The concept behind Matthew Sharpe's first collection of short fiction doesn't sound, at first, particularly promising: Each tale in Stories from the Tube is based on a television commercial - for toilet paper, detergent, financial services, a car. As organizing principles go, this one is gimmicky and seems too slight to sustain a book: Most of us can't manage even 30 seconds of full attention to such ads.
But these unsettling, lovely, creepy stories aren't commercials and they aren't about commercials. They're about everything advertising is not: the tangled and thwarted desires raging beneath the surface in families, the pain of acquisition, the persistence of unbearable contradiction.
In "Tide," an overwhelmed single mother deals with her reckless 9-year-old daughter's demand, "When am I gonna start to bleed?" In "Rose in the House," a nasty, pot-smoking, cancer-ridden old woman hooks up with her grandson in a secret, brutally honest partnership constructed around deception. Another story, "The Woman Who," tells of Hazel Hess, a skin-care executive "deeply tuned in to the stylistics of the educated urban women of her generation." Hess literally becomes Marilyn Monroe, receiving pilgrims to the shrine of the reincarnated movie star and scaring herself half to death.
Sharpe is witty and sly as his deadpan voice slips between the surreal and the ostensibly normal, digging out the messy, excruciating human relationships under the myths of advertising: "'I don't hate you, but I do want you to go away,' I said. I invited her in for a glass of water. It could have been worse. I could have invited her in for coffee in a mug with the word Mom on it."
Sharpe has found the perfect epigraph for his hilarious, nerve-racking, heartbreaking book: "'The revolution will not be televised.' - Gil Scott-Heron, as quoted in a TV advertisement for sneakers."
Stories from the Tube, by Matthew Sharpe: US$22. Villard: (800) 793 2665, on the Web at www.villard.com/.
STREET CRED
Old-School Tool
Inside the Microsoft File
Sharper By Far
Plug-in Pickup
World of Risks
Finstervision
Geekspeak for the Masses
Fit for Your Ears
Brandon's World
Classic at Heart
Jargon Watch
Phone Home Page
The Mix Is in the Stick
Commercial Focus
ReadMe
When Your Computer Gets a Brain
Automanipulation
Generation X: Ready to Rule
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