June 22 - "Happy Fish, Plus Coin"

“Happy Fish, Plus Coin”
by Scott Snyder
Voodoo Heart (2006)

* * * * * (Excellent) Realistic

A man on the run from his wealthy family befriends an indestructible man and learns how to give up the fear and loneliness that kept him hiding from life.

A sure sign that writing has style is when you don’t even notice the words on the page. I’m not saying that I don’t recognize the cleverly crafted sentences and powerful images – I’m saying that it all works in such a way that I’m so completely lost in the world Snyder has created that I don’t notice the words, instead I experience the story. From L.J.’s conversations with Gay at the Happy Fish, Plus Coin and under the overpass to L.J’s job at the Home Wrecker, I was zipping along through the story, wondering what the imaginary Nancy would do next, listening to Gay’s discourse on the connection between the color green and longevity, and hoping alongside L.J. for the destruction of the indestructible inflatable house. How could a person not be enamored with passages such as this?:

“They had detectives out looking for me, detectives with real means, but in Florida at that time, for a short wonderful period not too long ago, it was easy to find employment without identification of any shape or sort. It seemed you could open a police station with just a few phony papers to tack on the wall. You could become whoever you wanted; that was Florida right then. I had a book of over fifteen thousand baby names, and I changed mine whenever I felt like it.”

Like the mysteriously named Happy Fish, Plus Coin restaurant and bar, the magic of the story is understood, even if at first it seemed a bit strange.