The last book I loved was Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin.
Martin has always been interesting to me because of the way he teeters between hilarious and laughably unfunny. Take The Jerk. That movie is genuinely funny, but about forty-five minutes in I always think about going to sleep or ordering a burrito. Cruel Shoes walks this line like Mary Lou Retton on a Russian balance beam. It is perfectly and weirdly confident. On his way across, Martin is going to do some fancy handsprings and a somersault and then nail the dismount. And oh, through it all, he’s going to wear that silly arrow-through-the-head thing. If this is funny, it is also kind of mysterious.
As Andre Breton once remarked, “We are still living under the reign of logic.” To logic, we might add “genre.” Cruel Shoes isn’t really a book of humor. It’s a chapbook of surrealist poetry, a cry from the metaphysical wilderness, and a parody of, well, everything. A parody of parody. A parody so given to parody-ness that it tosses its reader into a lingual laundry machine and spits him out not knowing which way is up, what’s clean or dirty, what’s a poem, what’s a dream, what’s a joke.
Ultimately, it’s this mania that constitutes the book’s mystery. And this mystery, like its humor, is cumulative. What is pedestrian and not-so-funny on page two is somehow bizarre and uproarious by page fifty, sort of like an old photograph of you and your high school girlfriend that kind of gets you down until you realize you’re both wearing the same extra-large Gap sweater. Take the essay (poem? word jazz?) “The Confessions of Raymond to His Goldfish.” The conventional work of literary humor, then and now, is Aristotelian in structure. Not so with “Raymond,” or really anything else in Cruel Shoes. “Raymond” is just a tiny missive from a spaced-out man to his goldfish. No theatrics. No story. Just a promise that, should the fishbowl bust and send the fish flapping to the floor, Raymond will “find the water” to save this fish. I don’t know what that means or even if it’s funny, but I know that I love it.
To extend Breton, then: If Swift is a Surrealist in malice and Sade in sadism, Martin spins his surreality in laughter. You should read this book.
