BIG GIANT FLOATING HEAD

An antic novel assembled from connected metafictional stories
that stretch metaphors to their breaking points and beyond.

The 17 stories, several of which have been published earlier in
one form or another, feature as their narrator a hapless antihero who shares a
name with the author. This Christopher Boucher (only slightly to be confused
with the author of Golden Delicious, 2016), a writer who lives in
the fictional town of Coolidge, Massachusetts, has either been kicked out by
his wife, Liz, or is on the point of being so. He encounters one odd situation
after another, generally coping with them less than gracefully. In the title
story, for example, a giant face floats through the sky following the narrator
until his friend shoots it and stuffs it into an old storage unit. In “Call and
Response,” Chris gets a job at a City Hall prayer switchboard, where he’s
assigned to zap the majority of the prayers that come in, prayers the size of a
Volkswagen or a refrigerator, until they eventually threaten to physically
crush him. Often, the stories morph words into physical objects. “The Language
Zoo” imagines a place with “strange, slithering adjectives, followed by
propositions hanging high in their cages or burrowing low in hollowed-out
logs.” When a stampede begins, sentences like “I’m so sad and lonely” and “How
do I live without love?” break free only to rear their heads in the white
spaces of other stories in the volume. The novel’s primary problem is that its
chapters are all basically variations on a theme. Though the final chapter,
“The Unloveables,” offers a bit of hope and a sense of closure, those that
precede it are more or less interchangeable.