The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

September 19, 2016
Sixteen years ago Sherrill cast the minotaur of Greek mythology as M, a sympathetic everyman holding down a dead-end job as a fry cook, in The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. In this bittersweet sequel, M’s circumstances have changed but his prospects have not improved. Now a Civil War reenactor in Old Scald Village, a sleepy Pennsylvania rust-belt town, M slogs through a daily routine of dying on the battlefield for the entertainment of pitifully small crowds of tourists. Though he’s accepted as a regular by the townspeople, M still feels isolated from those around him—“Human behavior never really surprises him,” he thinks in a very telling moment—and he longs for intimacy like a bachelor too shy to ask for a date (which he is). Hope arrives when Holly, a sassy out-of-towner taking care of her “damaged brother,” catches his fancy—but that hope is sorely challenged by the ensuing madcap mishaps that conspire to keep them apart. Sherrill populates his novel with a colorful cast of weirdos and eccentrics who wouldn’t be out of place in a screwball comedy, including a chain saw carver of tourist-bait statuary, reenactors who approach their work with the intensity of method actors, and the Guptas, the friendly immigrant proprietors of the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge that M calls home, whose foreignness resonates with his own feelings as an outsider. They are all comic foils to M, whose reflections on his incongruous modern life speaks volumes about the human condition even though “Unngh” is nearly his only spoken expression. Readers unfamiliar with Sherrill’s first novel will still appreciate the wit and poignancy of this follow-up.

In Sherrill's follow-up to The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break (2000), a creature from Greek mythology interacts with a group of eccentric characters in central Pennsylvania.The clash between monstrous figures from antiquity and the quirks and foibles of the modern world are the stuff from which a host of plots can be mined, from the horrific to the elegiac. As the title of this novel indicates, Sherrill's tone is more matter-of-fact. Here, the Minotaur finds himself adrift in Pennsylvania, taking part in Civil War re-enactments, pondering his half-human, half-bull nature, and conversing with the residents and owners of the motel where he lives. "Converses" might be pushing it: the Minotaur is a protagonist of few words, bull's head and all, and there's a memorable disparity between his philosophical musings on everyday life and immortality and the brief and sometimes-nonverbal utterances that he makes throughout the book. There are plenty of quietly mundane and grotesque details: one character blowing his nose without the use of a tissue, for instance. Sherrill notes at one point that "the bull-man was conceived in and born out of the god-awful," and that sense of an undercurrent of unpleasantness manifests itself most when he befriends a pair of troubled siblings. Slowly, the simulated violence in which he periodically engages gives way to the threat of something more chaotic. The pacing here is relatively languorous and borders on the episodic, but the book's quirks largely add up to an affecting and unpredictable whole. While its pacing can be an acquired taste, this novel's juxtaposition of magical realism and the mundane allows for a number of haunting and contemplative moments. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2016

It's been 16 years since the Minotaur took the cigarette break that made Sherrill something of a cult author, and now he's back, working as a Civil War reenactor in a Pennsylvania theme park. Having endured millennia as an outsider in the world of humans, M is less action figure than existential loner trying to get along, and Sherrill lets us feel his pain. M is affable enough as he slowly meanders from job to home, the motel where the immigrant Indian owners treat him kindly, and he is taunted some but mostly tolerated by his neighbors. The plot takes its own sweet time getting to the crux of the matter: the arrival of a tough young woman named Holly and her rascally brain-damaged brother, whose presence creates a crisis M will overcome. VERDICT Brightly and incisively written, this is a well-rendered portrait of a stranger among us.

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