Lansky's singular, marvelously absurd, graphic, hybrid novella, Shoes has cutting-edge detailed, prose modeled on recanted reality. It moves like the doorway god Janus, who, upon the threshold, looks both outwards, and to the interior. Two faces, toggle facets of moments, the third eye drawn from both, or either, and between the front and back, the edge. Imaginary and real, fantastic and mundane, possibilities sublimely rendered in comedic instants tucked into the mind as wayposts.
The novella shifts between places, a possible diagnosis, a change of heart, and/or venue, that keeps the reader in a rather delightful attempt to keep up with or abandon meaning in a literal sense. Take the rich detail and let the author's sure hand move the narrative smartly back and forth through the doorway. Understand that the instrument of illustration is unnecessary for genuine pleasure in getting a little lost in the story and getting a little lost in the author, but the graphic element helps. There is a personal metaphor in all the mileage piled up, in the distance, from place to place recounted, time travel, from footnote to footnote.
Steve Lansky has a unique perspective, from the doorward gaze, drawn either way, of the neurotypical, or the neurospectacular. Somewhere in between ambition, and accomplishment (something of a bipolarity itself, eh?). He starts a conversation with a version of himself, and flexes outward, as the reader becomes the most colorful of chameleons. Sure, there's some shapeshifting here, and a relaxation of the serotonin guardrails, that order memory, and experience, to behave in a linear way, but it's supposed to be fickle.
Plot summary:
Young Jack Acid, aspiring artist and writer, lands in a halfway house transported from Cincinnati to San Francisco mid 1970s, in the midst of left coast marijuana uprising, and social unrest. Rejected by radical mental health intervention, traditional means are suggested causing Jack to seek Zen, the Merry Pranksters, hitchhiking, storytelling, and rockstardom.
Years later he absorbs the intervention of Unusually Tretheway, a lesbian Sensei, whose hallucination chamber yields a story including radio, Cuba, Lansky in Cuba, time travel, famous people in and out of place and time, photography, fine art, Harvard, mystical romance, method acting and neurolinguistic programming.
Jack, somehow restored from Cuban highs, through institutions in Ohio, faces his schizophrenia, transcends his alcoholism, and discovers poetry in the shoes of being.
Industry Reviews
Lansky's singular, marvelously absurd, graphic, hybrid novella, Shoes has cutting-edge detailed, prose modeled on recanted reality. It moves like the doorway god Janus, who, upon the threshold, looks both outwards, and to the interior. Two faces, toggle facets of moments, the third eye drawn from both, or either, and between the front and back, the edge. Imaginary and real, fantastic and mundane, possibilities sublimely rendered in comedic instants tucked into the mind as wayposts.
The footnotes on the negotiations of the battle of the tables were such a perfect insert, to illustrate the march of hallucination, that becomes the history of an event, after everyone, with a memory of it gone. The proposed setting is the nature of perception. Even-handedness is at its best incarnation, where the exchange of the sane, and the imaginary across the same space, glare incredulously at each other.
This is a book you will find easy to read. On one hand, it is a travel narrative that moves through layers of history and space. Here are familial gangster-kindled koans, old beach vistas, strange relatives, and people with wonderful names. Bicycles, cars, airplanes, Greyhounds, and thumbs crisscross the neural maps-places you can only find through the author's plan of the oft-unplanned. A recount demanded!
Peace, on the other hand, in the narrator's mind, is a sticky, messy affair that we code with the restless truth of self-doubt, the enigma of memory, the placation of grift, guilt, and potential harm to oneself and others-a comedy in the error of some odd gene editing by the great bean counter.
-Ken Kawaji, poet emeritus, Kaldi's Coffeehouse Bookstore
