Will Not Attend is a little like getting invited to dinner with Adam Resnick. He has the seat of honor at the head of the table, and he’s got a crazy leer on his face, like he’s about to do something unspeakable to the mashed potatoes or the roast chicken.
So you take your seat, with a little apprehension, because you’re not so sure you’re going to like what he does with those mashed potatoes, that crazy grin. You notice the restraints on the chair you’re about to sit in.
“Don’t worry,” says the maitre’d, “those aren’t for you.” But that’s exactly the sort of thing that makes you worry more.
As you sit and the maitre’d sinks back into the shadows you notice that Mr. Mesnick actually has two heads… No, good God, three! It’s like you’ve been let into a freak show tent where they serve dinner. Each one had a different, maniacal grin. One, the younger one, has a frightened rabbit of a grin, likely from living in and amongst a slew of brothers and a steamroller of a trip of a dad. The second has a more innocent smile, though you get the sense that that second head is thinking about, at first, what items from the back of a comic book he was going to send away for and how he’d organize them on his bureau when they arrived, but then started to think of girls and sex and all the rest. The third is an older, more hardened grin as if it’s just eaten a mouthful of tacks by accident but, by God, it’s going to muscle through and eat them and seem to enjoy it, damnit.
The second head begins speaking first, telling you some story about an Easter egg hunt and a conspiracy between two young kids, a girl and a boy… and you begin to get where it all went off the rails for this head. The first head interrupts the second, and then the third starts, as if just awakened, and soon they’re all going, each telling a different story, sometimes overlapping, oftentimes not.
But you’re not tied into the chair, and the maitre’d, or someone, keeps bringing another glass of wine, or beer, or sparkling flavored water, so you stick around. You haven’t opened your mouth since you arrived, your tweed jacket with the professorial patches on the elbows still on, something the maitre’d forgot to take from you.
Despite his neurotic, somewhat abrasive personality, you like this guy, you like his stories. He tells them with humor, self-deprecating at most times. He’s got them down to a science, by now, so that they flow naturally, and even the multitude of heads talking over the course of the evening doesn’t seem odd or awkward, just a natural, rambling flow. You get the sense that, were you to sit down next to this guy in a bar, this guy with three heads, that he’d be a miserable bastard, sitting on his own, in silence, looking out at everyone in the bar through hooded eyelids, maybe grumbling obscenities to himself, clutching his plastic bag from The Strand. But this special performance, here at his table, is where he shines, where he feels most comfortable and, warts and all, he’s pretty damn entertaining.
I got this book through Penguin’s First to Read program (http://www.firsttoread.com). While I enjoyed the book, I didn’t quite enjoy the ebook reader I had to use (Bluefire Reader on my iPad — hence the tweed jacket with the elbow patches, eh? Look at me, all fancy with an iPad. ). Whether it was a limitation of the app or because of a limitation the publisher set on the content I couldn’t take notes, notes which would have made this review at least 14% more amazing. The app also crashed on me a few times and forgot my bookmark when I came back to reading. So Bluefire, 1 star, this book, 4 stars.
