Twentytwenty

Stephen-Paul Martin's TwentyTwenty reminds us that in his finest moments, he's the king of writing degree zero, the American Albert Camus, if Camus had a sense of humor. "He stares at the seemingly random combination of numbers and letters, then shrugs and clicks. There's a flash on his screen, a clip of someone jerking off in a bedroom. Clark thinks it might be a picture of himself right before the phone rang, but the image is gone before he can see it clearly." His straightforward yet unaccountably insane prose is anomie trapped in a bounce house. His seemingly relaxed narrative is "a leash that can be jerked at any moment," as his hapless protagonists, in stories like "Almost Famous" and "Just Another Emergency" obsess over people's fake smiles, mermaids who appear out of nowhere, and the political soul destroyers who mask their evil intentions with bland and obvious gestures in a nation soothed to boredom by the grotesquerie of the commonplace.