Mentoring with benefits and other mommy issues

First impressions matter, which is why you really can’t trust anyone who tells you never to judge a book by its cover (these people will have made a lot of poor decisions in their lives, so don’t let them influence you). Even better than cool cover art is an arresting opening, and in the case of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, I knew I was onto a winner when – after what was already a gripping description of our narrator, Cherry Hendricks aka Bunko the Clown, having sex with the mother of the six year old whose birthday party she had just worked – Arnett hit me with the line, ‘If I can’t MacGyver myself a dick out of thin air, then I need to find a new profession.’ The best thing I can say about Kristen Arnett’s third novel is that the rest of the book mostly lives up to this line.

Cherry Hendricks is a struggling artist with serious mommy issues: she has a distant and pained relationship with her own mother while wanting to sleep with other people’s. Clowning is her passion, but to pay the bills (barely) she works part-time at an aquatic pet supply store with her best friend, Darcy – the drummer in Orlando punk band RHINOPLASTIZE – and the permanently stoned and feckless wannabe slam poet Wendall. Things are complicated by the fact that Cherry gets involved with the supremely self-confident and successful magician Margot the Magnificent, from whom she craves both career advancement and sex – ‘mentoring with benefits’ is another great piece of Arnett phraseology – only to discover that her mother has been seriously dating Margot’s ex-wife for several months.

There’s more to Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One than a comic love-triangle and great lines, though. This is a book where the author’s care for her subject and her characters is compellingly evocative. Arnett’s descriptions of the elements of a clown’s craft are meticulous and involving; the Orlando she depicts is utterly vital and full of the kind of detail that only someone who could declare themselves ‘obsessed’ with Florida in her acknowledgements could bring to the page; and the experience of being young, queer, and simultaneously brimming with purpose and bereft of direction is vividly convincing and tender.

My one complaint is that Arnett leans a little too heavily on the mopey aspects of her character. The mommy issues are important and effective character notes, but get heavy-handed, though the worst is the dead brother. I haven’t mentioned him because you’ll have more than enough of Dwight when you read the book yourself. Which you should certainly do, because Cherry’s world might be a bit mopey, but it’s majorly entertaining.