Apathy and Other Small Victories BY Paul Neilan Reviewed by Susan Brooks    Apathy and Other Small Victories is the first novel from writer Paul Neilan, newly released in paperback. Its story centers around Shane, the possessor of the titular apathetic outlook. Shane is the modern-day equivalent of a drifter, except that instead of riding the rails and earning his keep on ranches, he goes Greyhound and works corporate temp jobs.Shane’s exact age is never discussed, but he is young, maybe twenty-three at most. He hasn’t figured out his path in life yet, and he’s just hanging out. He’s involved in ridiculous, dysfunctional and sometimes downright appalling situations, but can’t rouse himself to do anything – he only observes as the train wrecks unfold and comments from the sidelines of his own life. He takes the path of least resistance in every possible direction, which is sad but also very funny because it creates the insanity that forms the book’s plot. His apathy is so deep that it is almost zen, as though he is removing himself from the cosmic wheel of karma by doing absolutely nothing. Shane observes his attitude with a mixture of curiosity and familiarity, and, apathetically, can’t seem to do anything about it. Apathy is a symptom of clinical depression, and that is certainly hinted at as his possible deeper affliction in some small references to the sources of his alienation. He doesn’t really have anywhere to go, or anything to do. No one is waiting for him, no real job is lined up. He is untethered. He drinks a pitcher of Miller High Life each morning at a neighborhood barfly dive (“It was like sitting in a cave that sold beer”), then rides his rickety thrift store bike to an epically horrid temp job at Panopticon Insurance (named for a type of prison), where he tosses out the file alphabetizing work he is assigned each day and spends his shifts sleeping in the handicapped stall of the men’s room. One time he wakes up shouting incoherently, and every day his legs lose all circulation, undoubtedly symbolic of his emotional numbness. Between that and the beer, he staggers and crashes into walls and no one at the insurance company ever notices that anything is wrong. He’s begging to be fired because he hates his job so much, and no one even cares. They also never notice his filing work is going into the garbage; they just think he is just a really fast alphabetizer. The absurdity of that response makes his apathy make sense, as a defense mechanism against a world that is so crazy it doesn’t notice when a kid is flailing helplessly. The one time he does take some decisive action, it has such wretched results that he can hardly be blamed for his history of avoiding involvement at all costs. Ironically, though, that event actually serves to spur him to make a change, in pursuit of something that he discovers he actually cares about. His feelings might be misguided, but at least, finally, he does something. This book has been lumped in with slacker-lit like Douglas Coupland’s era-defining Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, and it certainly owes much of its tone to that genre, but midway through, it suddenly becomes apparent that it’s broken through into something more ambitious, a kind of allegorical absurdism. In his drunken, detached state, Shane can see how unsatisfying and depressing is what passes for life for the people around him. His co-workers cheerfully decorate the cubicles that he sees as holding cells, and they drink copious amounts of company-provided coffee to get through their workday, the same hours that Shane spends unconscious. As he says, “Everyone’s asleep for the wrong part of their lives.” Your reviewer’s theory is that he is a budding writer: it’s almost like he puts himself into harm’s way in order to give himself material. He’s strikingly honest about his own shortcomings, knowing and admitting that he is a disaster. The motif of physical disability is used over and over in the book, from the handicapped stall Shane sleeps in to the deaf girl he befriends at his dentist’s office, and it sums up the emotional condition of every character, yet the book, a chronicle of profound dysfunction, is somehow still very funny. Anomie and humor are potent mixers, and Neilan proves an able bartender with this signature cocktail of existential questioning and gut-busting political incorrectness. |
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