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The Gay Dirtbag Lives On
Kristen Arnett’s specialty is queer women in Florida who are Going Through Some Stuff.
Her debut novel, 2019’s Mostly Dead Things, began with a studious description of a taxidermist skinning a white-tailed deer; in her newest, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, the curtain rises on a lesbian clown, hired to entertain a children’s party in suburban Orlando, slipping off into the bathroom for a sweaty assignation with the mother of the birthday boy. Within this broad rubric — and against a familiar backdrop of Publix supermarkets, suburban sprawl, and 7-Eleven parking lots — Arnett finds the ingredients for a fascinating range of stories, in which scenes of gonzo humor bring levity to portraits of prickly, frequently self-sabotaging characters. Cherry is an old-fashioned smart aleck, something of an overexplainer, and a deeply earnest narrator who peppers the story with corny paeans to the creative life, saying things like “In order to perfect my art, I must let it swallow me whole.” Her constant invocations of the “dreams” she’s chasing can lapse into wearying self-help pablum.
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