Dying in the Nightmare: Sam Pink’s Ketchup – Manuel Marrero
September 16, 2024
I read this in about seventy minutes on a short flight from Miami. Having once written this old thing, I had to patch up some lacunae now that I’m reclaiming time to read and write. I read this and Ice Cream Man & Other Stories in three sittings. Ketchup is slight but it’s no pamphlet-ass book. It’s your funny man, your piano man, the most dependable entertainer in letters, flipping burgers, chasing ducks and playing with guns, chopping it up with the polis in small town Michigan. Honestly if there’s a gateway to literary fiction today it’s Sam Pink. I caught a cab ride from LaGuardia with a drunk Senegalese man. He yelled at me insisting I lived in Bushwick not Ridgewood, introduced me to his wife via FaceTime, asked if he should leave her for a prettier woman, etc. I never once felt unsafe, his drunk driving impeccable, probably common in Senegalese culture, which is mostly about partying and girls, he claimed. I kept rattling out thoughts like That’s the way the game is played as he drove past some industrial warehouses yelling they’d be loft apartments within the year. The quote from Ketchup, in which Pink deals aloofly, sometimes stoically, with deadpan imperturbable humor and often grace, with characters you might consider eccentric or folksy, is the kind of talky platitude like the hits keep on coming that bejewel this landscape. If American life is a carnie sideshow Pink is voluntarily complicit in its exotic terraforming. He’s incisive about the way his subjects talk, holding court with a quietism that trusts the reader with generous bandwidth, asks only to dance. A ghost-like presence in his more recent writing, he’s never vulnerable but palpably scarred, with a proverbial thousand yard stare for time served living. This isn’t Person or his earlier, darker work. He doesn’t put himself first, there’s not a lot of him but rather everyone around him. Many of his stories seem interchangeable or disposable, and yet his voice is raw and authentic and thought-shaping in a way you aren’t really allowed to be mass-market. His milieux interior and exterior. I can recognize his writing from a few lines. No offense but I can’t say the same about Noah Cicero. You take Sam Pink for granted, you forget he’s there, and yet, turn a page and there he is. In seventy minutes, however many pages, however many miles from home, rare. Known. In this sense his language is noetic, a theory of mind, a greatest hits, if you will, from a populist rough trader shining this little light of his. It comes down to skill, not sentegraphs. If there’s a direct line from Andrew Bujalski through Tao Lin and into the future, Sam Pink is a cycle. I thought about leaving the book with the Senegalese cab driver. I bet he would have liked it.