TimeOut Chicago spazzes out over The Milk Chicken Bomb
By Andrew Wedderburn. Coach House, $16.95
Growing up spazzy is never easy, but it’s probably hardest in a small town. Lucky for the narrator of Wedderburn’s debut, Marvin, Alberta, is home to another spazz and they happen to be best friends. He and Mullen cause all kinds of “public mischief” together, and they’re known for it around town. “…[N]obody cares what we do, so long as it isn’t causing public mischief….”
Wedderburn writes with a quirky but faithful realism that really brings Marvin to life. There’s a character around every corner: Deke, who holds a maniacal grudge against the local credit union after they won’t lend him the money to buy a nuclear submarine; Solzhenitsyn, Vaslav and Pavel, the Russian immigrants who pack meat by day and dominate the local curling league by night; Helene, the mysterious Quebecoise who comes to town to start a music school. The quirky small town is an old trope—a bigger nerd than me would maybe make an argument here about pastoralism, class and urbanization—and it’s quite familiar in the works of writers like Sherwood Anderson and Richard Russo. There’s even a hint of Napoleon Dynamite here.
But Wedderburn pulls the old “quirky town” maneuver exceptionally well, perhaps even using The Milk Chicken Bomb as a commentary on the maneuver itself. The abject poverty of Mullen’s family and neighbors is never sugarcoated, even if it does sometimes provide for humor, and the kid’s feelings of alienation and loneliness fall into a real and heartbreaking psychology. Wedderburn excels at characterization and setting, and these are generally enough to carry the reader through the largely episodic pastiche.—Pete Coco
