Mechanical Bull, a Novel; Adelaide Books

This neo-noir, black comedy gives the reader a story that seeps in like a razor and an experience akin to swallowing fishhooks, and flaunting the hurts of unacknowledged traumas. Stark and unusual, elegant yet deprived, clean yet vicious, this action-driven, tongue in cheek tragedy depicts unemployment, breaking marriage, and an unfulfilled love affair of its rogue and corrupt protagonists, who live in a society stripped of its facades and where the invisible social inequities come criminally apparent. The content of this novel pulls reader into an electric current. It is reality on crystal meth.

The three intertwined stories of wife, mistress, and husband take place in Hogtown on October 13 and 14, 2015, and for two days the readers watch Berlin Fearne, Clare Morgan, and River Fearne as their lives spin out of control. As unemployed River Fearne seeks work he spends his days indulging in self-destructive behaviours, including an affair with his former intern, Clare Morgan; while his wife’s abrasive personality and career success push everything and everyone in her life aside. Berlin, Morgan, and River indulge in self-destructive behaviors such as workaholism, shopaholism, sex addiction, self-harm, depression, drug abuse, and delusions of grandeur.

The irrational characters portray near-demonic presences torn between worlds: poverty and wealth, success and failure, strength and weakness, sanitized public discourse and realities of individual relationships, and race. The indifference of the grotesque universe cloaks the characters’ clandestine flaws and lies, and propels the self-destructive behaviors to the extreme, and the characters themselves are indifferent just as the universe itself. While action and violence drive this novel in jagged, sharp angles, it’s sardonicism continuously undermines its drama. Soaked in grim action, the novel examines the physical and the material, and questions the place and presence of the spiritual.

With elements of absurdist fiction, transgressional fiction, and tinges of magical realism, this naturalistic novel gives a skewed yet unflinching look at the dynamics of the 21st century society and sub-torrents of social issues and inequities. Not quite fiction, not quite cinema, and not quite poetry, the direct prose and machine gun-like dialogue provide a raw social commentary.