No Wasted Word: The Weirdness by Jeremy P. Bushnell
No Wasted Word is a bi-monthly column where Caitlin Reade Keenan discusses and reviews books by contemporary writers published by independent presses.
Written by Caitlin Reade Keenan
Jeremy P. Bushnell’s The Weirdness (Melville House) could not have come into my possession at a better time. The book’s narrator, the 30-something Billy Ridgeway, a sandwich maker by day and an aspiring fiction writer by night lives in a tiny studio apartment with a roommate. Billy is kind-of-sort-of seeing an experimental filmmaker, and struggles to make sense of the all the weirdness around him. By that I mean, when we first meet him, he is preoccupied by the availability of a banana in New York City in the middle of winter.
So, when the devil arrives in his apartment, brews him fair trade coffee, asks him to infiltrate a warlock’s abode, and take the Neko of Infinite Equilibrium in exchange for a book deal, Billy is able to accept the new reality of this more-readily than most of us would be able to.
I say this book comes at a perfect time for me because it’s very easy as a young-ish writer to get wrapped up in the contemporary writing scene and to find it all very discouraging. What The Weirdness does, in a darkly funny but nonjudgmental way, is call out all of the absurdity of the scene by juxtaposing it against a Faustian adventure.
This novel was playful and imaginative and so funny that I would stop and read parts of it out loud to whomever I was around. The tale is cinematic in scope (I suggest Woody Harrelson play the devil in the movie adaptation) but personal in character. Billy was a frustrating hero, pathetic at times, but always likeable. As we follow him on his epic adventure that includes warlocks, wards, demon wolves, and magic portals, we root for him and fully accept the absurdity of his situation.
Ultimately, that is why the book is so meaningful to me, it is a reminder that all of it —everything— is really, really weird. And, really, what one thing is weirder than the other? The world of the contemporary writing scene is weird, but no weirder than finding a tropical fruit in a bodega in the middle of New York City in the winter. Billy Ridgeway taught me that.
