Book Quicks

by Meredith Broussard

Unsung Heroes of American Industry: Stories

By Mark Jude Poirier Talk/Miramax Books, 169 pp., $22

From a conversation between Myra and Carlito, two literary critics in a local metropolis:

Myra: Have you read the new Mark Jude Poirier?

Carlito: Unsung Heroes of American Industry? Yes, I read it. What did you think?

M: What does "uxorious" mean?

C: Excessively submissive to one's wife. Why?

M: I couldn't remember what it meant. Poirier mentioned it in his first story; he had one of his characters look it up in a dictionary. Then he failed to define it, forcing me to wonder about what "uxorious" means throughout the remaining three stories.

C: That is kind of a dick move.

M: I prefer "hopelessly jejune."

C: So, was there anything you liked about the book?

M: The vivid descriptions of the button-manufacturing machines, and the detailed anatomy of the mussels used to make pearl-covered buttons, were particularly delightful. I also liked the gruesomeness of the chicken-manufacturing sequences, when Zilo Badde IV tried to breed beakless chickens that wouldn't peck each other in the factory cages.

C: And how about that last story, the one about the font and the mahogany dildo? "A Note on the Type," I believe it was called.

M: It was interesting that he inserted himself and the book into the novel by saying that the first book set in the Wayland font was Unsung Heroes of American Industry by Mark Jude Poirier, published in 1953. It's that humorous self-referential/false memoir technique that all the young Turks like Neal Pollack and Jonathan Safran Foer are using now.

C: I guess that means that Poirier is a young Turk, too?

M: Based on the fact that he's attended every major writing program in the country, including the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the Johns Hopkins Writing Program, I'd say that he qualifies. All of the stories have that textbook MFA feel, a sense of technical perfection and studied wackiness and a giant steaming pile of epiphany at the end.

C: I felt that too, and I also felt disappointed at the end of each story. Perhaps each should have been rounded out into its own book, or maybe they just ended too soon. It was as if there wasn't enough character development for the reader to actually care what happened to the characters and their dismal lives. And all the narrators were mildly depressed men of a certain age, crippled by their inability to form emotional attachments to appropriate partners, obsessed with their own (fairly mild) perversions and onanistic guilt.

M: I bet it'd be fun to slug back a coupla beers with Poirier, though.

C: Yeah.