Pulpy and Midge Not Just Cubicle Comedy
Imagine a cubical existence. Sketch in a Patrick Bateman-esque boss with an oversexed wife prowling your every move. Now add a sticky note with a cynical and lonely receptionist angling for a date. Ho ho! says Dan the boss man. The timid, clumsy Pulpy lives in this world with his ice-dancing, candle-selling wife, Midge. In the span of a few weeks their solid (and rather PG) marriage is challenged by the absurd, domineering demands of the new boss, Dan, and his wife Beatrice, who’s corrosive relationship and life-style destabilize Pulpy and Midge’s seemingly perfect one. Ho ho! says Dan, with a knee slap.
Structurally, Pulpy & Midge more closely resembles a screenplay than a typical, image-dense novel. It is lean on description, heavy on dialogue, and relies on physical (gestural) cues rather than exposition to indicate the emotional state of the characters. Good dialogue is a rare thing and Westhead is having fun with her talent. You can almost see her tapping out the quirky banter with a half grin. At times, the dialogue is so fast and fun you miss your bus stop while reading about Pulpy missing his (oh irony).
The action of the story moves entirely between the quotation marks and that’s no easy task. Dialogue can be limiting (just eavesdrop on the average coffee shop conversation). Often, the stuff that we really want to say is assessed, judged and ultimately filtered into simplified sound bites that fit the audience or tone of a given conversation. In Pulpy’s case, the ‘audience’ is frequently the boss. Standing up to the corporate head honcho is something even the most savvy A-types among us struggle with. It doesn’t help that Pulpy is, ahem, lacking the proverbial balls required for saying what he thinks. So our only map into the character’s minds relies entirely on what is (or isn’t) said, and on a tiny bit of physical description/reaction surrounding the dialogue. But Westhead uses those locaters well. It’s clear that what Pulpy wants to say, and what he actually says are two different things. Nerves, anger, frustration, excitement can all be told through the spare clues of Pulpy’s hand gestures, the position of his mug, what he’s wearing, etc. etc. etc. The physical environment repeatedly stands in for the mental states of the characters, so read between the lines carefully. The relatively speedy dialogue can be deceiving, so resist the quick page turns.
The sharp dialogue allows Pulpy & Midge to be casually comedic one moment and dead serious the next. At points it reads like a comedy of errors with a plot line very similar to an episode of The Office (lots of comedic scenes that draw attention to the office as a breeding ground for personality quirks and bureaucratic jargon). But then there are moments of genuine depth that leave you squirming. The receptionist, who remains nameless for the entire book, is the poor pleb chosen for torment by Dan and Beatrice. The scenes that involve this calculated psychological game play are some of the best in the novel. They’re subtle and emotionally engaging. She faces some of the greatest insults in a novel filled with them, and it’s her (not Midge) who drives the characters to action. Notice too that the receptionist reveals Dan’s character through their shared personality traits. We get the impression that in a different world the receptionist might be just as controlling, driven and domineering as Dan is in the current one. We sympathize with her situation, but at the same time, we wonder if we’re watching Dan attack some aspect of himself. It’s through the complex psychological nature of the receptionist’s interaction with Dan and Beatrice that true transformative violence and deception occur in Pulpy & Midge. There are echoes of this beyond the receptionist’s scenes, especially later in the novel, but none that come as close to the subtlety and emotion of her battle with the bosses.
While we worry about the receptionist, it’s the relationship between Pulpy and Midge that keeps us reading. We want this oh-so-cute couple to be happy. We hate that Dan and Beatrice’s behaviour begins to enter the safe little apartment that they quietly share. We hate it so much we feel ill reading the passages where they begin to adopt Dan’s phrases, to second guess their bodies and relationships, to spend more money than they can afford. We lament that they aren’t fighting harder against the obvious infiltration. But at the same time, they’re too sweet and comfortable at the start. Too unbelievable in their plainness and cuddly love. Dan and Beatrice with their sexual boredom, their emotional inadequacies and latent insecurities seem more like the rest of us. Or, more like the broad-stroked version of the many couples we know. What Pulpy and Midge need is something that tests the relaxed love they have at the start (think of Job before and after God smites his ass).
The relationships fall too easily into extremes of “dysfunctional” and “naïve” though. At times we want to know more about what really motivates these people, especially Dan and Beatrice, who tend to be more cartoonish than realistic. But in the end, that’s part of the fun of Pulpy & Midge. We’re there for the ride. We’re there to witness Pulpy becoming a real (assertive) person in the midst of so many exaggerated personalities. Ho ho! indeed.
Jenny Sampirisi is the editor of other clutter. Her creative work has been published in Carousel, Misunderstandings Magazine, Filling Station, existere, dANDelion, & The Windsor ReView. She has work forthcoming in QWERTY, Rampike and FourSquare, and is an assistant editor with The Southernmost Review.
