Private Idaho

Sharing this story aloud to a professional in a white coat should earn our friend a mandatory 3 day stay for evaluation. Witty, fun with a sliver of eerie relatability.
Great reader, the perfect voice for the story.

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Cartoon Art & Animated Prose

Frontier Motor Court is the kind of story which, read aloud to a live audience, almost instantly sparks snorts of recognition – not because a handful of astute listeners know where they’re headed - they know how they’re going to get there. And, with a quick-start comedy like this, that opening moment is infectious – soon enough, the full house is along for the ride, following the hapless hero as he weaves and staggers, somehow always a step and a half ahead of expectations, from the stacked deck at the beginning the story to the epiphany at the end.

That epiphany, the ostensible payoff for making the journey, is the proffered “secret” of the opening scene, when the protagonist invites himself to sit down at a stranger’s table and promises to provide a “new perspective on your troubles” in exchange for patient listening and half a pitcher of beer. This is an effective framing device, deftly used to break up a painful trek through arduous, sometimes treacherous territory, as the narrator is at pains to remind his diegetic listener – several times – of the awesome reward to come. But the end of that rainbow is less a concern for the live audience or solitary reader because the telling of this story is such a nimble performance of comic art that their own transformative experience, as lovers of literature, is already in process. Once the rhythm is struck and momentum gathered, a more likely sentiment is hoping the story won’t come to a close too quickly. Which, thankfully, it doesn’t.

True to its subtitle, Frontier Motor Court is a very funny story – one of the funniest I’ve ever read – and it’s driven by a distinctive brand of humor. There’s no denying that Aritz can apply a light touch when called upon, but for me the influences that come to mind range between Looney Tunes hilarity and Norman Rockwell’s droll Americana. These strange bedfellows are the two terminals Aritz modulates the storytelling between without ever fully occupying either.

Okay, it sounds odd to invoke the Mozart of the Saturday Evening Post in a review of a “crime” story (or to pair him with a stable of irreverent cartoonists), so let me explain. The reason this story is so funny is because it’s so animated. ‘Animated’ works for Looney Tunes because cartoons never stop moving. It works for Rockwell because his paintings – still images – are caught by a high-speed imagination. They all tell stories, but in the blink of an eye. Like Cartier-Bresson, Rockwell is the master of the decisive moment. Only, he doesn’t capture it by snapping a shutter; he reconstructs it. The animated quality of Rockwell’s paintings lies in the perpetual back-and-forth between two types of realism – magic and photographic. Logically, this is a quality that Aritz manages beautifully in set pieces best suited for story-world building, as in the snapshot of history embedded in the description of the Frontier Motor Court. But it also kicks in at some of the most comical moments in the action – motion seizes up into an image – you blink – and your swift ride through this zany, all too recognizable landscape is momentarily frozen on the retina.

At the other end of the spectrum stands the wayfarer’s homecoming, a climax so scaled up it’s on a par with Act V of What’s Opera Doc?

Between these terminals is a carnival of comic turns, embedding the texture of the narrative with every sort of irony as the narrator – a victim of his own fatalism, a hopeless self-deprecator, but also a clear-eyed observer of human nature (when his eyes aren’t crossed or clouded with blood), sometimes reminding himself to stand tall – reflects on the perfect storm of absurdities that has become his willy-nilly destiny.

It's a dereliction of duty not to delve into the philosophical dimensions of this story. But I will leave that business to other reviewers, except to observe that there is something essentially kindred between Aritz’s bibulous security guard and Chaplin’s Tramp – with the caveat that the hero of this story is less balletic in physical comedy and, in my view, something of a socialist.

I do feel compelled, finally, to offer one other rationale for my admiration of this story: among the many pleasures I find in reading good literature is savoring the prose, phrases and images that reformulate the world in ways I hadn’t yet discovered for myself. It’s certainly true that this is a very funny story, making me smile at every turn of this misguided hero’s DUI odyssey of a day. But inhabiting it, being inside it, I’m continuously distracted by the gloss of the language. The comedy is muffled by line, image, color, phrase, figure. There’s a lot of cartoon art and magic in Aritz’s animated prose. Very savory!

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