Stephen Sherrill's THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK

A pervading weary hopelessness threatens every page of this novel, and no surprise; it's hard to imagine anyone having a carefree and cheerful experience of life on the lowest levels of working class society in the rural U.S. South, even if they are millennia-old beings from Greek mythology who are inexplicably stuck there. This seemed to me like weirdly unpromising material on which to construct a novel, but in The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Stephen Sherrill not only makes it work but makes of it an affecting, relatable and only occasionally shocking novel (and it's never shocking for obvious reasons; the low-hanging fruit, here, remains dangling off the tree) that I'm very glad I took a chance on when I stumbled across it in the available selections in the Kobo+ subscription listing.

Told from the perspective of the titular Minotaur -- and yes, this is the very same bull-headed man stashed away in Daedalus' labyrinth on ancient Crete, who somehow survived his encounter with Theseus and just kept on living and acquiring useful skills despite his bilateral vision, vast, sharp and heavy horns, and terrifying appearance -- our story begins where most of it takes place, in a not-quite town in the Piedmont area of South Carolina, where M* has turned up driving a decades-old Chevy Vega he has maintained himself and in need of a new place to live and a new job. He finds both, at first, at a small and decidedly podunk backwoods trailer park run by a widower, Sweeney, who buys and sells old cars for what living he doesn't quite make renting out a few old mobile homes he's tried to keep habitable. M. can help with that, and swiftly reaches an agreement to trade mechanic work on whatever cars Sweeney brings home in exchange for rent on an odd, but furnished boat-shaped trailer, at least until he can find a job in a restaurant kitchen, where he has traditionally made his own nut.

The man talking to Sweeny looks up and catches the Minotaur’s eye, which leaves the Minotaur no choice. He inhales deeply, from the belly up, filling his chest. He holds his head erect, horns straight, then walks toward them.

“Morning, M,” Sweeny says.

If fear is what he hopes for, the Minotaur is disappointed. The men acknowledge his presence with little more than nods and furrowed brows. There is a noticeable sag to the Minotaur’s shoulders.

Almost never is M.'s status as an immortal and impossible mythological creature commented on by any of the novel's characters, except occasionally as an occasion for bigotry on the part of the especially ignorant, though Sherrill devotes considerable thought to what it might actually like to live in and care for such an improbable body, to which not even emergency room physicians react to as especially strange when M. shows up with the results of various kitchen accidents. M's presence in the world is all but taken for granted, as is that of what I think is a satyr, briefly encountered stampeding a herd of goats, a tired looking wood nymph playing Ms. Pac-Man between customers at a gas station. Everybody has to make a living, no matter how glamorous her former existence might have seemed.

Most of the book takes place in a popular area restaurant, where M. gets a kitchen job not long after arriving in the area. Thus not a little of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break might remind the reader of a lesser-known work by the late and much-missed Anthony Bourdain; the hierarchy of waiters and cooks and management, the dinner rushes and the kinds of bizarre mishaps that can only happen when cabbage is being sliced and dressing made on the kind of absurdly vast scales of mess halls and cafeterias and restaurants with ten gallon drums of mayonnaise and gigantic dishwashers that run in cycles of minutes and incredibly sharp and well-maintained knives are flashing everywhere. The issue of the amount of extra headspace needed when one of your cooks has a wide pair of horns swinging around every time someone calls out his name is addressed early on, but nobody knows how to accommodate the kind of blind spot that only a guy with a bovine head experiences, unable to see what's right in front of him. Nobody gives him too much hell for these things, but his very slow and laconic speech does let him in for some issues, as, for instance, when two of the less mature waiters trick him into bellowing that he's a "tit man" right when new waitress Kelly, whose breasts have already excited plenty of comment among the staff in general, that are pretty universal in spaces where diverse personalities are thrown together and forced to interact despite their differences for hours every day.

This scenario all sounds like it would be leading to some kind of dumb monster erotica, and there is a little bit of sex in the book, but the relationship that develops between M. and Kelly is sweet rather than salacious, with plenty of time given for an actual friendship to develop out of the allyship of the kitchen before things get saucy -- and misunderstandings pile up.

Meanwhile, the community of the trailer park also gets a fair amount of page time, and while a few of the characters there threaten to become stereotypes, once again, what conflicts arise are not the kind of normies versus freaks, locals versus outsider hostilities that would serve as the easy route to drama for a novelist. Instead we get to see some healthy male friendships at work, bonds formed over the brotherhood of wrenches and carburetors strengthened by shared guilt over allowing an unfortunate accident to happen (trigger warning, animal death) and a shared resignation that this might be as good as it gets. Nobody in this book is dreaming of Getting Out of This Place and Making it Big Somewhere Else. Aspirations are modest, nobody is waiting to cut down the tall poppy or pull down a crab escaping the bucket, but it's mostly because nobody is really trying to. They don't seem to resent their lot; nobody is starving or avoiding medical care because of the cost, meaning that these characters are a bit better off than a lot of the people who might read about them, but not in an unrealistic way. Weirdly, it's kind of aspirational, which I'm not sure it was when the book was first published in 2000, but 26 years later it all seems kind of nice?

I think a modern myth is what author Stephen Sherrill is going for here, and in a gentle and thoughtful way, he has achieved it. M. has a stoicism to him that isn't showy or profound; he is a quietly competent and genuinely kind and generous being, whose thousands of years of life and haunting past as a figure of terror have left him with a tremendous compassion for himself and others that is comforting to read of and lovely to see. He can fix an engine, cook and carve a prime rib (and never mind the implications there, err...), carve an apple into a swan, read and contemplate a novel and help a friend move house, just like any other person; he has just learned to carry around a drywall patch kit to effect quick repairs when his horns accidentally damage his surroundings. I think a lot of of would like to have a friend just like him.

There is a sequel, set in and published 16 years later, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, but I don't feel any great compulsion to read it just now. I think I'll keep it around for sometime when I'm in the mood for something just a little melancholy or lonely, but don't want a great epic tragedy. We all need one of these now and then.

*Sherrill eschews the Minotaur's traditional name of Asterion, probably because how would a dude with bovine lips, teeth and tongue pronounce that, and refers to him simply as M., as does all of the novel's other characters.