Small Apartments
By Chris Millis
Anvil Press
127 pp., $16
Reviewed by Tyler Gabrysh
Meet Franklin Franklin, a short, fat, forty-something with a few eccentricities and one fantastic problem. Chris Millis’ winning entry in the 23rd Annual International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest (2000), which also received major motion picture treatment last year, is fresh off the press again in a second edition.
Somewhat similar in plot and, to a degree, sensibility with Hans Keilson’s “Comedy in a Minor Key,” “Small Apartments” opens with:
Face up and smiling lay the warm, dead body of Albert Olivetti on the cracked, linoleum kitchenette floor of Franklin’s small apartment on the west side of Buffalo.
From here we experience our protagonist’s comically deranged (and at times naïve and sarcastic, we’re never sure) personality, to go with his odd habits and awkward physical self, juxtaposed with a host of colourful minor characters.
There’s brother Bernard who sends him envelopes of fingernail clippings from a psychiatric centre, the lovely mother-teenage daughter tandem across the street who warm up his binoculars, and the two other tenants in the 100 Garner building.
Tommy Balls is a prototypical lazy stoner with a family-disassociated father and a bible-thumping mother who’s devoted herself to the teachings of one author-TV celeb psych doc, Sage Mennox; a man name-checked throughout the book and indeed pops up at one point. The other tenant is Mr. Allspice, a no-nonsense retired marine who detests Franklin and the wall-shaking bellow of his Swiss Alphorn (yes, that’s right!)
Millis employs linguistic ease with deft wit in writing about circumstances just real enough to be plausible and yet uneasily intriguing. It’s akin to viewing a gruesome accident as the paramedics scramble about the highway. He’s fittingly chosen an array of unique names (Burt Walnut, anyone?) and the setting choices of Lackawanna and Buffalo (over, say, Brooklyn) isn’t per chance either.
Having lived with his brother for twenty-two years, Franklin has become even more the hermit in the four years after Bernard’s confinement. But he does cradle his lifelong dreams of the heaven he’s built Switzerland up to be. His abode is modest, and we intermittently find him ruminating on what to do with the corpse inside it. The urgency is there, sort of, and at one point we experience his funny pontificating of alternatives. as if he’s selecting items at a buffet.
The strengths of this book, such as this absurdity, are utilized well in the mere two days of the entire fiction, and like “Seinfeld,” not all the laughs and attention are entirely protagonist-focused. Tommy, Allspice, Walnut, and Bernard all have their own little brief spotlight (though Allspice’s feels misplaced, disjointed, and briefly out-of-character).
Within hours of a barn going up in smoke, a triptych of proficient fire and police pals begin their investigation. Coincidentally Bernard also dies, though he still has surprises in store for Franklin.
As the short chapters fly by in this wonderful, and often humourous read, the narrative gets neither cheesy (in a bad way) nor obvious as the authorities close in while their suspect heads back to his small apartment.
Tyler Gabrysh (www.tylergabrysh.com) is a writer living in Victoria.