Book: Wild Thing, by Josh Bazell (2012)

Dr. Peter Brown, formerly button man for the mob Pietro Brnwa, is currently Dr. Lionel Azimuth and working on a cruise ship thanks to the good people at the Witness Protection Program¹. His handlers steer another potentially lucrative gig his way: tagging along with sexy paleontologist Dr. Violet Hurst on a mission underwritten by a reclusive billionaire (known as Rec Bill) to determine whether a lake in Northern Minnesota is actually home to a beast that’s a holdover from prehistoric times.

Lionel, or Peter, or Pietro² was introduced in Josh Bazell’s Beat The Reaper, one of the most blazing debut novels of recent vintage³. Reaper was a dazzling high wire act, its stylized action always rendered on a human scale. Wild Thing is more of a wild thing, loose, shambolic and occasionally hard to swallow. The preposterous storyline is made even more of a reach by shoehorning an already compromised protagonist into it. Some of Bazell’s narrative digressions feel like cul de sacs. The material based on the real world – insider tales about medical mishaps on cruise ships and the consequences of meth on the American heartland – is stronger than the fanciful stuff, while a key role given to an Actual Political Figure⁴ throws off the balance of the book’s second half.

But Bazell writes with such comic verve and has an ideas-per-page count⁵ so abnormally high that you go along for the ride. He readily acknowledges the goofiness of his premise⁶. The frequent footnotes are back⁷, as is the sharp writing. (“Outside in the black-and-white TV moonlight there’s a low-lying fog on the ground of the kind I thought only happened in discos and vampire movies.”) The wrap-up is highly satisfying, and is followed by an appendix and a note section written with a fiery flair that give full voice to the anti-anti-rationalist sentiment that drives both the author and his hero. This screwball of a book may not live up to its predecessor, but I still enjoyed it.


¹ Which is actually the Witness Security Program, or WITSEC, as Bazell rightly refers to it.

² Whatever.

³ I liked it.

⁴ Henceforth referred to as Ac Pol Fig. If I refer to this figure again. Which I won’t.

⁵ Statistic trademarked by Vince Keenan, 2012.

⁶ His frequent invocations of Scooby Doo as an inspiration pay dividends, and include a fascinating sexually-charged exegesis of the show that ranks with Eddie Izzard’s comparison of Shaggy and Scooby to Falstaff.

⁷ Obviously.