Pun Salad

As I type, Graveyard Special by the one and only James Lileks is a mere $3.99 in its Kindle-only incarnation. That's a pretty good deal, so go ahead and click over.

Robert Thompson is the protagonist, a college student majoring in Art History at the University of Minnesota in the Fall of 1980. (The narrative is studded with real-world news: Ronald Reagan gets elected, John Lennon is murdered. Sorry for those spoilers.) It centers around "Dinkytown", a Minneapolis neighborhood attached to the University. Robert is a waiter at the "Trat", one of Dinkytown's 24-hour restaurants, most often working the "graveyard shift". Which turns out to be appropriate when an unknown assailant shoots Dick, the cook, who has just huffed a can of Reddi-Wip. (Robert initially assumes Dick is on the floor due to his huffing, but no, that's due to Pb, not N₂O.)

From that beginning, you might take this to be a murder mystery, and it sort of is. There's a lot of political skulduggery and deception around; Robert makes a few tries at figuring it out, but realistically: aren't that what the cops are for? It's more Robert's complete narrative of a pivotal few months of his life. We meet his roommates, friends, the University of Minnesota hockey team, the zamboni driver for the hockey arena, an attractive reporter for the student newspaper, an attractive Russian teaching assistant, and many more. There is a lot of smoking (cigarettes and weed). There's a lot of talking, much at the college-student bullshit level. And as a sign of progress, the Trat gets an Asteroids arcade cabinet to compete with its pinball machine.

Eventually the murderer is revealed, but the plot is a thin clothesline, on which a lot of observational prose is hung. So if you're looking for a Lee Child-style thriller with a Jack Reacher-style hero set in 1980 Minneapolis: this ain't it. But it's what Lileks wanted to write, and that's good enough for me.