Stripmalling can leave you divided. It’s full of self-deprecation that often leads to a smile or chuckle, even if you feel yourself resisting. It’s also slightly pretentious and somehow full of itself. But it resonates — to the point where its protagonist, Jonny, recalls one of literature’s greatest icons, Holden Caulfield, of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
Jonny works at a strip mall in suburban Winnipeg by day — and spends the rest of his waking and sleeping hours there too, in his car. His dream is to be a writer, which, by the end of the novel, he accomplishes, to some success. The characteristic that plagues Jonny through this tongue-in-cheek narrative is his unfathomable stupidity. From shagging a fellow strip mall employee in broad daylight to dealing drugs to youth, trying to rip them off and getting beaten to a pulp for it, Jonny doesn’t always exhibit the surest signs of intelligence.
When he hooks up with the sexy, smart Dora, who leads him out of car-dwelling and into apartment-dwelling and supports him in his goal to become a writer, Jonny seems to be pulling it together. In fact, the exchanges between him and Dora, as well as their individual reports — his on his mid-life crisis and Dora’s on their relationship — are compelling cornerstones of the novel. Jonny uses journal entries to explain his motivations and actions, always with a sardonic edge that reveals that Jonny is in fact not unfathomably stupid, just caught up in his own originality and potential. Dora’s entries are akin to postmodern insertions into the novel, not quite invited but somehow completely necessary: we know we will get the straight goods from Dora. And the postmodern approach is manifested once again with Jonny’s occasional resemblances to Fiorentino (Jonny is also writing Stripmalling, and his previous novel is Asthmatronics, whereas Fiorentino’s is Asthmatica). Fiorentino is poking fun at himself, which makes both Jonny’s arrogance and seeming stupidity much easier to bear.
In fact, it’s Jonny’s complete self-focus that puts one in mind of Salinger’s Caulfield –every sentence has multiple “I’s” as he tries to sort the myriad things going through his mind at any given moment. Caulfield doesn’t always feel like a smart character either, yet he makes some brilliant observations that have led to his iconic status. Jonny may not be headed for such immortality (though perhaps Fiorentino is trying) — but he too comes through something by the end of Stripmalling. His journey seems mundane, just like Caulfield’s, and surely Fiorentino knows it. But this is just the point. Many of us lead these kinds of lives, and our evolution happens in spite of that mediocrity. And sometimes, as in the case of Jonny, that evolution leads to something almost brilliant.
Carolyne Van Der Meer is a Montreal writer and editor whose poetry has been published in Bibliosofia, Canadian Woman Studies, carte blanche, Helios and Pink Lemonade Design.
