By Joe Sacksteder

In the 2001 black-and-white space cowboy musical, The American Astronaut, writer/director Cory McAbee sought to write a joke that wasn’t funny now but would be in the future. Tom Aldredge’s character tells the long, long joke to warm up the all-male crowd before a dance contest in a watering hole on the asteroid Ceres. What starts as a “hertz” donut joke, with increasingly violent punchlines that can be recognized as grimly funny, devolves into something the bar finds increasingly hilarious and the contemporary viewer finds increasingly nonsensical. “I’ve never understood that joke,” the old man concludes his set. “But, then again, I’ve never been to Earth.”

In Robert Lopez’s new novel in stories, The Best People, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, for example when our speaker translates the crickets and frogs he hears on his white noise machine: “What they say is come on over and fuck me or kill me or kill me and then fuck me you crazy demented savages, every last one of you.” Or this description of drowning: “Water fills the lungs, making life at first difficult, then impossible to sustain.” However, Lopez’s protagonists often feel like they’ve never been to Earth, and The Best People reads like a joke that’s waiting for us all to catch up. I had the image of multiple shaggy dog jokes offset and laid on top of one another, so that usual effect of associative logic in a story made of braided strands registers more as the continuous percussion of the protracted jokes’ punchlines.

It is hard to know the protagonist of this Beckettesque novel in any stable or confident way. But certain scraps of information begin to accrue: he believes himself to have been reincarnated many of times over ten thousand years; he’s obsessed with sex but has difficulty performing, both because of his hardware and because of how his defamiliarizing mindset seems to render the world around him grotesque; he is—despite this obsession—very selfishly anti-nativist, as he desires to be released from the cycle of rebirth, and every reproducing couple is seen as a personal threat in this regard; he likes tennis; his previous job was to conduct symposiums on environmental issues at conferences, but he was summarily dispatched—“they told me I didn’t have to do that job anymore, that the job had been completed to everyone’s satisfaction”—and given one million dollars, perhaps due to an ambiguous “accident”; he has a hypochondriac streak, sure that if he goes to the doctor he’ll be diagnosed with cancer; and he perhaps lives with his sister, who apparently spends all day washing dishes. Since he reports to having been abused as a child, isolated by his parents in a shed and routinely beaten, readers might check their laughter at times and wonder if his non-normative beliefs and behavior might be symptoms of this trauma.

The third book in Lopez’s trilogy of novels-in-stories along with Good People and A Better Class of People (one need not have read those books to enjoy this one), The Best People begins by alternating very short chapters composed mostly of listed imperatives—warning readers not to make the mistake of doing very customary things like being born or sitting at a table where other people are seated—with somewhat longer chapters in various points of view. The strict alternating of sections eventually breaks down as one container leaks into another. The second story, “Full Stop,” is in first-person, giving us direct access to a mind characterized by over-explanation of things that don’t need explaining and under-exploration of gaping lacunae. An example of the former is “Then I added the words full stop for emphasis, which means there’s nothing else to say on the subject and I don’t want to hear it.”

The fourth story, “An Attempt at Sex,” shifts into third-person narration inflected by a free indirect discourse that initially seems to be filtered through our protagonist’s language, knowledge, and biases. It occurs to me that readers have a natural tendency to view the third-person narrator in such setups as possessing a certain innocence—one that is “contaminated” by the character. The storytelling voice in The Best People, however, is hardly innocent. At times, the free indirect discourse seems to function as described, for example, “The problem was he couldn’t get aroused, which, now that it comes back to him, isn’t true. He couldn’t sustain an erection is what actually happened.” At other moments, however, a gulf opens up in which readers find that the voicey and opinionated and flawed third-person voice is not in fact being filtered through the narrator, that the narration is coming from somewhere else. We are dealing with a voice that is diegetic in the sense of narrating but non-diegetic in the sense of having an unclear involvement in the plot and world of the novel. Such a moment arises in “An Attempt at Sex” as the narration muses over two shapeshifting women named Esperanza and Sofia; I assumed that it amounted to the protagonist remembering his past relationships with these women, until I came to the line, “But the man is not thinking about Esperanza and Sofia and hasn’t for years.” This storyteller’s voice is also marked by a sort of suspicious, hesitating, crab-like way of suggesting hypothetical plot points, for example in “Sister in Basement, Manny Again Elsewhere”: “That Sofia and Esperanza are tangled up two doors down doesn’t mean anything in this context, as it’s almost certain that the woman is not talking to either Sofia or Esperanza. // This means it’s impossible to know who Benjamin is or why anyone should care about him.”

The first-person plural of the sixth story, “A Town Called Luck,” has a desperate feel to it, like the story might be not nearly as crowded as the point of view suggests. The collective speaker seems to evince similar idiosyncrasies as the book’s protagonist, but the Manny from whom our speaker so earnestly desires approval shares the same history of parental abuse as our ostensible protagonist. “We always wanted Manny to think of us as the best people,” the speaker admits, “but by the time we got there the cops had the whole area cordoned off and Manny was nowhere to be found.” The Best People might seem like a curious name for a novel that’s so solipsistic; there’s a reasonable chance that this story’s “we”—and the Manny they vow not to betray to the police after being locked up for two days and interrogated—amount to no more than one person. Such a reading is supported but hardly proven by moments elsewhere like, “Sometimes I can’t distinguish between what’s real and what I’ve dreamed or saw in a movie when it comes to my own life story. It’s also possible that I’m referring to a past life.”

Later in the book, “An Attempt at Human Relations” is a recapitulation of “An Attempt at Sex,” but with the free indirect discourse instead filtered through the female partner’s consciousness. The “normality” of the narration here—compared with the heightened malfunction of the novel’s predominating voice—serves to lay bare the divide between the workings of the female partner’s mind versus our protagonist’s. We are not just in a world where language is glitchy; readers understand by contrasting these two stories how profoundly askew our protagonist’s way of moving through the world ultimately is. There’s some dramatic irony to it: I felt scared for the woman at this moment, at her obliviousness, as surely as if I’d seen chopped up bodies in her partner’s basement.

Sigmund Freud begins his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” with the observation that most writing on aesthetics has focused on positive affects, like feelings that attend encounters with beauty. As I read The Best People, it occurs to me that most writing on the uncanny has been content not to question its categorization as wholly negative. But the tension between familiar and unfamiliar in Robert Lopez’s lines is essential to its uncanny humor. “Still I drew a paycheck or loved a woman in almost all the fifty states except the ones in the lower lefthand corner,” the protagonist muses in “What Water Does to Wood,” a sentence that’s baffling on one hand because readers don’t yet know about the speaker’s past lives, and baffling on the other because the lower lefthand states could be California and Arizona—or they could be Alaska and Hawaii. Maps simultaneously render massive spaces knowable and coherent while distorting the territory, inflating Greenland to sublime proportions or making “The Bullshit States” (so termed by The Onion’s Our Dumb World atlas) appear just offshore California. On a spectrum of positive to negative affects, of course, laughter can spike anywhere, can slide so easily to horror or joy, and to read Lopez is to exist in a perpetual state of anticipating the spike, the slide. The sheer pleasure makes me willingly accept complicity in whatever crimes against polite logic our beleaguered narrator might be about to hallucinate.

Readers who enjoy the duplicity, defamiliarization, amnesia, and Kaspar Hauser logic of The Best People will also enjoy Robert Coover’s “Going for a Beer,” Nicholas Grider’s “Millions of Americans Are Strange,” and Ray Levy’s novel A Book So Red. The Best People engages in unclear ways with Much Ado About Nothing, as at least three story titles are plucked from that play. The final words of the novel are also the title of the first story in Lopez’s Good People, offering a Finnegans Wake-like circularity to the trilogy. The protagonist’s condition—confinement, surveillance, phone calls, masturbation—toward the end of the novel starts to feel more and more like the plight of the central character in Lopez’s 2009 novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, suggesting that an author’s past books might be seen as constituting the past lives of their characters.