You're reading and enjoying a book by an author whose work is still fairly new to you. The author references other writers with whom you are much more familiar. It's a comforting and gratifying feeling - shared tastes and influences; you feel a greater closeness to the writer whose book is in your hands.
I experienced this when immersing myself in the small Texan towns vividly conjured up by
Bullshit Rodeo, a novel published last year by Misti Rainwater-Lites. Somewhere along the way, there is mention of reading and re-reading Charles Bukowski's
Women, a novel whose protagonist is Henry Chinaski, the alter-ego used in four of Bukowski's novels as well as countless short stories and narrative poems.
Bukowski's style seems widely considered to be composed of elements of extreme honesty and realism. So many of his devoted fans find it difficult to tell where Chinaski ends and the real Bukowski begins. While the two do overlap, there are some crucial differences, not least around the matter of isolation. The loner Chinaski keeps the world firmly at arm's length. His creator was a prolific correspondent, answering much of the vast quantity of mail sent to him.
I find myself asking the same question about the Misti Rainwater character captured in the pages of Bullshit Rodeo, a work whose action switches back and forth between Texas and California, where the protagonist heads in pursuit of unrequited love for another writer.
The Misti in these pages recounts a largely unhappy childhood and adolescence of not fitting into a world of church, school, football games and suffocating family life. The narrator recalls numerous false starts - a rashly entered marriage, an abandoned college degree, an abortive stint in the army, unloved and unsuitable jobs, giving up her first child for adoption. The breadline never seems to be far below Misti, her long-suffering second husband and her only child, a boy for whom she struggles to act as the warm, encouraging mother she knows she should be.
The backdrop to these miseries is sketched quite effectively. But this is done not so much with naturalistic descriptions of landscapes or interiors (these details are generally quite sparse) but by listing the cultural artifacts of the settings. Not least of these artifacts is food. For me, I associate non-metropolitan, non-cosmopolitan America with a diet of sweet, fatty, bland foods with bright colours and childish names. Misti's Texas is made of buttery microwave popcorn, sprinkled donuts, fried chicken, Chick-o-Stick and McDonald's. This is contrasted with a more sophisticated life of health food, cultural pursuits and affluent ease in the California for which she hankers:
"Somewhere else that is not here women eat yoga bars and text message their lovers and discuss designer shoes with their girlfriends over cranberry salads".
I wonder, then, how much of the author really is in these pages. Is this a Chinaski-style caricature, created for the sake of sustaining mood, interest and intensity? Or is the Misti of Bullshit Rodeo a faithfully accurate rendering of the writer, making this purely an autobiography rather than a novel? If the latter, it might to tough to empathise at times. By no means everyone will find it possible to sympathise with the narrator's on-off withdrawal from the responsibilities of parenthood.
Either way, the story takes hilarious turns, not least in its treatments of bleakly unappealing cyber-sex. There is laughter in the dark. Raw, raucous laughter.
I enjoyed this immensely - and the book has done much to accelerate the pace at which I am coming to believe that there is some great writing being done outside the industrial system of the mainstream publishing houses and booksellers. That Misti Rainwater-Lites has had to go down the self-publishing route so far is an indictment of the conservatism of the marketing-led book trade and not any indication of a lack of quality about what she does.
