Pulpy and Midge by Jessica Westhead is funny novel about office relationships. But unlike the television show “The Office” which is a funny show about office relationships —a comedy – Pulpy and Midge is not so much a comedy as it is a farce. This book contains all the elements of farce, including an improbable plot (new boss and bosswife seek swinging couple for, well, swinging), exaggerated characters (excessively aggressive, excessively passive, excessively compliant, excessively sex-seeking, etc), cascading events leading to inevitable disaster (give an inch and those bossmen will take a mile — and your clothes), and plenty of slapstick, including farts and moans, sliding around on the floor of bars and other drunken revels, crowded busses and fish in bowls (together: not a good combo), and ridiculously-enacted sex (and ridiculously-concocted hopes for sex).
I was amused by the farce of Pulpy and Midge but I never laughed out loud, and by the final third of the book I was frowning. I finished reading the novel carried along only by my desire to see Pulpy, our lame hero, finally get his act together and just quit the job already! My desires went unfulfilled. A good book can have a mensch as a hero but that mensch needs a bit of kick to be the hero: Pulpy has no kick. He is pulpy, he is mushy, and finally, he is just exasperating. Midge was a smidgen more interesting but in the end her basic airheadedness was not enough to rescue her from the trash bin in my head (the little basket of nerve-endings where I put useless characters from books that I read).
These characters, and the book, failed for lack of motion. I’ve written about this before, the importance of motion in a novel. Characters have to change, to move, to grow or shrink. Stasis is not exciting, and by exciting, I don’t mean my heart is pounding, my cheeks are flushed, my lips are parted. I mean my brain waves are hopping around, ignited and gleeful and just dying to find out what happens. My little cheering squad was going there for a while for Pulpy and his Midge but the ending of this novel was like a tub full of cold water poured right on top of the squad. And cold and wet brain waves are very unforgiving. I was not happy. Letdown in a book is a crime, really. A reader feels cheapened, put upon, put over.
I liked the part when Midge used a depilatory to create a love line on Pulpy’s hairy chest (although I found it hard to believe that he would have a hairy chest). During the work day Pulpy can reach inside his shirt and feel the hairless line and think of his Midge. Too bad that the “love line” is the most interesting thing about Pulpy and Midge, and too bad that Pulpy never uses his brain for thinking other than when he touched his loveline (and even then, not too much thinking goes on) and too bad that all the funny parts of Pulpy and Midge just do not add up to enough. This novel is a good farce but it is not a great book.
The word “farce” also means “seasoned stuffing”, like for a turkey. Pulpy and Midge is that kind of farce as well, but the turkey was dry.
