After reading Darby Larson’s raw and sublime debut, The Iguana Complex, I was left eagerly anticipating the second installment of Mud Luscious Press’s Nephew series of novel(la)s. Andrew Borgstrom’s Meat Is All did not disappoint. This 41-page prose poem within a play within a jaggedly winding narrative pleasantly assaults the reader with a smattering of language constructions that are occasionally playful, usually clever, oftentimes disturbing, and always perception-blowing. Defying classification, the book is a masterful piece of conceptual art.
Meat Is All is loosely centered around the non sequitur exploits of a group of Boy Scouts, their inept troop leader and an anonymous fisherman. The text is comprised of 60 short scenes in which the main narrative thread is broken up by interjections from the various characters and concluded by a series of bizarre all-caps “truisms” like the chapter headings in some delightfully warped version of a Scout’s handbook – “A PET WITH AN ERECTION SHOULD NOT BE PET,” “THE AMOUNT OF SCALP AND FACIAL HAIR ARE INDICATORS OF SKEPTICISM,” “THERE IS NO MEAT IN TEAM.” These mostly self-contained vignettes structurally and visually remind one of those proverbial fireside Scout chats, except that the topics of conversation here – debating the function and importance of the male nipple, how to earn coveted merit badges made of condoms, the validity of platypus as a meat (lots of meat/bodies/flesh in general) – are as outlandish as they are strangely prescient, equipped with an unexpected and disarming existentialism. I’ve always felt that there is something inherently creepy about Boy Scout camping trips, specifically the scout/leader dichotomy (not priest/altar boy creepy, but still an element of pederasty), and Meat Is All takes the reader’s already disoriented gut to a squirmier place. It’s not the Scouts’ levity at the mention of penis play (though there is enough of this to adequately disturb) or the leader’s constant intentionally thin-veiled innuendo – “I wasn’t going to put on a glove that his tool was in” – it’s what is not said, the ripe undercurrents of forced solidarity, a subtle yet suffocating closeness, the sense of not being able to muster just the right expression to make sense of an awkward and absurd predicament. These hints of a darker, overarching madness are what elicit the greatest and most intriguing unease.
For all it’s idiosyncratic beauty, I found the book difficult to get into, initially. Mostly it’s just a question of getting used to the scenes’ structure: an opening statement in a bold font followed by a prose that is lush in wordplay (“…the tasteless kind, to match the less kind mouths filled with echo and…taint, the fences they could paint, the feces they did paint, the fences they built with their painted feces…”), which is in turn broken up mid-sentence by the characters’ observations, screenplay-style (SCOUT #5: You were created with a seatbelt on.”) in a light gray font, which continues through the aforementioned all-caps sections. At first I was distracted by the scene-within-a-scene shifting, especially given the addictive poetic jargon of the main thread. But as I continued to read, I began to envision the text sort of like Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the characters provide a lighter, comedic running commentary to an otherwise obscure film (or in this case, an obscure camping trip). Yet whereas the show’s wisecracking commentary is its focal point, the two very different threads in Meat Is All provide a welcome postmodern embellishment, a depth of perspective and poignant suspense, a call and response that is at once an outburst at the weirdness of childhood and a longing to find meaning in the even more bizarre and darker world that follows:
“Others wanted to tell the one what the tracks were for but wondered what Would become of him if he SCOUT #1: He took us to the rainforest. never knew: or I wondered what he wondered…or if one did SCOUT #2: We didn’t know where he was taking us. know…if my interpretations were worthy of a merit badge or perhaps a uniform, SCOUT #3: He wouldn’t let me bring my penis.”
Equal parts linguistic experiment and unfettered (yet witty) toilet-humor philosophy, Meat Is All speaks to both students of the absurd and those seeking the challenge of a good old fashioned, albeit wickedly corroded campfire story. Another Nephew you wish was your own child.
Meat Is All by Andrew Borgstrom
Published by Nephew, an imprint of Mud Luscious Press, 2011
41 pages
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