Ian Frazier, �Coyote V. Acme�
A little while back, my sister and my mom came into the bookstore. My sister also reads a shitload of books, though a lot of those are chick books, by the look of her shelves. She asked me for some recommendations, and I tried to pull her out of her Oprah book club funk, suggesting Harper Lee and Tom Robbins. But then I pulled a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces off the shelves and tried to summarize the story for her without giving anything essential in the plot away, which is harder than you might think.
�I don�t think so,� she said finally after scanning over the cover. �I usually can decide if I�m going to like something from what they put on the cover, and this doesn�t interest me.�
I was too flabbergasted to state the obvious � Don�t you know that you�re not supposed to judge a book by its fucking cover?!?! That�s what I should have said. But I was too shocked that somebody would be so clueless as to not accept my opinion as law! So I let her get away without buying one of the funniest books I�ve ever read.
But I forgot my own advice that I forgot to give to my sister soon after that. This book came into the store soon after she had left and I was intrigued by the title, as well as the art, which showed the cheap cartoon-y style of the old Roadrunner cartoons. The summary on the back explained that this was a collection of short stories, the title of one revolving around an essay involving a lawyer initiating a lawsuit of negligence and product liability for Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Corporation. I was sold. And so was the book.
What transpired was a collection of 21 extremely unfunny stories. Worse, is that they all revolved around a funny premise, but Frazier lacks the talent to expand these premises. The entire thing would have been a total write-off if it weren�t for one story that begins with the quotation embraced by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani that said, �We can kick your city�s ass.�
The rest of the story revolved around the citizens of New York traveling to other cities just to, well, kick their ass. Other cities start to trash-talk their actions. �Oh sure, you can kick our ass,� one city complains. �You have, what, eight or nine million people? Our city has a population of forty-eight thousand four hundred and fourteen! Pick on somebody your own size!�
So yeah, I shouldn�t judge a book by its cover. And I suddenly remember that I never cared for Roadrunner cartoons in the first place.
