Brian Doyle, the versatile author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and “proems,” could well be the love child of a literary three-way between George Saunders, Steve Almond, and the late David Foster Wallace (in the canonical Caucasian tradition, male reproduction is possible—nay, common). Doyle’s defamiliarized contexts, satirical absurdity, lively injection of the political, and voicey commentary in this latest collection all trace hereditary humor threads to this trio of theoretical forebears. But Doyle exhibits independence both in his liberalized Catholic sensibility and tendency to let overexcited prose and characters outpace authorial control.
Bin Laden’s Bald Spot and Other Stories opens with the title story, in which the first-person narrator—who is informal, chatty, chummy, and lacking in requisite terror—is barber to “Osama” and the cohort of men inhabiting his complex of caves. The eponymous bald spot, as we will be told four times, is “shaped exactly like Iceland, complete with the Vestfjarda Peninsula to the west.” Osama, meanwhile, is vainly preoccupied with the nuances of his own “film productions,” prerumpling his jackets and emulating American actor Van Johnson. (Flip Iceland upside down, and you get a shape similar to, if not exactly like, the contiguous United States of America.) Displaying opaqueness, egotism, and hypocrisy, Osama is flattered when he believes (mistakenly) that his men are imitating him as they copy “that stiff wooden walk of Gregory Peck’s, you know, like in Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn.” Bin Laden, whom it is indisputably ballsy to render in character, is to an extent humanized here, and humorously so. But he remains ultimately unsympathetic, not far from cliché. Doyle works a fascinating tension between Osama and his men, but undermines this initially nuanced construction when the barber, in an abrupt transition, invokes Peck’s Atticus Finch and then condemns them all:
I know that the men who sit quietly under my clippers
It remains unclear if this condemnation is in any way ironic.
This story and the eleven that follow it are brief voice-propelled nuggets that more often than not consist of elaborate, protracted, dialogue-imbedded sentences, riffs rife with commas and parched for periods. These pieces are dictated by “I”s and wrapped tightly around controlling devices, structures that range from outlandish scenarios—a road trip undertaken by a woman’s ex-boyfriends, a three-day party for a hostage returning from Iran, a 10k race whose competitors consist exclusively of “cuckolds”—to collections of quotidian anecdotes about basketball, former cars and dogs, and upgraded tow truck services. In conjunction with the momentum of their conversational relay, these devices function like the fuse in a bottle rocket, energetically propelling the narrative into a culminating pop: moments of spiritual uplift, doomed red-blooded hope, aching nostalgia, or some combination thereof:
Or maybe moments like that are like windows that you
There is human connectivity and necessary perseverance. There is full-speed-ahead, gut-busting life and sometimes senseless death.
Individually, each of the pieces in the book’s first half might feel like a focused invigoration of the form, but apprehended in succession the voicey-ness can begin to grate. Doyle is fond of attaching “you know what I’m saying?” to his narrators’ conveyances, a textual tic that feels natural once or twice, but in such abundance (twenty times? thirty?) bucks the reader out of the story, as do sentences that seem long simply for length’s sake, italics for emphasis, and overuse of “anyway” and “and etc.” One begins to feel a desperation and communicative anxiety further evidenced by a refusal to use quotation marks—Doyle wants the text to absorb speech, become speech, but forces the effect. This is not to say that he cannot turn a pretty phrase or offer flashes of insight, but bottle rockets are not the most dynamic of fireworks, and he pops off twelve in a row.
In the book’s second half, Catholic themes bubble more overtly to the surface, and third-person pieces, freed from the shackles of speechifying, achieve grace as they arch into the realms of fable and folktale. In “Waking the Bishop,” officials squabble over a deceased bishop’s estate in a telling that is restrained and that derives power from its objectivity, its externality. Characters are referred to not by name but by title—university president, chancellor, communications director—underscoring how such roles define us and how little they will matter at our ultimate reckoning. It is the lusty, hovering vibrancy of the late beer-swilling, rib-grilling bishop that provides catharsis. In “The Train,” a man suffering a heart attack struggles mightily in his death throes toward, of all things, his office. In “Mule,” a man roams an ancient countryside in search of a horse “[t]o drag the prisoner properly behind,” though it turns out he and his compatriots do not know the proper way to do this, or why they are doing it. The tale’s strength is, again, a product of restraint. Doyle does not tell us where the prisoner came from, or what country or year we are in; we do not know the conditions of this conflict, and don’t need to—the ubiquitous horror of war is compactly captured in the singular act of senseless dragging. Still, stories continue to pop up with overbearing orators who seem to lack confidence in the intelligence of their audience, as if sharing the concern of the protagonist in “The Man Who Wanted to Live in the Library”:
some twenty million Americans cannot read at all
Doyle’s strived-for transcendence for the most part derives from life rather than afterlife, though an undercurrent of the latter trickles throughout. As the collection progresses, Catholicism weaves in and out in increasingly interesting directions. “Pinching Bernie” takes up the true story of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, former archbishop of Boston who, when faced with the offenses of child-molesting priests, “kept shuffling the rapists around from job to job” before eventually fleeing to Rome and the Pope’s protection. Doyle twists the tale when the narrator’s friend Jimmy kidnaps Bernie and brings him back to America to make him “[clean] the bathrooms of the mothers whose kids got raped when Bernie was the boss.” The story revels in revenge; forgiveness is nowhere in evidence. Nor is it in the final story, “Bin Laden’s Blind Spot,” when we return to the cave complex to find that two of the men have fallen in love and are walking around holding hands. The barber, who we learn here is “not Muslim,” once again concludes that all of the men “are most definitely going to hell,” but goes on to describe how, thanks to the love of these two men, “there has been much more laughter and friendliness in the cave,” and that the Sheik will lose his war because “there is not enough laughing in the world he wants to make.” This laughter seems inconsistent with the narrator’s own laughter at the conclusion of the opening story, though the sentiment is essentially the same. One cannot help but feel that by resorting to unequivocal condemnations Doyle has missed an opportunity to fully exploit the power of the situations he has rendered.
Amidst these twenty-five stories, there are many LOL one-liners and eccentric, stimulating premises. There are characters who are joyfully, fallibly human, who demonstrate “the increasing musculature of American manhood,” who strive for “eternal motion and transition.” But, in Bin Laden’s Bald Spot, a dearth of scenes and disproportionate amount of summary ultimately offer more surface than depth. The collection strains for a transcendence that it does not quite achieve, though this is, in a certain way, appropriate. Because, as Doyle longs to show, “Doing really hard things that don’t make the slightest sense is what human beings are all about.” We are human; we struggle; we fail. As its own dramatization of this, the book could be said to succeed. Wading through an effluvium of textual excess, one locates bright sparks of empathy and love. This model of a buried core of beauty might parallel the average American: projecting facades, eternally yammering, vulnerable at heart. In the end, Doyle might just be America’s love child, not unlike the discarded baby the narrator of his own “Yoda” extracts, alive, from the dirt.