All Back Full

November 21, 2016
Lopez’s (Good People) playful third novel ponders the nature of meaning and the inadequacy of language over the course of a nondescript suburban Sunday. In the morning, an unnamed man who “enjoys nuance and language and the language of nuance” has a halting conversation with his wife as they sit in their kitchen (the setting is never specified). In the afternoon, a friend joins him for a similar kitchen-counter back and forth. In the evening, all three of them talk together. The conversation and narration has a natural, free-wheeling quality, focusing on such diverse topics as their friends, dogs, birds, trees, sex, nudism, sports, illness, alcohol, and the subjectivity of time. Topics recur as the characters attempt to expose common errors of speech, fact, and memory. Through the narrator’s sardonic expressions, short sentences, clipped paragraphs, and pointedly unreliable descriptions, Lopez forms a cutting, dry humor and—to match the characters’ bleak moods—a pervasive sense of boredom. The three characters frequently question what’s knowable, as well as what’s worth arguing over, and Lopez’s cyclical techniques demonstrate one of the unnamed narrator’s many oft-repeated phrases: “awkwardness, confusion, frustration.” The novel’s motifs eventually intertwine in a satisfying ending that, like much of what’s said, is open to interpretation and misinterpretation. Fans of Lopez’s previous work will enjoy his latest, as will patient newcomers with an interest in drama and metafiction.

November 15, 2016
A daring theatrical novel from Lopez (Good People, 2016, etc.), set in a kitchen, with only three characters.Act I begins with a man and his wife (both unnamed) reading the newspaper at a table. Act II involves the man and his friend (also unnamed) drinking whiskey. Act III involves all three at dinner. They speak but often avoid matters at hand--or are any matters precisely at hand? Either way, no plot develops. Instead, each new remark, however mundane, leads to digressions, about slugs in the driveway or paraphilia or the country Georgia--expository/informational digressions that replicate the experience of clicking around Wikipedia articles. Yet how to explain the strange pull of this novel? It's risk-taking work that, despite its realistic milieu, never approaches realism; nobody speaks in phrases that sound natural. Eventually a secret or two is revealed, and as the book rolls to its end, the work of Pinter comes to mind, with elliptical menace lurking in the corners. But despite the theatrical conceit, this is a novel, one that flirts with ideas of fiction writing. "Everything open to interpretation and misinterpretation," Lopez writes at one point. Elsewhere: "The same thing all over again." Then: "So what is another question." Lopez is crafting the responses of critics, confident they'd be missing the point; through the banality, startling statements emerge, e.g., "Sometimes he cannot understand the woman he married." In moments like this, the novel both embodies and reveals meaninglessness. The title phrase--a reference to submarine terminology--is revealing: "All back full." Familiar words can seem strange together the longer you look at them. Fans of Lopez will understand what he's up to; others may be surprised to discover the novel, like a slug in the couple's driveway, has inched its way into their heads and hearts.

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