Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

March 1, 1993
Tiny women lawyers, a torch singer in psychotherapy, terrorists, a girl who dates the moon, and members of a support group for lovers of unattainably remote people inhabit O'Donnell's wacky, absurdist universe. In ``The Corpse Had Freckles,'' amateur sleuth Bitty Borax and her legitimate cousin Anodyne investigate Aunt Addle's death from petting an infected cat. The title story features a Midwesterner turned Hollywood starlet who marries in succession the two worst U.S. presidents. ``Marred Bliss'' uses fractured puns and subliminal wordplay to mock the monotony of monogamy, as a marrying couple diversifies into a love quadrangle. Also noteworthy are an epistolary tale about a supposedly psychic newspaper columnist, the diary of a Sigourney Weaver fan, poems to Sominex and to a Dove Bar in the style of Emily Dickinson, a playlet in which Plato invades a modern urban couple's apartment, and laugh-aloud cartoons drawn by the author. Spiked with acid ironies, one-liners and outlandish events, O'Donnell's ( Elementary Education ) humorous tales, sheer zany fun, deftly deflate greed hype, the public's malleability, big egos and superficial emotions.

January 1, 1993
Soaked in innuendo and punnery, humorist O'Donnell's tale "Marred Bliss" features such juvenilia as, from a sailor, "My shaft is at rancor in the harbor, and they gave me whore leave." He lampoons presidential campaigns in the title piece, also the longest and tallest tale of these two dozen; in it, Carlotta, Van, and Cliff, expatriates from a St. Louis suburb called Vertigo Park, wend their weird way to the White House. O'Donnell tries his hand at other forms--cartoons, a Q & A interview with Samuel Beckett, Dickinsonian odes (to Dove Bars), and a farce of homicidal melodrama entitled "The Corpse Had Freckles." Some pieces are snippets of street conversation anyone could compose, such as "Overheard While Walking." Others will be chewed over by connoisseurs of satire, at least those who like sardonic spoofs of Platonic platitudes such as can be found in "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: The Play." O'Donnell can't seem to maintain a joke for more than two or three pages, the title story excepted, but should he try again, consider acquiring this should his next effort break through to the level of the O'Rourkes, Blounts, Trillins, and Barrys. ((Reviewed Jan. 1, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)