Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change From My Pockets While I Sleep
Roses are Red, Violets are stealing loose change from my pockets while I sleep
by David S. Atkinson, Literary Wanderlust, $13.99
You know those cute little books right by the cash register at the book store? The ones that have fifty ways to remind yourself you are beautiful or humorous tracts on puppy antics? Well David Atkinson’s new book of short stories, Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change From My Pockets, despite the catchy-kitschy title and cover which might suggest otherwise, is not such a book. What kind of book it is, however, is hard to pin down, as each story wiggles away from logic, reason and what we commonly think of as “plot” or “story”. Or typical anything, really.
The narrator’s point of views in the book all seem to be the same, and frankly, that of the author. In other words, while described as a “work of fiction”, one suspects after reading a few of these pieces that, while patently absurd, these stories could not be more true, and indeed, if anything, are thinly veiled autobiography. Better put, this is a book of mini-memoir essays that have been allowed to play dress-up in the family’s closets. The pieces or stories or essays (whatever you want to call them) are all about riffing on life and the modern family in particular, circa now.
Take the titles. They are often encyclopedic, similar to the book’s title. Atkinson knows how to squeeze a lot of hilarity into a title and a little angst, too. Take “Extreme Couponing Can Yield a Month’s Worth of Existential Dread for Less Than Three Dollars Canadian”. Or “The French have Been Serving up Pencil Shavings for Years and Insisting It’s Coffee”. Or “Tootie Seemed Sweet, but Her Lust for the Blood of Nebraskans and her Annexation of the Hobbit Homelands Eventually Destroyed Facts of Life”. The titles hint at the contents but sometimes seem to bear zero relationship to them. Like a good poem title, they can suggest another topic, outside the story, and one that enlarges the whole enterprise.
Like the stories themselves, you have to unpack them (the titles) and this reviewer wishes you luck in that endeavor. One has the sense, reading Atkinson, that you are reading THROUGH the stories and titles, past a narrator who is having a ton of fun being ridiculous, and probing, digging really, down inside for the story-heart inside. So, the first story above, the extreme couponing one, actually seems to be about hating a town mayor; the second one is about the President of France, Francois Holland, preparing Manwich for breakfast, which may or may not be about how the French really can’t relate to our food in America since theirs is so much better. And the last one mentioned above appears to be about the effect of gold on certain celebrities. But I am pretty sure if Atkinson read this review he would say I am way off base with all these interpretations. (Atkinson, if you are out there, reading this, I really tried.)
One story has a title twice as long as the story itself.
Outside the literary main, Atkinson’s flash pieces meld the absurd with the mundane, the quixotic with the quotidian. Some of them feel like they were written by a team of teenage boys who have read all the Captain Underpants book a few dozen times. Others could be early works by either of two late twentieth century authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, with a dash of Tom Robbins in there for good measure. High sarcasm plays in the fields of brand name America, which is fun and funny and frankly, a little exhausting. Like David Sedaris’ work, they are rooted in sarcasm. Like Erma Bombeck’s, they make fun of the domestic and world we tread day to day. As with the writing of Hunter Thompson’s, you might wonder what particular substance he has imbibed just before writing, though I suspect it may just be a surplus of KFC and Diet Pepsi.
These are short stories so quirky and random, you may find yourself wondering what they are actually about while reading them. But some of Atkinson’s stories are full of soul and have nutritious centers, once you peel back the mockery. And that is what gave them ballast for this reader. The beating hearts within.
Take for example, the story “The Philosophical Problem of Original Jam”, a story about a protagonist who wakes up every morning with strawberry jam smeared in his boxers. The story could be a batch of silliness, all about a fear of some sort of physical malaise, his body secreting jam due to some kind of male hormone disorder “early onset male menopause from reading too much Steinbeck in the tub”). That is the sort of joke I can really get behind but later on, the narrator begins to consider more psychological reasons for the phenomenon including “psychosomatic trauma,” and while this too, is ridiculed, there is a lingering sense of ennui that peeks out of the story, waving a red flag, a vagueish cry for help that pushes this story, like many in the book out of the realm of absurdism and into one of contemporary dystopic psychological writing. You may laugh while reading these stories, sometimes out loud, but then sense a low boil of distress and anxiety, just under their skins.
The reviewer recommends you read these stories in Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change From My Pockets one at a time, with a few days in between. Or at the very least hours, sort of the way one might eat marzipan. Like you wouldn’t sit down and eat a whole box. But one little story, here and there, goes down wonderfully. And a few will make you laugh out loud. I might suggest you leave the book in your bathroom as I did, but then I found myself taking it out and moving around the house with it. It eventually landed by the pool, where it has happily resided all summer. I slathered it with Copper Tone by accident one morning, and now it has a nice tan. I am kidding. I thought I might try writing a LITTLE like Atkinson to see what it feels like. It’s a gas.
Elizabeth Cohen teaches creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and through Gotham Writer’s Workshops in New York. She is the author of The Hypothetical Girl, a collection of short stories, The Family on Beartown Road and four books of poetry, including What the Trees Said. She lives in upstate New York with her daughter, Ava, and way too many cats.