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Anonymous
Posted October 6, 2009
A funny look at pain
Phil Camp never intended to become a self-help guru. All he wanted to do was come up with the money to pay off his ex-wife. But when Where Can I Stow My Baggage? becomes an instant hit, his career suddenly takes off.
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Phil doesn't want anyone to know he's the genius behind the pseudonym of Marty Fleck. Everything is going fine, as the book turns into a regular column, Baggage Handling. But then one day Phil develops a strange and unexplained limp, and he's forced to turn to a real self-help guru for answers.
His journey through the layers of pain lead him to the Irish Shrink, who helps him unravel his past and try to make sense of it all. Phil uncovers several disturbing and shameful events, and an undercurrent of rage runs through it all-the rage that's causing him so much pain.
Everything Hurts is the humorous account of how Phil Camp comes to terms with his past and his pain. But there's more to this story than just laughs, as he delves into the healing of age-old family rifts. After reading this book, you'll never look at your past, your family, or your pain the same way.
Reviewer: Alice Berger, Bergers Book Reviews -
Jim_Westfall
Posted May 20, 2009
I Also Recommend:
Two cannibals are eating a clown, and...
In the movie "Tropic Thunder," there's a great line spoken by Robert Downey Jr., who's playing an Australian actor who has been cast as an African-American character in black face: "I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!" I'll never be able to hear that line again without thinking about the origins of Marty Fleck, the metafictional, unintentional, self-help guru in Bill Scheft's wonderfully funny third novel, "Everything Hurts."
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If Phil Camp, the main character, who suddenly develops a mysterious, painful limp in Scheft's novel, represents the book's author (who, himself, suffered from an actual case of "phantom limp" while writing this book), then Fleck, who is created by the fictional Camp, represents something even more detached. When Camp writes under the pseudonym of Marty Fleck, he is allowed to operate unfettered, tapping directly into his subconscious mind to bypass the usual filters that are in place to protect not only himself (although especially himself), but also those around him. Marty Fleck is Phil Camp's id made manifest...Phil Camp is convinced that his successful, imaginary creation, Marty Fleck, is simply the product of a happy accident and is nothing more than a big joke. However, in the end, the joke is on Camp (and us) as we come to realize that Marty Fleck has been responsible for a great deal of unintentional healing...The plot contains all of the elements of a Greek tragedy, but Scheft manages to keep the reader laughing through all of the pain. "Everything Hurts" is not just a reference to the mysterious, physical pains experienced by Phil Camp. It means what it says: EVERYTHING hurts. Childhood memories hurt, marriage hurts, divorce hurts, work hurts, loss of work hurts, anti-Semitism hurts, family relationships hurt, aging hurts, living hurts, dying hurts, everything hurts...Scheft is fully aware that the territory of dysfunctional family relationships that he is exploring in this novel is nothing new to us. In fact, with a wink, he knowingly inserts a nice little joke about "The Prince of Tides" early in the narrative. However, what prevents this novel from deteriorating into "The Prince of Tylenol" is the fact that Bill Scheft understands a fundamental principle of writing comedy: somebody gets hurt. Every great joke has at least one victim, and when everything hurts, well, that just means that everything is fair game for Scheft's brilliant style of comic skewering. Add an abundance of wonderful examples of comic wordplay to the mix, consisting of such verbal gems as "Mr. Continuing Ed," and "'White Fang' shui," and you have a novel that takes some of the most depressing material that you can possibly imagine and makes it laugh out loud funny on virtually every page.
...one cannibal turns to the other and asks, "Does this taste funny to you?" Yeah, this book tastes INCREDIBLY funny! In this novel, Bill Scheft bites down deep into the horror and sadness that makes us human and spits out a pair of clown shoes. Scheft is a comic genius who understands profound sadness, and when it comes to extracting laughs from human suffering, writing comic novels born of intense pain, I hope that I'm bestowing the greatest accolades possible upon Mr. Scheft when I close with a joke of my own: I haven't laughed so hard since Joseph Heller died!
(What, too soon?)
A must read!