This book won’t change your life. It probably knows a book that says it can, though. Or an evening class. Or a retreat.

Zena Barrie’s terrain is dotted with the illusory pyramids of self-improvement fads, her audience whichever arbitrary generational stratum it is that’s beginning to notice jowls where their cheekbones once sat.  

Two similar looking men with umbilical hernias, her first collection, is a rummage sale of comic vignettes, most reading like the chat show yarns of a stand-up raconteuse disheartened by their increasing reliance on voiceover work. Each bears the imprint of her distinctive comedic persona, one whose footnotes accentuate a passing resemblance to a club circuit David Foster Wallace, wearing a life jacket of cynicism in the sewer outlet of socially-mediated existence. 

The pieces, sometimes literal fragments, see Barrie playing on the bomb sites of crocheted edge culture, unearthing banal reference points with the appalled delight of a 1970s pubescent finding pornography in the woods at the back of the local pub. The humour manifests both in the attention to mundane detail and the absurdity that balloons into the cracks Barrie prises open between the paving stones of its metaphorical footpath, whether that be the spectacle of daytime television or the caprices and pettiness which make up the below-the-waterline bulk of our personalities.  

Still, writing about comedy is like dismembering childhood toys. In the heat of the moment, it seems like a good idea. But in the aftermath of dawning regret, you realise that you’ve ruined it in the process. It’s less self-indulgent, perhaps, to take a yellow highlighter pen to the collection’s particular peaks, whilst noting parenthetically the general absence of troughs.  

The titular men and their corresponding umbilical hernias act as a very loose linking device, recurring at irregular intervals, providing a semblance of structure to the miscellany of scattershot inspiration that peppers the paperback’s pages.  

Performing a similar function is a triptych of sketches in the form of transcriptions from what you fervently hope are imaginary Facebook groups. Whether discussing the correct way to care for a foundling pigeon child, the raising of succulents or the gynaecological needs of female dogs, Barrie accentuates the clamour of passionate opinion and malicious self-importance that characterises life on the line, where the mask of the user profile affords the license of cruelty in a sort of digital counterpart to Marquis de Sade’s imaginings in the Bastille, albeit with an undertow of tetchy conversational cross-purpose familiar to readers of Viz‘s magnificent Pathetic Sharks.  

If Viz is one obvious point of comparison, another, perhaps less predictable, is Jane Austen. The Workshop, in particular, owes something to Austen’s beautifully modulated irony when Barrie observes that “in the course of one afternoon, she had entirely reinvented herself”, only to twist the knife in further with the finely calibrated “she’d recommend it to her friends, so they’d waste the same amount of money”. 

For me, however, her pièce de résistance is Monti Donne, a sort of stream-of-consciousness prose poem inspired, as Barrie carefully reminds the reader, by the “entirely fictional” gardener. Written in a way that captures the hectic antithesis of doom-scrolling (fever-Googling?), if the piece were exhibited in a gallery, Monti Donne would be described as an interrogation of its subject’s essence, one which invites the audience to ask of it such pertinent questions as “Was Monti Donne in prison with David Dickinson?” and others, such as the one involving Simon Le Bon, that would use up my asterisk quota if transcribed for Northern Soul.  

In much the same way that the recollection of the opening sentence of Charlotte’s Web unfailingly brings me to tears, so it it is impossible to think about Monti Donne without, at the very least, a wry smile.  

This book won’t change your life, then, but it will affirm it, in all its slovenliness, solipsism and meanness of spirit. It is, in a word, a joy. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: cover artwork by Claire Robinson

 

Two similar looking men with umbilical hernias by Zena Barrie with illustrations by Claire Robinson is published by Breakthrough Books. Click here for more information.