by Chris Leite
Rating: ****
Mr. Portis Strawberry harbors dreams of becoming a famous director but instead works as a low-grade math teacher. Late one Friday night in Brooklyn, he finds himself inexplicably drawn to a strange cinema featuring the opening night of a film that promises to be box-office gold.
It's a film that he supposedly made. The thing is, Mr. Portis did write and plan the film, nineteen years ago … so who exactly is the Mr. Portis Strawberry who has brought it to life on the big screen?...
Sans Stability Minus Sex is one of the most mind-boggling books I’ve ever read. Leite hurtles the reader straight down the rabbit hole as Mr. Portis is guided to the otherworldly, enchanted cinema. It’s chromatically visual, slightly creepy, and weirdly cartoonish.
However, the breezy surrealism hides a sharp narrative focus and, as the story progresses, there is, among the extraordinary shenanigans, a linear story that has been carefully considered and well-executed.
Mr. Portis, a defeated, depressed man, whose dilapidated life is due to his own poor choices and those of others, decides to enlist his wealthy, estranged daughter, Cherise, to accompany him on a road trip to Los Angeles to find the doppelganger that brought his film to life.
At first, it does seem as though Leite has thrown everything into the book. It veers wildly from familial psychodrama to surreal mayhem within a few sentences. Perspective swings between Mr. Portis and Cherise with a few random points of view interjected and the pace is propulsive.
Indeed, Leite has an electric storytelling style that fizzes with a deranged energy and an imagination rich with whimsically clever flights of fancy. There is an air of knockabout comedy and frenetic farce to several of Mr. Portis’s escapades in addition to what appears to be a supernatural element, or is the entire premise a wild imagining of a deeply troubled, mentally unwell man?
He initially presents as a pathetic, deluded, and unfiltered old schmuck but, later, becomes a ruthless, deeply unpleasant, and violent individual. He’s riven with bitter self-loathing which he masquerades with victimhood and Leite portrays him convincingly with an immediate dimension that renders him oddly likable.
Dialogue especially, and not just involving Mr. Portis, is natural, colorful, and whip-smart. As with the previous book of Leite’s I’ve read*, there is quite a lot of monologuing and he writes these intriguing, rapid-fire diatribes with some laugh-out-loud moments, and a hefty pinch of pathos.
The reader is primarily unsure whether Cherise is a hero or villain. Her treatment of Mr. Portis appears unduly harsh until both her backstory and present-day issues hove into view. The thread that courses through Sans Stability Minus Sex is her toxic, complex dynamic with Mr. Portis.
She is a study in contrasts. A little girl lost, a bit of a brat, but also an incredibly successful, self-aware young woman who, in some places, is more of a parent to Mr. Portis than he ever was to her.
Mr. Portis and Cherise’s increasingly fantastical tale is aided by a collection of offbeat characters who flicker in and out of the narrative. Bunny and Foxy were my favorites; their conversation at the bus stop in the chapter, Vaporized Mind is a brilliantly textured piece of writing.
Leite plays with chapter structure, time pendulums back and forth, some are long, some are short, it’s haphazard but controlled. Not only are Leite’s characters chaotically thrown around in this bizarre alternative reality but his readers are too.
Tense is present, although this occasionally changes, and when Cherise evaporates into the film (trust me, it works), several chapters take on a screen-writerly tone and are scripted, albeit with motifs running parallel to the action with Mr. Portis and his younger alter-ego.
There are occasions when the narrative loses purpose even within its crazy confines and there are a few, tenuous plot reaches but, overall, Sans Stability Minus Sex is a kaleidoscopic mind-bender of a novel. Cinematic, intense, and unique, it’s the literary equivalent of LSD. Highly recommended.
*Click here for my review of Pink Gallery to Mar Suite.
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