This is the third installment of Shorties, a series where I review a short book off my shelf each week for ten weeks. An archive of the previous installments can be found here. Next week I will read and write about The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector.
Bugsy and Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin. Simon & Schuster, 2024. 224 pages.
Very few things happen in my day-to-day life that are truly weird. At a bus stop recently, a man threw his cigarette butt at my feet before digging through the trash and asking me if I’d like to share some leftover chocolate milk he’d found inside; when I said no thanks, he told me doja (the cat) was an alien trying to steal my brain. (This type of thing is topped by many of my bus-riding friends on a regular basis.) At a pool party this weekend, a stick bug (the first I’ve seen in my life!) crawled onto the stretch of concrete where the grill and table were located. This was not strange; the fact that there was a smaller stick bug riding on its back was, a bit. Generally speaking, my life is unremarkable, demarcated by routines that I either create or follow on someone else’s orders.
I saw Friendship on Thursday at 11:15am and thought about this—how the strangeness of worlds can be so relative. I really liked the movie, which plays out one man’s quest to befriend a new neighbor in bit-like sections. In comedy, weirdness is kind of the golden ticket. It’s a medium that favors the absurd. In Friendship, absurdity comes in the form of Tim Robinson’s classic character, refined to a point—he’s the kind of guy that gets worked up about a tiny accident and spirals out to the point of no return. The kind of guy who yells a lot, and only buys clothing from one particular brand that’s also a workwear brand for service workers despite the fact that he has an office job. The kind of guy whose only discernible interests are “the new Marvel” and sitting in one chair in his house.
The effect of producing such a genuinely weird guy is both that you get to laugh at him, and that you have to wonder what you look like alongside him. Watching this character try to make a friend, you leave the theater thinking not about how stupid he is, but wondering what it looks like for you, ostensibly a more normal person, to make friends as an adult too.
I was already thinking about weirdness this week while reading Bugsy, a short story collection which runs the gamut of hot-right-now and evergreen themes: neurodivergence (and mental illness), queerness, internet personas clashing with real people, pornography, sex, death. The book is thoroughly weird, by which I mean it is unpredictable, and filled with scenes that are simultaneously of this world (Chicago) and off-kilter. I think “weirdness” is a hallmark of a lot of contemporary art, so I want to think for a bit about what kind of affect it takes to produce good, weird writing in particular.
There is an astounding amount of theoretical writing dedicated to unpacking and tracing Weird Literature (capitalized across so many of these writings as a sort of movement or nameable sensibility) through a historical lens. In the Weird Fiction Review you can read speculative fiction writer China Miéville’s wordy, academic essay on the development of Weird through the twentieth century; on the London Review Bookshop blog you can read an excerpt from M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, in which he attempts to describe and define the Weird.
But these types of writings, which are interesting, don’t really get at the kind of weird that appears in Bugsy, or even in other story collections of its ilk.1 The stories aren’t speculative fiction, per se, or fantastical; they’re realistic, if about bizarre scenes or told from unexpected vantage points. (Take, for example, the story told alternatingly from an omniscient narrator who hovers over a young mother and her non-verbal child, who narrates their experience of the world.)
These stories work in the shadow of the toxic internet, which is also incidentally where we all live. In the titular story, a deeply depressed woman unexpectedly lands among a set of friendly hardcore pornographers, who become her best friends and lovers and caretakers. In the second story, “Fugato,” a highly functional and professional psychiatrist takes on a new patient who changes his life. Both of these characters land in the same place: consumed by mental illnesses to the point of breaking with reality, injured, blacked out, or both. The register of the narrators—whether in first or third person—doesn’t change dramatically, so that as a reader what you experience is a slow descent that turns out to be a crash landing. Of course, this mirrors the experience of a psychotic break. Not coincidentally, this is also the experience of regularly using the social internet, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours at a time. Though the internet appears to varying degrees across the stories, in these first two, it’s an ambient, backgrounded presence, the secret heart these stories share. Without an explicit appearance of the internet on the page, it’s clear enough that the web—or, maybe, what it has wrought for our society—is part of the world that causes these people to briefly lose their minds.
The narrators across the stories in Bugsy, who are telling the stories of so many different forms of mental illness and neurodivergence, present these things as partly symptomatic of our times (in the case of the aforementioned stories). But they also accept them without fanfare as a fact of a character’s life. There’s no morality tales here, no judgements or even any particular lessons to be gleaned from these illnesses. Another way of putting this: as in life, the character is living, and we’re along for the ride. So that despite the fact that there are people who don’t strike me as particularly “normal” (e.g. I guess, like, someone with a 9 to 5)—lesbian porn stars in head-to-toe latex, a restaurateur who (in a schizophrenic break) kills someone he perceives as Donald Trump, an incel and the freshly eighteen-year-old streamer he’s in love with meeting in her living room—I feel an utterly normal sense of kinship with them, and protection over them, and a neighborly understanding of them.
I guess I should clarify that I would never use “weird” pejoratively. In fact, I prefer to think of myself as someone who uses it sparingly. For much of my childhood I was afraid of being perceived as strange, whereas now I think it’s virtually impossible for that to be the case. Strangeness is a form of singularity. It’s a gift.
In the last story of Frumkin’s collection, the reader flits in and out of a character named Flora’s death dream. As she lay in a hospital bed, intubated and intermittently surrounded by her children and grandchild, we go from a gauzy hospital room to a Manhattan club sometime in the sixties, where Flora’s memories of her old life come to the surface unwittingly, sometimes becoming the scene she’s in. She’s her young self again, but she doesn’t really know who or where or what she is. The effect of this is really disorienting—even though we move from a house to a club to a featureless room and back, the story moves at its normal pace. Reading this story is a little like jogging behind it, craning your neck to try and see what will come next.
This is perhaps a strange thing to fixate on, but I was piqued by Flora’s consistent use throughout the story of the word “queer” to describe what was happening to her. This, at the end of a series of stories in which so many kinds of queer people move through the world at their own resolute-if-unsure paces. Flora uses “queer” in the original sense—that she’s experiencing something odd. But the word, even in that original iteration, also describes the eccentric, the unconventional. Its regular usage, so late in the book, feels like finding something shiny on the ground. Frumkin’s command on language here is the other piece of all this: even though the stories can disorient and twist and feel arbitrarily “weird,” they find a landing place in the steadiness of language, the sureness of each narrator to be on a path, even if we as readers don’t know where it’ll lead. 🐁
As a quick aside, Rafael has a Substack that you should follow, funnily (and weirdly!) called The Cosmic Cheeto. On there, he writes about writing and other stuff. He also interviews writers about their new books!
Raf sent me a copy of Bugsy because we are longtime writer pals; I met him what feels like a lifetime ago, probably for both of us, first through an online workshop, then briefly in the plane of reality called Tampa, Florida. The copy of Bugsy that arrived in the mail came signed, and straight from Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Indiana. The included postcard reads, “Thank you for your literary citizenship.” I was very touched by this, considering that mine and Raf’s acquaintance is due to his literary citizenship, and willingness to continue to be in loose orbit with me. Cheers to the world of books, to literary friendship, and to media mail!
Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is buddies with Bugsy in the type of weirdness I’m trying to describe here. Internetty, absurd. But the approach, the sound, the style is, I would say, markedly different.