Jim Quinn's "Waiting For the Wars to End'

Jim Quinn's latest slim book sandwiches two gruesomely comic novellas about losers, scammers, hookers— in short, damaged, if smart, people living on the cusps between criminality, the corporate world, the working class and academia. Their stories take place during the last two decades, when the lands formerly known as Yugoslavia deconstructed themselves into five new states and George W. Bush sent Americans into two other states that resisted deconstruction by the U.S.

Quinn, you may recall, is a barely reconstructed '60s survivor whose earlier books included American Tongue and Cheek, an attack on language purists, and Word of Mouth, a similarly offbeat guide to New York City restaurants. He has spent his long career straddling the rival worlds of conventional and alternative media, specializing in food and language while writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine, The Nation and Esquire, not to mention several of his own short-lived underground publications in the '60s and '70s.

Quinn sets Men in Love in Wildwood-by-the-Sea, New Jersey (the world's longest hyphenated town name), where its hero, Jon, works the boardwalk for an unidentified foreigner from one of those resyllabilized countries, the name of which even Jon cannot remember. The scammer promises Jon an immense amount of weekly income and throws in his wife as a perk.

Pizza boy's surprise

Jon calls her Rose because he cannot pronounce her real name"“ she's from one of those countries where the lexicon consists largely of consonants. He sleeps with her and complains that she answers the door for the pizza delivery guy naked, but she explains, "We get our pizzas a lot quicker now."

Throughout Men in Love, Quinn continues in his oral orientation, reparsing Rose's fractured English to such a degree that when the narrator speaks, you forget that he's not speaking her lingo. In Quinn's lingua franca, you might at first read a sentence like "Four days of rain stop" as "Four days of rain, stop." As I did. Ultimately you realize you've been scammed into the misreading and that the sentence is perfectly correct.

Quinn tends to be cynical about sex. It's "why adjuncts get freshman classes. The money stinks but fringe benefits include all you can eat."

Rose and Jon fall in love; he makes her pregnant; and when she bids goodbye to her crying husband, Jon is bored by the whole scene but thinks in her lingo: "Let him have her if it's this tragedy."

Well, love is all about eating words, isn't it? Lovers, it's been said, are the most frantic epistemologists.

Downward mobility

In America Strikes Back, Quinn's protagonist, Jack, turns nouns into verbs, as in "She napkins her mouth"— in this case speaking of his ex, with whom he has remained friends and who sits across from him at dinner.

Jack has been fired from his corporate management position and after two years can't find a new job. So he buys a newspaper route that winds its way through South Jersey's Pine Barrens. Here he meets, sleeps with and nearly gets killed by a variety of people living the kind of barren lives that derive from that geography. Quinn's portrayal of the futility and hilarity of these hardscrabble lives is nonetheless affectionately wrought and dramatically tied up in a cataclysmic ending that brings the wars abroad home.

Quinn writes unflinching yet tender characterizations of people slogging through life. Both stories are sadly funny and horrifically real— good reads for one of those cold, damp nights when you're waiting for a pizza delivery and you haven't paid your cable bill. Clothing optional.♦


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