The Pickle Index

by Eli Horowitz

Overview

“The Pickle Index is full of life and everything else—it’s rowdy and sweaty and heartbreaking, and by heartbreaking I mean funny, and by funny I mean laugh-until-you’re-exhausted-and-leaking-and-hungry.”

—Miranda July

Zloty Kornblatt is the hapless ringmaster of an even more hapless circus troupe. But one fateful night, Zloty makes a mistake: he accidentally makes his audience laugh. Here on the outskirts of Burford—where both the cuisine and the economy, such as they are, are highly dependent on pickled vegetables—laughter is a rare occasion. It draws the immediate attention of the local bureaucracy, and by morning Zloty has been branded an instigator, conspirator, and fomentor sentenced to death or worse.

His only hope lies with his dysfunctional troupe—a morose contortionist, a strongman who’d rather be miming, a lion tamer paired with an elderly dog—a ragged band of misfits and failures who must somehow spring Zloty from his cell at the top of the Confinement Needle. Their arcane skills become strangely useful, and unlikely success follows unlikely success. Until, suddenly, the successes end—leaving only Flora Bialy, Zloty’s understudy and our shy narrator, to save the day.

Punctuated with evocative woodcuts by Ian Huebert, Eli Horowitz's The Pickle Index is a fast-moving fable, full of deadpan humor and absurd twists—and an innovative, exhilarating storytelling experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374535810
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/03/2015
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eli Horowitz was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney's. He is the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery; Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong; The Silent History (FSG Originals), with Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett; and The New World (FSG Originals), in collaboration with Chris Adrian. He lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

09/21/2015
Horowitz (The Silent History) weaves a strange tale about an eccentric group of circus performers who operate within the borders of a zany, obscure, and vaguely East-European country that prides itself on its pickles and pickle recipes. When ringmaster Zloty Kornblatt is arrested for “antagonistic fomentation with a side of gratuitous slapstickery” (i.e., inspiring laughter), the other members of the circus troupe conspire to break Zloty out of his prison cell at the top of the Confinement Needle before his impending execution at Termination Field. The various talents of the troupe, ranging from the strongman to acrobat to knife-dodger, aid in their daring rescue plan. The pickle index itself is shown to be a sort of teletype, a scrolling index for “citizen-to-citizen fermentation-recipe exchange.” And the Prime Mother of the pickled land, Madame J, travels with a Javanese octopus named Simeon who must be regularly spritzed with saline solution. While Horowitz certainly generates some laughs, as a sustained work of fiction, the whole conceit wears thin and the characters feel more like jokey caricatures. It is an absurd and whimsical story, a novel of pure invention, marked by Horowitz’s obvious delight in devising weird names, outlandish pickled-food recipes, and bizarre judicial practices. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

The Pickle Index is full of life and everything else-it's rowdy and sweaty and heartbreaking, and by heartbreaking I mean funny, and by funny I mean laugh-until-you're-exhausted-and-leaking-and-hungry.” —Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man

“You know when you find a book that feels original and fresh and weird in just the right way? The Pickle Index is such a book. Eli Horowitz has created a carnival world a little like that amazing place Katherine Dunn took us to in Geek Love. But this book has more laughs. It's a crazy caper!” —Arthur Bradford, author of Turtleface and Beyond

“This novel takes absurdity to new heights and reflects the author's McSweeney's roots, but for all its silliness, it is at its heart a tale of hope and friendship.” —Julia Smith, Booklist

“[The Silent History] handsomely fashions a relationship between digital and print media; but most of all this is a compelling story about difference, rights and power.” —Richard House, The Guardian

“Ingenious . . . [The Silent History is] a richly textured vision of a dystopian future.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

2015-08-17
A ramshackle circus troupe attempts to rescue its imprisoned ringleader in this political farce/allegory. Horowitz's prior fictional works have been collaborations, including the novel The New World (2015) with Chris Adrian and the ambitious book app The Silent History (2014) with Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett. An extra set of hands might have improved this thin and only intermittently funny tale of wrongful arrest and totalitarian regimes. As the story opens in an imaginary country, circus leader Zloty Kornblatt has been arrested by a strike team and accused of illegal performances that stoked "mockery, destabilization, and anarchy." While he stews in a "Confinement Needle" and awaits a kangaroo court's verdict in a neighboring and more conservative province, circus member Flora helps plot a rescue, but her cohorts are unpromising saviors: husband-and-wife performers are at each other's throats, and the strongman only wants to deliver imitation feats of strength according to "Continental mime theory." The novel alternates between Flora's voice—earnest, adventure-seeking—and that of a lackey for the regime holding Zloty—bureaucratic, propagandistic—which helps underscore Horowitz's point about the virtues of independence, however scruffily acquired. But tonally, the novel never successfully settles into the satiric tone it aspires to, leaning heavily on quirky coinages ("smokepoot," "tedfruit," "Harmimal," and the "Pickle Index" itself, a kind of collection of good-hearted folklore), while the plot turns as the circus infiltrates the needle are threadbare disguises, suddenly handy escape hatches, etc. It gives nothing away to say that the novel stands for the power of a small committed team to overwhelm the bad guys and challenge the way rebels are persecuted for public entertainment. But its plot and prose are too limp to sell the point. "Nonsense had gotten us this far," Flora enthuses, as their plot comes together. But nonsense only goes so far. Half-baked Orwell.

Kirkus Reviews