front of live audiences,” and this workshop process appears to have fine-tuned his sense of pacing and inflection.

Novak has an idiosyncratic voice that’s distinctively his own, though One More Thing (a title that oddly recalls the line that Columbo, the television police investigator, liked to use to eke out clues from unsuspecting suspects) will also produce lots of comparisons to other writers. His more fully developed stories have a sense of the absurdities — and sadnesses — of contemporary American life reminiscent of George Saunders’ short fiction. Others will more likely elicit comparisons to David Sedaris’ books (without the curmudgeonly persona), Steve Martin’s prose pieces (with less conceptual strangeness) and Woody Allen’s Without Feathers and Side Effects (with less emphasis on big, existential questions).

It is Novak’s gift for channeling the way we talk and think today that propels many of the funnier tales here. By giving us the contemporary point of view of the bunny in the fable of the tortoise and the hare — sinking into a depression after his loss to his slower-footed rival; gaining weight; turning to religion, travel and volunteer work, before vowing to make a comeback — Novak extracts fresh comedy from a familiar story (“The Rematch”).

In “Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley,” he explains the secret identity crisis supposedly behind the death of that famous singer and the mysterious sightings of him in the years after. And in “No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg,” he posits an afterlife in which everyone is not only granted eternal youth, but also gets to go to free concerts by all of the greats: Elvis, Miles, Tupac, Michael Jackson, Sinatra, Mozart, “L V Beethoven.”

An African warlord goes on a blind date — apparently arranged over the Internet — with a dim bulb of a girl, and natters away about things like “flourless chocolate cake,” trending on Twitter and Malcolm Gladwell. The inventor of the calendar decides making a month with 31 days is a mistake since “you can’t divide anything into 31, so you can’t make anything half a month or half a week or anything (because 7 is the same way).” And a billionaire who’s ordered his engineers to invent a huge, full-length mirror for the Earth warns them to make it so that it doesn’t reflect too much heat, because “I do not want to be ‘that guy’” who burns up the planet.

Some of the entries here are way weaker than others. Some feel like sketches for unrealised skits or undeveloped premises jotted down in a notebook; they are random musings that may give us a feel for the map of Novak’s mind, but are otherwise self-indulgent and annoying. There are stories consisting of silly two-sentence riffs (“I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”); strained and unfunny exercises in bad taste (a Comedy Central roast of Nelson Mandela featuring the likes of Pauly D); and lame jokes about the need for “a new Hitler” who’s “against genocide” and “opposed to world domination.”

The reader can’t help feeling that Novak wanted to preserve every scrap of writing he’d accumulated — in much the same way that considerably more eminent authors like John Updike have filled out their prose collections with picture captions and one-paragraph-long scribblings.

What redeems many of the lesser pieces in One More Thing is Novak’s delight in language, his precisionist eye for detail, his ability to capture the odd thoughts that burble through his characters’ minds, wondering why Sunday nights often seem lonelier and windier than others, or whether some ticks of a clock are especially loud.

Novak is nimble at showing how easily the ordinary can morph into the extraordinary, and adept at making us see the surreal in the everyday: the cold, diagonal corridor “where everything was more or less the colour of manila,” the building that “looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace.” That last bit is a perfect description of what the author says it is, the Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of the Kellogg’s cereal company, and it comes from the centrepiece of this collection, “Kellogg’s,” a small gem of a story about a boy who wins a $100,000 prize in a box of cornflakes, only to find that his good fortune will unravel his family forever. This story, along with “J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote” and a couple of the other longer pieces in this volume, attest to Novak’s abilities not only as a funny writer with a great ear, but also as a genuine storyteller with an observant eye and finely tuned emotional radar.