From labyrinth to trailer park
Sam Leith
THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK by Steven Sherrill Canongate, £12.99, pp. 320, ISBN 1841953989 What if, millennia ago, the Minotaur escaped Knossos alive? What if Theseus chickened out and cut a deal, whereby he emerged from the labyrinth claiming to have slain the beast — a claim which duly passed into mythological history — and the Minotaur was able to slip out the back and skulk into a 'tepid eternity'?
This proposition — you might call it 'counter-fictional' — is the starting point for Steven Sherrill's novel. It is the present day and M, as he is now known, is living in a trailer park in North Carolina and working as a line chef at a rib-shack. The title gives you a sense of the easeful whimsy which makes this such a consistent pleasure to read, but undersells the pathos. When he could so easily play it for laughs, Sherrill studiously deadpans the oddity of the set-up. The reaction of most of the humans he encounters to M's bovine upper half are on the level that they might have been had he a disfiguring facial birthmark or a cleft palate.
Young men egging each other on snigger from the safety of the pack. Teenagers shout 'moo!' at his back. Others react with compassion or indifference. When a child stares at him in a supermarket and asks, 'What's wrong with him, Papa?' the father tells the boy off for being rude and apologises. He is later, charmingly, overheard promising the child that they will go home and look M up in the encyclopaedia. But The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is far too full, and its hero far too particular, to be anything as heavy-handed as an allegory — and, indeed, the few clumsy sections of the narrative are those which insist on flagging up a meaning. M isn't a cipher standing in for some notional community of the disabled or excluded. He is literally the Minotaur — complete with socking great horns, a mass of fur and a long snout which impedes his vision.
A great deal of this exceptionally well imagined book is concerned with the practical difficulties of his situation: the talc he uses to ease his sweaty fur, the unguents he uses to soothe the sore red welt which marks the dividing line between his two halves, even the glass paper he uses to polish his horns. But it also deals with the human particulars of his life — the bitchiness and camaraderie of the kitchen and the cultural peculiarities of trailer trash America.
Sherrill draws M's neighbours, for example, with affectionate wit — like his irascible, ferrety landlord Sweeny, and the two children in the next-door trailer who, when not being beaten by their father with a belt, sit on the front porch and 'take it in turns to hit a little metal car with a hammer'.
A romantic date could he a strawberry milkshake from the drive-through window of a hamburger joint, and a round of mini golf at Honeycutt's Putt-Putt, round the back of the drive-in porno cinema. The Minotaur's dream of a brighter future is incarnated in a second-hand concession trailer jerry-rigged to dispense corn-dogs. (If you don't know what a corn-dog is, by the way, be grateful.) As it happens, you learn more about short-order cooking than you do about Greek mythology. There are useful tips on how to fry frog's legs, make popcorn shrimp and fillet a salmon with needle-nose pliers.
For all his skill in the kitchen, M is clumsy in a wider way: his horns accidentally bump things and on the odd occasion, when he is startled, people. His thick tongue and animal mouth make even basic speech difficult, so he grunts and lows to communicate, though he dreams of being able to sing. Shy, accustomed to rejection or humiliation, M is awkward among women and taciturn among men. He longs to be included, and barely dares hope to be loved.
In other words it is not what's extraordinary but what's ordinary in Sherrill's story that so commands the attention. This is a hugely sympathetic, instantly recognisable, magically well written account of what it is like to be lonely.
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