Customer Reviews

Petroleum Man: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
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I finished Petroleum Man several days ago, and it is still very much with me. Beyond the layered, ultra-vivid protagonist Leon Tuggs, a fine supporting cast of eccentrics, and an exciting plot, Crawford has created a satirical art object that shines from every angle- perfect-pitch dialogue, terrific humor, and an engaging narrative that sucks you completely into the dark mind of Leon.

It must be difficult to create a character that readers simultaneously like and despise, but Crawford sure knows how. Crawford is satirizing the inner state of most of us stuck on the 21st century treadmill; we know we're complicit, know that most of what we touch is tainted-be it with the warming of the globe, the extinction of species and indigenous cultures, horrific modern war. But how to get off the treadmill? Leon Tuggs, his weakling white liberal son-in-law, corporate daughter, and even to extent his not-rebellious-enough wife (she stays with him for decades) wrap themselves in their own egos as much as Tuggs does, thereby missing the significant tragedy of what we're doing to the planet and the rest of humanity.

But beyond social critique, read Petroleum Man for the fun of it! I found myself entertained as much as I was intellectually and emotionally stretched.

That American dream slogan used to be part of an advertising campaign for the Wall Street Journal. It may also serve now as the ironic subtitle of Stanley Crawford's "Petroleum Man."

Leon Tuggs is a billionaire. In fact, the amount of billions that make up Tuggs' net worth increases exponentially at a rate exceeding the number of MacDonald's hamburgers sold world wide each day. An engineer by profession, Tuggs is the inventor of "the Thingie®". The Thingie is apparently a rather simple device but,like the wheel, virtually everyone on the planet owns one.

The book is in the form of a diary. Each diary or journal entry bears the name of a model car that serves as a reminder of the actual car(s) that played a role in Tuggs' life. They include everything from a 1939 Ford Fordor (Ford's clever spelling of four-door) Sedan to a 2000 Bentley Azure Convertible. The model cars are gifts bestowed upon Leon's grandchildren, Fabian and Rowena to commemorate birthdays or other important events in the life of Leon Tuggs. The journal entries are to be presented to Rowena and Fabian when Leon deems them old enough to understand them. The entries each involve a particular car but Tuggs manages to wrap the story of the car around his life story, his business dealings, his relations with his wife, daughter and son-in-law and his theory of life, the universe, and everything. These life lessons are meant to help his grandchildren on the `road to life'.

In many respects the main characters are pretty broadly-drawn stereotypes. Tuggs is the arch-capitalist robber baron. His world revolves around himself, his millions, and billions. Poor people are poor because they deserve to be poor. The wealthy are important because they serve as role model for the rest of us minions of the middle classes. His long-suffering wife is portrayed as being a bit ditsy. She wants nothing more than a return to the simple life despite her billions. She takes up worthy causes and eventually converts acres of her property into an organic farm in which she attracts legions or ardent feminists who wish to protect her from her husband. (This played a bit like certain scenes in The World According to Garp.) Tuggs daughter is dutiful, loyal and a successful attorney who for some inexplicable reason married Tuggs' most dreaded type - the liberal democrat. Crawford plays the son-in-law as the quintessential limousine liberal (indeed he is wealthy and married into even greater wealth) who wouldn't recognize a worker if he tried.

These exaggerated stereotypes work very well in Petroleum Man. They make perfect foils for Crawford's jabs at contemporary society. He seems to paint a society in which Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption is taken to its logical extreme and ini which all players in this scenario, including his son-in-law and wife, are willing participants. In a manner reminiscent of Adam Smith who said that "consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production", Tuggs refers to the world's consumers as petroleum people (hence the book's title). He asserts bluntly that what he/we "are good at doing is arranging our lives and the lives or others so as to use as much petroleum and derivative products and related natural resources as is humanly possible." For Tuggs, the world is about things. He tells his grandchildren to trust things not people and he eagerly awaits the time when the world will be paved over.

Although this sounds terribly serious and perhaps a bit boring for those looking for good fiction, in the hands of Crawford and as uttered in the immortal words of Leon Tuggs the effect is the result plays more like tragedy than comedy. The book held my interest throughout. This is no small feat given the fact that Tuggs may be one of the most unappealing protagonists I have come across in quite some time. His stunning lack of self-reflection makes some of today's entrepreneurial giants (e.g. self-proclaimed New York billionaires with highly rated reality shows and edifice complexes) appear to have the introspection of Socrates.

The comedic, or satiric, tone holds up until the very end of the book, until the last chapter. Those last four sentences of the last diary entry make for a powerfully evocative end to the book. It was, for me, a satisfying conclusion and one that put all that proceeded it in some perspective. It turned the daily diary of the American dream into something approaching a nightmare.

This was an entertaining, funny, and thoughtful book.

L. Fleisig

Every so often, a book comes along that makes the reader think about life and its many different occurrences. This book is a meditation on the lack of fulfillment created by materialism and the difficulty in dictating one's own legacy.

Crawford has done an excellent job in creating a novel that is satirical without being mean, and funny without resorting to toilet or slapstick humor. The narrator, Leon Tuggs, is an unabashed capitalist. His goal in life is to ensure that his product, Thingies, dominate the world. He will stop at nothing. Through Leon's letters, we learn of the unscrupulous and hard actions he has taken so far to ensure his and his children's fortune. But, we also see a man puzzled by humanity. For example, he cannot understand why his wife wants a divorce, while he spends the majority of his life flying to business meetings. He also attempts to instill his values in his grandchildren, only to have both of them treat the precious models as toys or goods to be sold or bartered. The hurt in Leon's voice is palpable but hidden behind his macho exterior. As a reader, I sensed an undercurrent of unhappiness behind all the swagger Crawford put into Leon Tuggs. It is something that a lesser novelist could not have achieved.

On the other hand, Leon's acerbic dislike of all that oppose his business is hilarious. He goes off on his liberal son-in-law, hippies, environmentalists, and other similar people. There are parts of this book that will make the reader laugh out loud, because the commentary is so apt and true, but politically incorrect at the same time.

This is the first book I have read by Crawford, and it will not be the last.

His first foray into fiction after 10 years of writing nonfiction, Petroleum Man is classic Stanley Crawford. So glad to have him back! Petroleum Man is an hilarious satire guaranteed to push buttons for those on the right AND the left, and like the reviewer below mentions, Tuggs is a protagonist you can love and hate at the same time. Crawford has a loyal cadre of devotees, and I highly recommend picking up a copy of Petroleum Man and finding out why.

Rating - 5/10

Summary - Stanley Crawford returns to fiction with a savage satire that exposes the materialism and greed in American society. I thought that the first half of the book was hilarious, but the second half lost momentum as Crawford never developed much of a plot.

Review - After reading Stanley Crawford's Gascoyne, I was thrilled to see that he had returned to writing fiction with 2005's Petroleum Man. I hoped for more of the same and - to my chagrin - that's exactly what I got. Petroleum Man is just OK; it shares all of Gascoyne's drawbacks (and many of its themes) without having some of Gascoyne's strengths.

Petroleum Man centers on Leon Tuggs, a controlling, car-obsessed, ultra-greedy capitalist. Leon is getting on in years and wants to leave a legacy of his achievements to his grandchildren. So, he has die cast replicas made of all of the vehicles that he has owned during his lifetime. With each vehicle, he presents a note to the grandkids; the notes make up the chapters of Petroleum Man.

Crawford's greatest strength as a writer is his wicked, dry sense of humor. Some parts of Gascoyne are laugh-out-loud funny. Leon's unintentionally reveals himself as selfish, controlling, and grandiose. Here are his remarks about one of the cars that he has driven:

The car was bought new and owned by a steel-mill family who had successfully put down a union demonstration with no loss of life on the side of management (page 47).

The jokes in Petroleum Man sneak up on the reader and the surprise makes them that much better.

The problem with Petroleum Man is that there is no real plot. Crawford has created a great set of characters and he is a skilled stylist, but he doesn't give the characters much to do. (Gascoyne's plot - while better - is also somewhat underdeveloped). Once the reader realizes that the book is going nowhere, the jokes begin to seem repetitive and the book meanders to a close, even though it is just 238 pages.

Everything that Petroleum Man does, Gascoyne did better.

I'd heard some nice things about Crawford so I bought Petroleum Man and put it at the top of my read. He writes with intelligence, humor and a sharpened wit. But after several chapters I still wasn't sure if I knew the story or I didn't care. An old man writing about his grandchildren and the gifts he's given them? So? Either way the start was slow and I put it down. Nice words but who cares?

From 1966 to 1978 Stanley Crawford published four novels, and after nearly three decades he has now returned to fiction with the book "Petroleum Man," an oddly sedate, minor work for which to come out of retirement. But then, the book is an ideological commentary on contemporary society-a rather dry satire, in fact-and artists of all sorts have their hackles up today, feeling the need to engage in the resurgent "culture wars."

I don't mean to say that "Petroleum Man" is a bad novel at all. The writing is very engaging at times, and Crawford's ideology rarely approaches the obnoxious. Put it this way: If you were to find this book while stuck in a secluded cabin for a couple of days, it would be adequate to relieve your boredom, but don't expect much more than that.

The book concerns Leon Tuggs, a billionaire ultra-capitalist and conservative who invented something called "Thingie" that the reader never really gets a clear picture of (it may help to think of Thingie as something like Post-it Notes-an invention that has "revolutionized" home and office life, a small but ubiquitous presence in the developed world). The book is an epistolary novel organized around a series of letters written by Leon for his two young grandchildren as he periodically presents to them expensive, super-detailed, scale models of the cars and other various vehicles he has owned through the years. Over the course of the letters, we learn much about Leon's past and about his conflicts with his leftist-leaning wife and son-in-law. Most of Crawford's highly ironic satire is devoted to Leon's own tremendous ego, but a fair amount is spread over the rest of the family as well-including his wife's country-club-style, faux-voluntary-simplicity follies and his son-in-law's hypocrisy at continually biting the gilded hand that he feeds from.

And, in fact, Crawford's insightful satiric scenarios often provide delicious material, such as the following meditation from Leon: "Human beings, however, even though they are increasing their tolerance for non-stop mobility, still apparently need to come to rest now and then. This is where television has proven so handy, in the way it continues the sensation of mobility by other means."

In the end, though, the trouble with "Petroleum Man" is its lack of a driving story-a common fault in epistolary novels-and, therefore, the lack of any significant, climactic development. The ending simply feels arbitrary. Apparently, Crawford felt no need to give his readers any payoff for sticking with him through 240 pages.