Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan St. Martin’s Press, 2006

This novel’s funny moments, and there are a fair number of them, are very funny. The narrator’s a slacker named Shane who steals saltshakers, temps at an insurance agency, sleeps with his landlord’s wife, is dating a woman who beats him up in bed repeatedly. He seems to spend a lot of time at his dentist’s office, and while there, strikes up a friendship with Marlene, the dentist’s assistant. Marlene’s deaf, and her friendship with Shane consists mostly of swearing at each other in sign language and mocking Doug, the dentist, in front of his face without him realizing it. When I was entertained, which was reasonably often, I didn’t find myself thinking about how I prefer writing with longer clause-heavy sentences to writing like this novel’s: short declarative sentences, dialogue oddly lacking in commas, occasional moments when I wasn’t sure if it was the narrator being dumb or the author, as when the narrator calls the most obnoxious poster in a hallway of inspirational quotations a “coup d’etat.” Ah well. Apathy, as the narrator says partway through the book, “has its own slow momentum. It doesn’t like to be disturbed.” (159). And so I kept reading.