Book Review : Slight Goofiness Turns to Overwhelming

Hearing From Wayne and Other Stories by Bill Franzen (Alfred A. Knopf: $15.95; 113 pages)

Bill Franzen doesn’t simply dedicate his collection of short stories to his wife, Roz Chast, with love. He dedicates it with a tiny vignette. They are driving through the agreeably empty Midwest and talking of nothing in particular, such as what the difference is between concrete and cement; and what Roz would do if Bill were attacked by someone bigger.

She would bean the big man with a vase, is what; not simply fade back and call for help. And that seed of matrimonial care-taking sprouts, and when a bad thunderstorm comes up, he summons up a conscious determination to drive with equivalent care because she is with him.

A Nice Touch

This is humdrum and nice. In particular, it is going a long, quiet way out of your way to tell your wife you are dedicating a book to her. The reader smiles not exactly knowing why; and not without a touch of impatience.

It is the kind of small smile that occurs, along with an impatient feeling that nothing very much is happening, in Franzen’s small and hushed comic pieces. The punch lines mumble. A laugh is somewhere behind; but it gets stuck and doesn’t come out, its tickle remaining like a stuck sneeze.

I mention Roz Chast not mainly because Franzen does, but because so much in these stories reminds me of her cartoons. In her drawings, the nervous characters avow the normality of their projects with such intensity that their slight goofiness turns overwhelming. It is as if normality were the God they served, all the while suspecting he might be dead because they hadn’t heard from him for six months.

In Franzen’s stories, likewise, the pizza-and-beer tone of the narrators; their insistence on being ordinary down-home types, magnify the oddity of their endeavors.

In the title story, the narrator tell us of hanging out with his partner, Wayne, playing a little golf, talking of this and that. The this and that includes the narrator’s social uneasiness at dying and finding that the afterlife consists of being among people you know only slightly.

At a bar one day, he and Wayne agree that whoever dies first will communicate; not long afterward, after going out “for some Italian and a couple of pitchers of draft beer”--you get the tone--Wayne accidentally inhales a tiny toy-soldier head he had stuck in his nose for a laugh.

And not long after that, the narrator gets a post card telling him that heaven is OK though the stereo isn’t great, “and not to worry about it but just to stay loose and go with it and that everything will make a lot more sense to me when we meet up again.”

The reassuring cliches, the pieties and pop psychology of American discourse as retailed on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and at the movies, are applied to odd situations and a little wrong.

A Drought Dinner report from Iowa is a small society column: “Myrtle Lawson--in sporty black denim--slipped in causing heads to turn. Her husband, Bernie, is Mr. Big in roofing and siding in Boone County.” A man whose doctor tells him he has exactly 37 years to live goes on a drinking binge and then resolves to live life to the full. He takes a longer route when driving to the bank; he cuts his sleeping time from eight hours to 7 hours nightly.

There is drollness in all this, though to varying degrees. The joke can be very slight indeed and without much energy. Above all, the matter-of-fact tone struck by Franzen’s narrators is not the equivalent, in terms of effect, to the visual effect of Chast’s nervous lines asserting an equivalent improbability.

Going to Extremes

The best of the pieces are those that rely less on the irony of the subdued tone than on the extremity of what is related. “Peacemaker” is the bored narration of a man who drives a monstrous rig, containing an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, along a 15-mile oval track, and who deposits it at any one of 23 missile pads chosen at random.

The strategic point is to make it impossible for Soviet missiles to target it. The narrator’s concern is the boring nature of the job. He and his fellow-drivers look forward mightily to relaxing with beer and sausages kept in a refrigerator at pad No. 3. But what if the Russians target it? “I mean, maybe it’s time to start circulating our fridge now, too. Yeah, keep the fridge circulating. Keep the Russkis guessing.”

“Peacemaker” depends for its strength not on the narration but on the wildness of what is narrated. In the case of “The Brewster Family Time Capsule,” the burst of comedy comes from the explosive twists and turns in the course of a family counseling project. A stuck laugh is not enough after a while; we need to expel it. Comedy and satire call for purgation just as much as tragedy does; if not in quite the same way.