Foop!, Chris Genoa

Eraserhead, 2005, 293 pages, US$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-9729598-9-0

I get book recommendations from the strangest places. In this case, it was at a panel on Cyberpunk at the 2006 Worldcon. Well-known SF author John Barnes was exploring the differences between older and younger readers, and how many younger readers are fond of “flip and dip” reading, essentially approaching a book like a loose collection of passages that can be read in any order. He recommended Chris Genoa’s Foop! as one of the big underground hits among younger readers, and a book likely to be dismissed by older readers. That sounded like a challenge: I jotted down the reference and later asked my local bookstore to order a copy.

It turns out that Foop! is a Science Fiction comedy. Or at least tries to be. And Barnes certainly has a point when he identifies the book as a test for readers.

Set in a future often indistinguishable from our present, Foop! is about the timeless problems facing young single men, what happens when their bosses puts them on a “special project” and why, sometimes, there really isn’t any other option but to kill Abraham Lincoln.

That’s because our narrator, Joe, is a junior tour guide at an outfit that provides time-travel tourism packages and his job requires him to make sure that his clients are happy, even when they mess around with history. But that particular job is almost normal when compared to what’s waiting for him back at the office: A shiny new position as Chief of Probes, the first probe being finding out why his own boss is being most unpredictably and uncomfortably, er, probed. More trouble starts piling up as he tries hitting on a cute girl at the office and (in a possibly unrelated development) finds himself stalked by two strange characters on the subway ride back home.

But trying to impose a plot on Foop! is disingenuous, because the book never works better than as a surreal collection of loosely related riffs. Like many film comedies, the plot is just an excuse to get from one funny sketch to another. It works well most of the times, even if some chapters stand out as being particularly out-of-place — especially if you make the mistake of trying to make sense out of the book as being more than a collage of amusing situations. Chapter 12, featuring an excretory ghost that only serves to send the narrator out of his apartment, is a particularly frustrating example of this tendency to flash-and-forget.

Such deliberate nonsense also serves to illustrate why, if Foop! is futuristic and funny, it’s barely comic science-fiction: Genoa’s casual indifference to consequences and coherence is such that the imagined universe of his novel never serves a larger thematic goal. Sheckley and Adams this isn’t, despite segments that may feel similar. It’s not necessarily unpleasant as long as the gags keep coming up, but it’s eventually a disservice when the novel attempts meatier heartfelt segments (such as the “dawn of time” sequence late in the book) or when the reader tries to assess the book as a whole rather than snippets of it.

Which is a shame, because most of Foop! is hip, hilarious and a pleasure to read. It’s difficult to hold a grudge against a book that keeps up the laughs. Despite the nihilism and the swearing, it’s a likable book: I still get a kick out of the Joe/Warren bit (or all of Chapter 6) and wish that it could have led to something else later on.

But, in an illustration of the whole concept of surrealism, Foop! is as frustrating as it’s endearing: The indulgence of its readers in putting questions aside in the hope of a latter payoff is never satisfied. Foop! practically defines what is a cult classic. In the end, I can see John Barnes’ point about younger and older readers and how Foop! represents a certain style of writing influenced by film comedies and fast cutting: If a joke is boring, well, there’s always a new one coming up. ADD is an advantage for Foop!‘s readers, especially if it makes them forget everything that happened more than five pages before. Reluctantly, I’ll have to throw my support to “the older readers” generation, and hope that when the younger readership will put us up in old-age homes, they will forget to lock the doors as they go on reading their new-fangled blipvels.

Gee, I feel old.

(I should probably note that the small-press origins of Foop! are a bit too obvious to be glossed over: Beyond the physical feel of the binding, the lower-quality printing and the scattered editorial oversight on the content, the font of the book itself sometimes changes from paragraph to paragraph, subtly passing to a bigger point size without changing line height values. I have no idea why this is so –although I suspect late-minute modifications to the electronic manuscript–, but it’s another vexing reminder that Foop! may have made it out in the world with insufficient quality-control.)