Body High
Challenging. Heartbreaking. Disturbing. Hilarious. Fuckin’ A rights on point, buddy.
Jon Lindsey’s novel Body High is all those things and more. Throughout, failure and trauma break in waves between painful, slapstick attempts to right the wrongs of the past. The writing, at times, is reminiscent of the best of Irvine Welsh’s best, if Welsh were a millennial American writer by the name of Lindsey rather than a Scottish Gen Xer.
Consider the following passage (a personal favourite), where Leland is wrestling with his conscience after yet another in the seemingly endless series of terrible decisions, all the while watching his best pal FF duke it out in the squared circle during a low-rent semi-pro-wrestling match:
Choke slam. Chicken wing. Bulldog. Backcracker. Brainbuster. Facebreaker. Apache cutter. Bear hug. Bell clap. Frog splash. Monkey flip. Pile driver. Belly-to-back piledriver. Argentine piledriver. Spike piledriver. Oriental spike. Arm twist ropewalk chop. Stump Puller. Figure Four Leglock. Scorpion Death Lock. Trailer Hitch. Death Valley Driver. DDT. STF. Pedigree. FU. Crotch claw. Barely Legal. Power bomb. Hell’s Gate. Atomic drop. F-5. Doomsday Device. Frankensteiner. Steiner Recliner. Bronco buster. Camel clutch. Cattle Mutilation. Texas cloverleaf. Lasso from El Paso. Cactus Clothesline. Electric chair. Gutwrench. Guillotine. The People’s Elbow. Famouser. Neckbreaker. Facebuster. Musclebuster. Gut- buster. Diamond Dust. Stone Cold Stunner. Big Boot. Leg Drop. Booty Bop. Mushroom Stomp. Shooting Star. Moonsault. Sunset Flip. Pepsi Plunge. Sharpshooter. Rings of Saturn. Space Tornado. Polish Hammer. Inverted Swastika. Alabama slam. Hurricanrana. Hangman. Wings of Love. Go to Heaven. Crucifix. Pentagram Choke. Razor’s Edge. Suicide. Straight jacket. Surfboard.
Make no mistake, though: Body High can be a difficult read. Considering the subject matter, it would be crazy for it not to be. In a recent interview with The Nervous Breakdown, Lindsey explained how he came to write the novel (“I’m trying to suffocate my shadow in gold spray paint”) as a way of working through his own pain and guilt.
Only when I began to write into the pain, of memory, of my mom and myself, could the book emerge from my body. Only then could readers take seriously the questions I wanted the book to ask: How is trauma transmitted? How does the sexual abuse suffered by a mother affect her son? Is incest inherited?
Over and over again, Lindsey effortlessly weaves brief moments of absurd beauty into the ugly grit of Leland’s tragic tale (“His designer jeans are distressed in a way that looks like he pissed himself.”). The effect, not unlike any of Leland’s bad habits, is addictive. You may want to shower after reading. But a shower won’t cut it; you’ll still be itching for more.
As a piece of writing about LA, Lindsey isn’t out of place among those who came before him (or, at least, those that this provincial dweeb who hasn’t seen much of the world is familiar with: Chandler, Fante, Bukowski, Ellroy). His writing is raw and vivid, his characters, like LA, deeply flawed. You can smell the smog, hear the freeways (“—the 2, the 5, the 710, the 405, the 73, the 55—”) hum between the lines.
Out of the sun, Triangle Square materializes, a forgotten city of gold. The shopping mall of my youth fills me with something like hope. Driving closer, I’m reminded how many years have passed. Sun-bleached stucco with varicose cracks. Only a few shops are free of For Lease signs: a discount sushi, a fake-n-bake tanning salon, a nightclub where FF sometimes picks up shifts as a bouncer. Where in the bathroom he sells to some of the same right-wingers we knew in high school, who still roofy each other for fun.
Body High might not be your cup of tea. But man, is it a real piece of work; one that hits fast and hard again and again, right where it counts. Give it a go, once it’s available in Canada (on May 1 if I’m not mistaken).