The Nancy Boys

How can you not love a novel that begins with a charismatic elderly gentleman keeling over from a heart attack whilst singing Tom Jones on a karaoke stage?


Well, maybe you can not love it, Gentle Reader, but you know how I feel about karaoke and the men who sing it.


This is only one of many reasons why I love Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

Tim Bray wrote about the novel here, saying it doesn't — and I quote — Plumb The Depths Of Postmodern Subtextuality. But I misread his blog entry and thought he had called the novel postmodern.

A week later, when a dozen copies of the novel arrived at my USJ office in a box from Harper Collins, along with a dozen copies of American Woman, Bel Canto, The Known World, and The News From Paraguay, I grabbed Gaiman first.

Tim's partially right: deep it is not. Postmodern, however, it is.

The best part of the book, in the estimation of your humble narrator, comes near the end, when all the main characters, for one slightly implausible reason or another, arrive at the apparently non-fictional Caribbean island of St. Andrew. Gaiman, in an effort to persuade us of the plausibility of the implausibility of all this, has one of his characters explain to another the theory that each human being operates, from birth to death, in interaction with only 300 other people. The same 300 people over and over again.

All of which leads me to wonder, does Neil Gaiman sing?

Sadly, when Neil Gaiman emails Postmodern Sass it's not to answer that question, but to point out a couple of things...