Customer Reviews

Typical Pigs

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It's part Wild at Heart, part Feast of Snakes, but somehow wholly original. Both thrilling and hillarious, Typical Pigs takes an unflinching gaze at the laws the govern our behavior, then complicates matters by throwing in several emotional anarchists. Its portrayal of the mentally challenged is at once honest and brutal, and unlike anything I've read before.

Winner of the Llumina 2002 American Writers Contest

Finalist for the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel

"Brilliant and full of dread... In very contemporary terms,
it turns One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on its head. This
is an author with talent and an electrical rush of events."
--Doris Betts (author of The Sharp Teeth of Love; Souls
Raised from the Dead)

"This book is quick and hip and it actually bothers to be entertaining, a rarity, it seems to me, in the literary world these days. It's smart. It's character rich. It's one of the funniest books I've read in a long time. All that and it never abandons its heart."
--Michael Knight (author of Dogfight; Divining Rod)

Kenneth Godwin has been playing the same game for half his life. It's a game based on cruelty, with points scored for acts of malevolence. Simple as it sounds, Kenneth is confused about the limits of his unkindness. Adding to his uncertainty are his clients at Tomahawk House, a group home for adults with severe developmental disabilities. But as the game gains momentum, lives are lost, including--perhaps--his own.

It could easily be said that Stephen Ausherman's Typical Pigs is one of the greatest books to ever to be set in New Mexico. Easily. Its setting, however, should not result in this book being typecast as just another piece of regional fiction, because Typical Pigs is a great book, period.
Sure, the book makes New Mexico sound really cool--a strange state of dusty weirdness, strewn with dying cottonwoods, oily riverside muck, and nearly perpetual sunlight, a place that "has a foreign feel to it in the sense that locals make you feel welcome to stay no longer than two weeks." And sure, the book makes Albuquerque, the story's primary setting, sound wild and apocalyptic--a city on the edge of infinite deserts, with houses shadowed by now-dormant volcanoes, with a War Zone and a Little Saigon and a gangland West Side. It does all of that, yes, but ultimately that's little more than the story's setting. That setting sets Stephen Ausherman aside as a master of descriptive prose, but it's the story itself that really drives the book, that really makes it compelling.
"It was so disturbing I couldn't put it down," my friend told me, after spending almost all of two consecutive days reading it from cover to cover, and my experience was similar.
The book tells the story of Kenneth Godwin, a highly likeable but undeniably twisted individual obsessed with playing a game he calls "Barabbas," a game that simply involves trying to do worse and worse things--acting out against his conscience and against his better nature.
Kenneth plays the game with his oldest friend, a guy named Hank who is perhaps the book's most entertaining character. Hank is obsessed with William Walker, an obscure historical figure known best for once hiring the poet Walt Whitman, and he manages to work Walker into his almost every conversation, personal philosophy, and aspect of his life, often in hilarious ways. Kenneth and Hank get jobs working at a home for mentally handicapped adults, and it's there, after they get another of the home's employees involved in playing the game, and after Kenneth falls in love with the daughter of the home's manager, that the game truly devolves into disturbing, horrible-to-contemplate, yet darkly laugh-out-loud comical territory.
What's strange, and what's impressive that Ausherman was able to pull off, is that despite the grotesque ideas and actions of this book's characters, they are all so intensely likeable, and their interactions are so meaningful and human, even touching. They are all people who you want to see succeed, want to see make better choices, want to see turn out okay. They are all people who at least have a better nature to go against.
Written in a unique and modern style that is sharp, barbed, and cuttingly funny, and that is nothing if not readable, Typical Pigs is the sort of book that any fan of Chuck Palahniuk or Quentin Tarantino could enjoy, but it's also a book with heart. It's a great book, one that offers dark pleasures and unbelievable surprises, one you will undoubtedly recommend to your friends, one you owe it to yourself to read.