In three comic novellas, three unlikely hero-narrators insist their respective ways into revisionist stories — imagined or real — of rescue, resistance and ironic retribution. Darkly funny and politically urgent, their clumsy, self-conscious if sincere attempts answer our absurdly sadistic recent civic despair with complex if almost, if not quite imaginable, empathy. In The Dairy of Anne Frank, a community college student’s spelling error inspires his adjunct writing instructor to stage an alternative theatrical pageant rehabilitating grammar and syntax, love and brain injury, biography and history. In Not Enemies, But Friends, another teacher simultaneously takes on liberal fatalism and the organized complacency which enables both the virtual and actual kidnapping of public education by right-wing fundamentalists. Finally, in Going Clearer, accidental exposure to a single if singular book on Scientology transforms an otherwise illiterate and uninitiated nobody into an avenging disciple of reason and humanity against coercion, hucksterism, superstition and the limits of his and perhaps our own collective imagination.
Andrew Tonkovich is the longtime editor of the West Coast literary journal Santa Monica Review and host of Bibliocracy, Pacifica Radio KPFK’s weekly books show. His essays, reviews and original short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Juked, Faultline, ZYZZYVA, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor, with Lisa Alvarez of the first-ever survey of literary Orange County, and a regular contributor to the OC Weekly.