When the first line of a book is "Spongy buttocks exposed and wobbling, Tony Zank's mother piled down the rest home corridor, screaming 'Help me!' and 'Stop the monster,'" you can't help but keep reading -- just to find out what the hell is going on. That's pretty much the way Jerry Stahl's latest novel, Plainclothes Naked, reads throughout. The plot has more twists than a truckload of Twizzlers, and enough characters fucked in the head to supply a newborn baby with nightmares for the rest of his life. Quick plot synopsis: two crack-heads steal a photo of our current prez, George W., smiling at his testicular region, which has its own smiley-face tattooed on. But their plans to blackmail the Republican Party are shot when Nurse Tina -- a sexy psycho-bitch who serves her husband Drano with his Lucky Charms -- finds the picture. Nurse Tina hooks up with Manny, the ex-junkie, now codeine-popping, detective who investigates the death of her husband, and they develop plans of their own for the obscene picture. Madness ensues.
And that's not an understatement. Maybe it's the sheer craziness of the characters that drives the story -- I practically abandoned all expectations for them while reading -- since their actions and identities never ceased to surprise. Who knew that the voluptuous rest home nurse was actually a man with a poorly performed sex-change operation? And that the crackhead really did just throw his 70-year-old mother out the window? And that she's still alive? And that the sex-change doctor is growing his own breasts just to see if his new "Tits-in-a-Cup" medicine really works? I felt like I was reading some extended cover of a really seedy tabloid. I wanted to look away, but the images were too insane.
Stahl hooked me with his grotesque characters and plot twists; he teases the reader by breaking off subplots in cliffhanger endings, but never fails to tie up loose ends in some anti-climactic conclusion. Parts of the book made me want to put it down and slam it shut: the gratuitous violence (often sex-related) was written to the gory extreme. Now, I own copies of both Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction and have watched them countless times. I'm a fan of Reservoir Dogs, too. Some say these movies are violent, but they prepared me for Stahl's blood-soaked and perverted content about as well as an afternoon of Disney might have. In Plainclothes, if a reporter is being decapitated or a 13-year-old crack dealer is getting his foot ripped off, Stahl describes every grisly detail.
Plainclothes is cousin to the Quentin Tarantino genre of films -- prevalent violence in a world where everyone is so utterly crazy that it's sickly funny. Yet in Plainclothes, I didn't care about any of the characters. They were all selfish, and at the book's cheesy, love-story ending, you don't find out what happens to half of them anyway. All in all, Plainclothes is a great page-turner for those who can handle the vivid, NC-17 descriptions of sex and violence. I, for one, could have done without the dirty images it left in my head.
