Reviews

As a busboy at a San Diego diner and a part-time student, young Jasper John must navigate among a motley group of co-workers and friends. His religion professor turns Romeo and Juliet into a porno movie script and attempts "dephallicizing" himself to protest academic politics. Jasper's boss seeks love in bizarre personal advertisements and sings opera while tending to the grill. A waitress mourns her dead son and searches for signs in the letters of a Scrabble game and a potato shaped "like Christ's cracking heart." In his erratic passage to maturity, Jasper escapes the sexual wiles of confessional poet Didi Godunov and the criminal schemes of Henry Hank. Amid raunchy schemes of copulation and grim glimpses of death, Jasper acquires limited but valuable insights. In his second novel (following The Book of Mamie, Univ. of Iowa, 1989) Brenna's characters are vibrant and engaging but his plot is episodic and occasionally tedious. For larger fiction collections.‘Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville

Amid unmistakable signs of physical, spiritual and social decay, an oddly hopeful sense of community endures among the motley cast of eccentric misfits captured in Brenna's (The Book of Mamie) enthralling second novel. Set around Fat Stanley's Diner in East San Diego, this alternately sad, funny, grotesque and sexy yarn centers on Jasper John, a 23-year-old busboy and part-time college student who left Colorado on an unreliable Harley to start a new life in California. Good-hearted Fat Stanley, a frustrated tenor who occasionally sings arias for his customers while cooking lunch, tends to hire waitresses with serious health problems‘Helga is receiving chemotherapy; Mary Quick pops nitroglycerin for her heart. Among the customers, Godot, a rundown religion professor under attack by fundamentalists, and Henry Hand, Mary's charismatic, troublemaking ex-pimp husband, become strong influences on the searching Jasper. Vivid characters, rich dialogue and spellbinding narrative make this odd mix of tragedy, myth and ribaldry memorable and often moving. If the lingering denouement is a bit unsatisfying, the journey there is sheer delight. (Mar.)