Tin House Press, 2007
Read by Mike Spry
In his debut novel, Ovenman, Jeff Parker has created a vivid and honest recollection of a world that exists in the periphery of even the strangest of sub-cultures. Set in early 1990s Central Florida, Ovenman is the story of When Thinfinger, a skateboarding, poorly tattooed anti-hero who falls from restaurant job to restaurant job, doing his best to stay barely afloat in a society that has no respect or place for him.
Parker has provided himself with a difficult challenge. He has chosen Thinfinger to narrate Ovenman and yet he has given the protagonist little if any redeeming qualities. Thinfinger steals from his employers and friends, is dismissive of his girlfriend, and has blackouts so frequently that he has taken to writing himself Post-It notes before passing out so as to inform his sober self what his drunken self has done. It is nearly impossible for the reader to like Thinfinger, let alone find any degree of empathy for him. His one quality is his odd affection for his McJob duties: pride in a well-run pizza oven (hence the title), his love for a well-mopped floor and an Ajaxed sink. But this one quality is sad and indicative of his failing: his lack of any desire to grow beyond his pizza station in life.
Parker manages this choice delicately by surrounding Thinfinger with an element that rivals his lack of moral substance: skinheads, faux hippies, liars, cheats, whores and miscreants populate Ovenman to the extent that society’s norm is forgotten and the periphery becomes the main focus. Once absorbed by this world, one can’t help but be entranced by it. The reader has no desire to see Thinfinger grow or find some moral salvation, but rather takes delight in his appetite for destruction. Guilty pleasure is taken in the disdain for Thinfinger, and we cheer his every incompetence.
What certainly doesn’t lack competence is Parker’s employment of language in fuelling the hectic and destructive pace of the narrative. Ovenman is propelled by tight and precise sentences that fall from one into the other as Thinfinger’s life falls apart. The writing is wonderfully specific, creating a vibrant image of the setting, both physical and temporal. Above all, the pleasure one takes in the writing and the story is emboldened by the dark and twisted humour. Ovenman is at once funny, sad, disturbing and insightful, and a promising debut from a talented writer.
