Breakfast on Pluto : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Looking for love in all the wrong places.
Review: With his grim humor, ironic detachment, and mordant examination of profoundly disturbed psyches, McCabe always provides thrills and chills for the reader, forcing us to share the unique lives and grotesquely skewed viewpoints of his characters. Here the reader is drawn into the mind of transvestite prostitute Pussy Braden, the son of a priest and the teenage Mitzi Gaynor lookalike he raped, as he asks "How can I ever belong on this earth?" and tries, often pathetically, to find the answer.

Set in the 1960's and 1970's, a time in which IRA bombings occur as frequently as Beatles hits, McCabe's tale juxtaposes sectarian violence against Pussy's search for love and a very personal peace, the enormity of the bloodshed contrasting with Pussy's campy search for the perfect costume, fabric, or skin cream, and the grand goal of "political justice" contrasting with Pussy's search for a home. Pussy is writing his story for Dr. Terence Harkin, his absent psychiatrist, and the reader quickly discovers that he is a very unreliable narrator, inventing scenarios in which he claims to play significant roles and acting out his fantasies. McCabe's prose style here reflects Pussy's preoccupation with popular music, among other things, often sounding like a cross between the song lyrics of the period and the songs of Shakespeare, with inverted syntax, complex sentence patterns, and the kind of distortions one sometimes finds when a poet strains too hard for a rhyme or a character like Pussy strains too hard for an effect.

While I love McCabe's facility with the language and his ability to make even an unlikely character like Pussy come alive and inspire compassion, this novel felt a bit strained to me. The IRA violence, while certainly a sad part of the life and times, feels more like a parallel track in this novel than an integrated part of Pussy's psyche, and I found myself wondering if McCabe were using it to ratchet up the drama rather than for any light it might shed on Pussy's problems and their complications. Still, McCabe is so good a writer that it's hard to imagine any lover of words and word play not responding enthusiastically to this novel. It may not be as intense as The Butcher Boy or as wickedly thoughtful as The Dead School, but it's vivid and memorable, and in Pussy Braden it features a character not soon forgotten. Mary Whipple