Total B.S.

I was juggling the loose pages of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates in one hand, and the iPod in the other when Elvis Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week" came on, the song that comes on every Monday morning, without fail:

I hear you sayin, hey, the city's alright,
When you only read about it in books.

And wouldn't it have been a great story if this was the moment when the pages were knocked from my hands, and I lost Chapter X, Y, and Z somewhere on the tracks of the downtown 1 train?

That might be a story worth telling the whole internet, even.

Alas, the story dies here. The pages are intact. Reading the unbound pages of this novel is testing new levels of my organization, however, and reminding me that neither literature nor my mind is required to work in a linear fashion at all times. Which is why the book makes sense no matter the order of the loose sections -- whether the narrator is in Angel or at a football match, whether Tony is dead or dying. Or why I can start the day with Elvis Costello and a craving for pears, and end it with Cranes and a half eaten tin of almonds on my desk. And why it would take an entire novel to tell you how either of us got there.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.