This changes when Shane's deaf dental hygienist, Marlene, is found dead and Shane is fingered as a suspect. With no alibi and no recollection of his whereabouts on the night of the murder, thus begins Shane's latest and most perilous quest to save his own ass.

The novel opens like a demented Kafka farce. One Sunday morning, two accusatory agents, Brooks and Sikes, accost a severely hung-over Shane as he lies buried in his bed of salt. Mistaking the salt for coke or H, Sikes, the brash young detective of the duo, dips a finger into a white mound and snorts, hard.

That's the wind up; I'll let Neilan take it from there:

His eyes watered and he started coughing and sneezing in short fast fits like a dog. He blew his nose into his hands and rushed to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. The faucet was on for a long time and he was coughing and spitting and crying.

…When the cocky prick finally came out of the bathroom his face was raw and smeared, his eyes puffy from all the crying. He looked like a burn victim, one who'd been through numerous successful surgeries but still wasn't fully healed. It's tough to ever really recover after your face has been on fire. I stared at him pretty fucking bemused but he wouldn't look at me…

"Where were you last night, around 10 P.M.?"

"Probably at a bar."

"Probably?

"Probably."

"What bar?"

"The one down the street."

"What's the name of it?"

"What's this about?"

"How well do you know Marlene Burton?"

"Who?"

"The assistant at Dr. Weinhardt's office. Your dentist."

"Oh, deaf Marlene."

"She had a last name." Sikes broke his shame-induced silence. "She wasn't defined by her disability. She was a person too you know."

I know, fuckhead, I signed in response, working my hands slow for emphasis. I waited for him to react. I wanted to slap away the cockiness that was already creeping back into his blotchy, running face. When it was clear he had no idea I'd called him a fuckhead in sign language I said, "What about her?"

"Marlene Burton was found dead last night." (5-7)

Shane would have gotten out before all this if it were not for his masochistic girlfriend Gwen. Gwen breaks him in bed, literally. Their rounds of sweaty hell bent fury in the sack are ruthless and hilarious. Gwen is a limber dominatrix, equal parts sadist and gymnast, while Shane is her beguiled sex slave, helpless to fight back or disobey. To Gwen, he's merely a play thing, a rag doll:

It was always a blur of pain and domination. I remembered it, and could only deal with it afterwards, as a collection of warped Polaroids stapled to the inside of my head:

Me flat on my back, arms splayed out like I was being crucified, my legs kicking helplessly with her on top leaning over, crushing my biceps with her hands and screaming in my face…

Me behind her but backed into the ornate wooden headboard of her bed, frantically trying to push her away as she slammed me against the wall with her ass…

Whatever position we were in, I was the one getting fucked. At first I tried exerting myself, gently, but firm enough to let her know that I could take over any time I wanted to. But then I felt the raw power, the machine-like force and resistance. It was unyielding. I would've had to push full out and strain with everything I had to over power her, and even then I wasn't sure that I could. I didn't want to find out that I couldn't. (25)

Added to this humiliation is Shane's drone temp job for Gwen's employer, Panopticon Insurance, and the absurdly desperate arrangement he has with his landlord: Shane subsidizes his rent by having sex with his landlord's frigid wife in weekly mechanical and increasingly dehumanizing sessions. And much to Shane's morbid disbelief, his upstairs neighbour routinely and remorselessly fucks his pet guinea pig. The squeals, he informs us, are horrifying.

But the heart of the novel lies not so much in the narrative thread that underpins the picaresque sequences — the murder mystery whodunit and ensuing interrogation surrounding Marlene's death — but rather in Shane's examination of the mind numbing details drenched in every aspect of mid level corporate American life. If Schulberg's Sammy Glick is the archetype for the overambitious, social climber run amuck, then Shane in ‘Apathy and Other Small Victories’ is the anti-Sammy: the poster boy for the latest breed of disaffected, wisecracking slackers looking to coast undetected for as long as possible doing as little as possible.

An insurgent alphabetizer setting off little bombs of resistance from inside his cube, Shane attempts to beat the daily monotony by building miniature guillotines out of paperclips and sleeping in the handicapped stall of the men's room. Months atrophy in this way until Shane comes to the conclusion that:

Sometimes you are left with no choice but to manufacture your own fiascos, and alcohol is an easy and legal variable to introduce. I was curious — scientifically, economically, sociologically, morally — as to whether I could function as an alphabetizer for a large insurance company even though I was too drunk to recite the alphabet without singing it. But what if I could? What if I could keep up even as my liver failed and I went blind from alcohol poisoning? What if I could excel? What would this say about capitalism? About the unyielding corporate machine? About the fate of the individual in an increasingly conformist American society? Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, especially when you do not know what the answers are. (146-147)

In other scenes Neilan deftly navigates the miles that separate people. Whether it's significant others or office team members, he understands the pettiness and ethereality and competitiveness underlying most relationships. How people who on the surface appear to care about each other really don't and have never really cared; in fact, they can barely tolerate one another. Neilan articulates how transparent and paper thin people's motives for interacting can be, oft times nothing more than a sham of obligations couched in insincerity. He highlights those awful moments of disconnect when you realize, perhaps for the first time, how depressingly and unrepentantly full of shit your life actually is. It's not pretty, but it's true: denial is a powerful thing.

This is represented best of all by Shane's relationship with his girlfriend Gwen. Before tickling him to a bloody pulp in bar down the street, they have one last insipid exchange where Shane realizes the charade simply cannot continue:

Sometimes I thought she was trying to change me, save me, rehabilitate or recycle me, whatever word people use when they want to make someone else into something that other person doesn't really want to be. Maybe I was her good deed or her test case, or maybe she just wanted control. I never understand what motivates people to take an active interest in someone else.

Sometimes I thought I was a number and a story, some background filler so that when she met her professional and romantic soul mate she could say she'd "done the dating scene" and settle down without any of the reservations she never had to begin with.

Sometimes I thought she might honestly like me, which was so ridiculous it almost could have been true. Empirically speaking, she really couldn't: we hardly talked, she knew almost nothing about me besides my first name, and I was drunk every time she saw me. But you can never tell with these things. People get stupid and delusional, sometimes on purpose. They want to make obvious mistakes. It's an easy way to turn a casual nothing of a relationship into some tragic half-assed epic, an excuse to use words like love and loss and get melodramatic about the life you wish you were leading. It's the poor man's English Patient starring somebody you never really cared about anyway…

This was our final act together, since I planned on never seeing her again. This was it. But I wanted it to have a happy ending, even if it was somewhat mysterious and abrupt. I wanted to leave her with nothing but sweet memories of our sham relationship, to feel good about all the time we've wasted together. I don't care if it's founded on lies and misconceptions, I like to be remembered fondly. I was feeling so magnanimous just then I would have even bantered with her maybe, if she'd bought me another drink or five. But then she started tickling me instead…

And there I was, twenty-eight years old, being tickled in a crowded bar surrounded by young professionals. And God wept for the world that he had made. (118-119; 124)

But interestingly, the moment of real human connection comes between Shane and his landlord's wife before one of their Tuesday sessions. In Neilan's hands it is only a flicker of intimacy but, hey, it's something. Here it is:

"Did you go to that woman's funeral?"

"Who?"

"The one who died. From your work."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't even know her. It would've been more like a business lunch than a funeral anyway. People were just going because they were supposed to, for appearances or teamwork or some bullshit. I didn't want any part of it."

"You don't like false pretences?"

"I usually do, but theirs seemed so insincere. Mostly I don't like going to the funerals of fat women I don't know."

"I would have gone. I like funerals."

"Why?"

"I like watching people, how they handle themselves. How the family reacts, how some people laugh and can't help it, how the funeral director shakes everyone's hand and looks at his watch."

"You like funerals but don't like talking about death?"

"They're not the same thing. Funerals take all that useless talk and put it on stage. That's where you can separate people."

"Into what?"

"The ones who know they're on stage and the ones who know but don't care," she said.

"I've only been to two funerals."

"Your parents?"

"No, my parents are both alive."

"I thought everyone's parents were dead by now," she said, and drew in long from her cigarette and held it.

"Are yours?"

"No." She smiled again as she exhaled, smoke curling towards the ceiling fan and scattering.

Two smiles in one night. That was something.

"You should go," she said after her second cigarette was done.

So I left. And on the way out I wondered just what she was doing, and if it was a game whether I was even playing. (141-142)

The rest of ‘Apathy and Other Small Victories’ won't be revealed here. All that's left to say is that the end is a madcap sprint to the finish line replete with an unraveling of the whodunit and other small miracles. And jokes. Lots and lots of jokes. Be sure to track down a copy and see for yourself.

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Mike Ferraro is a writer and rocker living in a New Jersey suburb of New York City. In 2001 he completed an honors thesis at Rutgers University entitled "The Only Freckle-Faced Wop on Earth: Identity, Anger and Shame in the Early Novels of John Fante." Mike is currently at work on a first novel, Due Diligence, and a full length collection of home recordings. He also paints. For more info visit www.mikeferraro.net , or email: info@mikeferraro.net.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.