Note on a Napkin, to a Napkin
Note on a Napkin, to a Napkin, a review of Life Engineering by Brian Jacobson. Anxiety Press. 2025. $2.99 Kindle, $20.00 paper.
While Chris Haggerty, the protagonist of Life Engineering, is often caught up in circumstances beyond his control, Chris’s creator, Brian Jacobson isn’t; he is in complete control of Chris, his friends Maxwell and Noah, and all the character’s that inhabit Chris’s world. Their story is one that had to be told, a good story, one that bears the stamp of inevitability. As with any good work of fiction, it is more than a summary of parts. But three things that make it good are its author’s use of hyperbole to achieve a comic effect, its undertone of seriousness, and is compelling scenes. Life Engineering is busy, fast-paced, and Jacobson, with his sense of narrative timing, moves from scene to scene with the ease of a seasoned storyteller.
Life Engineering is, in a word, outrageous.What makes it outrageous, and often ‘falling-down funny,’ is the author’s hyperbolic sentences that depict quirkiness. Two characters at odds with each other are Chris and Arthur, the father of Chris’s best friend Maxwell. Chris, living with father and son in their home, takes it upon himself to arrange Arthur’s vinyl jazz collection in alphabetical order, as a way of easing tension, but more so just to satisfy his own instinct for order. Chris and Maxwell make videos and hope to parlay them into a TV reality show. Arthur has friend who can help them, Hunter Humpernickle, who, in photographs, always appears with a yellow Bic disposable razor in his shirt pocket. Chris and Maxwell’s friend Noah, a law school dropout, substitute elementary school teacher, who is ‘making a difference, (but also smokes crack), has a student, Ernesto, whom he more than once refers to as ‘a diamond in the rough.’ And there is Karl Boudine, a.k.a. Body Odor, an ex Green Baret Vietnam vet, Chis’s life coach, who is turning blue from taking silver pills. One bit of outrageousness involves Chris going into a sports chat room on the computer, his handle MAGICJOHNSONSWEATLODGE, and announcing, falsely, the death of the renown basketball player Larry Bird, from Alzheimer’s; then he describes Larry at an Outback Steakhouse, with blood around his mouth; and lastly suggests suicide as he connects Larry to the line ‘he blew his mind out in a car,’ from the Beatles song ‘A Day in the Life.’ No one in the chat room is buying it, but Chris has gotten their attention. Another outrageous thing Chris did, which he recounts in a flashback—he drove Senator Allen Joseph’s Mercedes into the ocean.
While the characters seem ‘larger than life,’ they are mortal. Chris, Maxwell, and Noah, upon returning to Boston from a weekend in Florida, learn that Arthur has died, from an accidental overdose of opiates, and Maxwell mourns the loss of his father. Chris cannot forget the loss of his sister, Marie, who died prematurely, in her teenage years, from lupus. Part of Maxwell’s insecurity is revealed in his wanting liposuction; Noah’s meanness and bullying tendencies come out in his continual referring to Maxwell as Moonhead. Chris is vain about his appearance, and, like Maxwell, dependent on others (for Chis, Karl; for Maxwell, Dave) to tell them how to live. And they are ambitious. Both Chris and Maxwell hope to have a TV show, and Maxwell wants to be a realtor, while Chris wants to own a gym. They persist, doggedly, to try to achieve their goals. Finally, there is disappointment in love, as things don’t work out for Chris in his romance with Sintra Boudine, Karl’s niece. What started so well ended abruptly. That is also true with regard to Chris and Maxwell’s hope for their own TV program.
The good scenes are many, and many are very good. There’s the scene in which Noah tricks Maxwell into giving him ‘a hand job’ that is captured on video in Noah’s apartment. There’s the scene in which Maxwell, giving Arthur’s eulogy, tells the mourners he, Maxwell, got stomach cancer from ‘eating dog shit.’ There’s the scene with Chris and Sintra making love after taking mushrooms at Walden Pond, in Chris’s Blazer, and the scene of mayhem at the AMC Fenway theater, after which Chris has a chance encounter with his biological father. Each scene occurs in a carefully laid out context. Arthur has never approved of Chris’s friendship with Maxwell. Yet Maxwell has taken Chris into their home. Arthur continually irks Chris with his referring to Chris as ‘homosexual male prostitute.’ He says this so often that it’s almost like a chant (in Chris’s head). Chris has had enough. There’s a scene that finds Chris nude in the living room, where some of Arthur’s neighbors have gathered. They finally have it out, protagonist and antagonist, and Chris abruptly leaves, quite exasperated. It’s cathartic in that his pain is the reader’s pleasure. Getting ‘thrown out,’ or forced to leave is no laughing matter, but in this scene there is much to laugh about. If you didn’t laugh, you would cry, or laugh so hard you cried.
One measure of how good a story is, is to see what it would be like if some part were omitted. There is a boy who lives in Karl’s neighborhood. Chris never learns his name, but he knows Chris’s name. Several times Chris encounters him when Chris is leaving or going to see Karl. The boy is at the window of Chris’s Blazer, and Chris can’t seem ‘to shake him off’. Although only a child, he seems clairvoyant. He both annoys and intrigues Chris, and Chris’s story would be lesser without him.
That is true of all the characters in this novel. There’s a lot going on in it, with not a syllable wasted. It all adds up to one heck of a good story. Life Engineering, a comment on a place, a time, and the people in it, is for all-time. It is local and in its scope universal, a work of truth and beauty.
More about the napkin could be said, but that would ruin the story.
About the critic
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
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