Floridian author Kristen Arnett (Mostly Dead Things; With Teeth) serves up equal doses of humor and emotion in Stop Me if You've Heard This One, a perversely funny novel about family, ambition, and desire.
Cherry Hendricks isn't your average Floridian--if such a thing exists. A professional clown, Cherry travels around Orlando trying to entertain children but more often entertaining their horny mothers. To support her art, she works by day at an exotic pet store. Her hypercritical mother, and maybe even her similarly eccentric friends, think she needs more stability in her life. But Cherry is determined to live for her art, particularly since the death of her beloved, if also annoyingly adored, brother.
Cherry thinks her luck might be changing when she is pulled into the orbit of Margot the Magnificent, a much older woman whose career as a magician has all the signs of success Cherry's lacks. Margot might be acerbic, challenging, and still emotionally caught up with her ex, but she's also willing actually to engage with Cherry's dream--and have hot sex while she's at it. As Cherry gets further entangled in Margot's world, she has to sort out how she can build a serious life for herself (even as a clown).
As always, Arnett excels at striking a pitch-perfect tone of dark humor, delighting in irreverent jokes and descriptions while always probing at something deeper, something closer to the heart. For Cherry, this emotional center is as much her brother as it is her abiding love for the art of clowning, although the two aren't disconnected. She lives because he can't, and to make the most of that life is as much a burden as it is a gift.
Still, Cherry's cackling first-person narration never drags the reader too far into that potential pit, sticking instead to dry comedy that hits hardest when it is cringingly self-aware. For example, upon seeing a woman she considers picking up at work, Cherry muses, "I don't know what it is about women who could be my mother that gets me off, but I am a sucker for anyone over the age of fifty who looks like they are about to lead a very rigorous step aerobics class." At moments like this, readers will be tempted to flinch and snort at the same time, an experience that's probably similar to that of the audience watching Cherry's final, eye-popping clown performance. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A darkly comedic tale about ambition, unexpected forms of art, and queer desire, Stop Me If You've Heard This One is another brutally funny and surprisingly emotional novel from Kristen Arnett.