A Lot Can Happen in a Year
Bear with me if this sounds a bit like a soap opera. Shirin and Morgan are
in a relationship. Morgan, however, is infatuated with Chantal, the female
lead in a French TV series. Meanwhile, Morgan is the object of someone
else's affections: Lance, a gay writer with a severe case of writers block.
Shirin, for her part, fends off the affections of Farzad, who apparently
wants littler more than "a Persian trophy bride". Oh, and Shirin's trying to
get into medical school. And Lance is suffering from a disease.
Don't let these rather broad strokes dissuade you from checking out Odds
Off, though. It's really a bit more complicated than that, and in Matt
Madden's hands, very satisfying.
The world Madden paints is inhabited by people in various states of
discomfort. It's a world where folks are trying to extend their education,
or when the jobs that were initially taken to pay for school are starting to
look like de facto career choices. People begin fielding consequences from
the wild oats they sowed as youths, and the threat of stasis, of limbo
brought about by complacency, hangs over everything.
Sounds pretty much like everyone I've known the minute the graduation
ceremonies were over.
Shirin and Morgan are the focal point of the story. Shirin's attempts to
get into medical school, despite the bleak picture painted by her
undergraduate transcripts, have her cracking under the stress. Combined with
a work environment that places her among a host of ultra-conservative
coworkers, as well as an increasingly distant boyfriend, the strain is
beginning to prove too much. Morgan seems to have retreated into a
combination fantasy world/fetal position dominated by Francophile
sensibilities and way too many Serge Gainsbourg records. Odds Off
portrays a pair that initially seems happy, but as the story progresses,
they both begin to sense the satisfaction that gnaws away at the couple's
roots.
Lance obsesses over Morgan from afar, breaking into cold sweats at even a
glimpse, and generally letting it darken his mood. As the story begins,
Lance is pretty much insufferable, and it's a wonder anyone hangs around him
at all. By various characters' accounts, his writing ability is formidable
in a proto-Burroughs beat fashion, but he seems to have paid the price in
social skills.
It's with this small cast, and some extras, that Madden peels away layers
of existences that need a good hard kick in the collective rear. Fans of
more extreme portraits of reality might find it a bit tame - even Shirin's
outbursts at Morgan are highly controlled. Life, however, isn't always
marked by Big Moments; it's often the little disappointments and comforts
that tell the real story. This is the angle that Odds Off comes from,
when it shows a sleeping Morgan reaching over to grab the leg of his
nightstand. In his dreams, the nightstand is a pier, and it's keeping his
floating mattress from floating off on the high seas. The image becomes all
the more poignant when, after a fight with Shirin, he's sleeping on the
couch and his arm can't find anything to hold onto.
Madden's excursions into such symbolic scenes are few, and when he springs
them on you, they possess a real wallop. After passing by some catcalling
frat boys, for example, Shirin returns to her apartment and collapses on the
bed. However, by the time she hits the mattress, she's peeled off her
clothes, skin, and muscles, removing every external part of her that can
conceivably cause her pain. It's a scene that comes out of the blue, and as
a reader, you can't help but linger on it in fascination.
Stylistic peaks like those are few, though. Madden's artistic style is
largely realistic, breaking for the occasional surreal scene, or when he
portrays scenes from Morgan's TV show in panels shaped like TV screens. One
of his subplots, though -- that of Lance's writer's block -- is purely fantastic. Lance has a severe case of word lice -- you can see the little
critters writhing on the letters of his writing -- and he must take
medication and refrain from any serious writing (doctor's orders include
"later on you can do a bit of typing, but only using sans serif fonts").
His sentences won't form, he gets dizzy whenever he tries anything more
complicated than the alphabet, and it drives him to burn all of his previous
writing. Out of it, though, comes a new, Joycean level of achievement. If
only writers block could be cured with a simple prescription, but the
message is clear. Lance literally has to devolve back to square one before
he can progress.
It's a lesson that Shirin and Morgan, in their own way, must also learn.
Lance's troubles bring a high level of language trauma into Odds Off,
and Shirin's and Morgan's troubles have some roots in the same ground.
Morgan's aforementioned addiction to all things French have him driving
everyone around him crazy with his incessant French practice (he even
imagines himself into the TV series with Chantal at one point, one of the
few times that we find him vocalizing his doubts). It's not that he's not
understood. Everyone around him seems equally conversant in French (must not
be set in America!); it's more the idea that he's using the language as a
wall. In a nice twist, a later scene finds Morgan sitting uncomfortably
while Shirin makes party plans with a friend, speaking in Farsi.
How does it all wrap up? Well, everyone meets up at a Persian New Year's
party (in a nice touch, Madden frames the story in separate New Year's
parties, giving the story a strong cyclical feel), but there are no
fireworks to speak of. In fact, some of the characters meet for the very
first time. By book's end, some of them fare better than others -- pretty
much like real life. In the long run, though, you get the sense that
everyone will be better off. If nothing else shows Madden's light touch with
his narrative, the dénouement that wraps up Odds Off illustrates it
perfectly. His characters can be vain, frustrating, and obtuse, but they're
all basically searching for the same thing: some center that gives them
comfort as everything is changing.
In my own experience, I can attest to knowing people who only seemed meant
to occupy others' lives for pivotal short periods and little else. It's a
sense of transience that Madden seems to respect. Lance's affections for
Morgan will obviously never be requited, but they spur him to a new level of
artistic achievement. Morgan and Shirin might not be meant for each other,
but if they end their lives with other people, then it seems that at the
very least, each one's presence helped the other through a difficult time.
At the end of Odds Off, you get the very real sense that many of
these people will never see each other, that some will stay in loose
contact, and that one or two will remain the best of friends. Again, it
sounds pretty much like real life, in all of its complicated, often mundane
glory.
