Tom Bradley’s book of memoirs and vignettes leaves a most interesting residue. While so much is eminently relatable, I doubt if the reader will feel he or she inhabits quite the same terra firma. His vantage point encompasses brilliant humor, compelling tales, and rarefied insights.

There is no thematic unity in this collection save the collector. In “Undecorated Dad” he speaks of a rather inflated (and quite tall) pater familias. Having spent the Great War guarding POWs in Utah, he concocts a plan to gain recognition of his patriotic sacrifice. Through sheer numbskullery he is accidentally gashed in the head with a fencepost by “one of us.” The final sentence sums up so much of what makes this book sing:

Till the day he died (in bed, not without company), my old man never stopped dining off his peculiar version of the “defining event” of the “Greatest Generation.”

Then there is the tour de force, “At the Creative Writing Workshop.” This is a wildly amusing trip through an abattoir of pompous literary sacred cows. Against an absurd academic backdrop where the workshop leader, is a suave but wordless Manhattan somebody (God knows why), the dedicated starving artist is as neatly disemboweled as the scribe of tomorrow, head awash in thoughts of sequels and screenplay royalties.

Biff, the narrator’s nephew, falls well into the later category with a cross-genre “classic to be” in hand. Bradley, having picked up his pen some time back for less overtly gilded reasons, tells the tale with panache, a dry descriptive voice that subdues his astonishment and horror at the bastardizations which surround. The fact that Biff peppers his speech with epithets the like of “Guzzle some dog smegma” and “Sucking Christ hole” adds much to this surrealistic narrative that many readers will recognize instantly–and that is the true strength of Bradley as a writer.

The author’s often scathing exposure of social ills and hypocrisies comes through, but due to a Twain-Rogers tone, does not plummet us to deep contemplation of that which only produces futile ruminations. In “Procedures for an American Wife…” he drops a neat little smart-bomb in prickly commentary on said same coverage on media d’jour.

On comes a kind of public service announcement disguised as a little radio drama, a kind of morality play squeezed between a foot- or base- or whateverball game that, in turn, preempts Associated Press coverage of the proud smart-bomb extermination of the civilian population of whatever third-world country we have chosen as the backdrop for our latest “manageable war.”

I could continue, but won’t, leaving it for the reader to further discover and savor. When one gazes at the beguiling photograph of the author and insightful bio anecdotes beginning with, “When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places beginning with the F-word,” it all starts to make sense. And that is when the fun begins…

Constance Stadler
Review Editor,
Calliope Nerve

You can get Tom’s Book at Amazon as well as Ms. Stadler’s new opus co-authored with Rich Follett.