Chandler Brossard’s Over the Rainbow? Hardly (collected short seizues)

Recommended: nytimes sunday book review - many moon ago
Contains short story collections: the chimney sweep comes clean ; dirty books for little folks; raging joys, sublime violations; postcards: don’t you just wish you were here! ; closing the gap ; traditionally a place of banishment; shifty sacred songs

Chandler Brossard (1922-)

Consider me shocked and astounded to find another beat writer, only this time, a beat writer who’s still kicking. Kicking and not at all American. I have read neither of his “earliest beat novels” Who Walk in Darkness & The Bold Saboteurs but I would recommend them to you any day with very little hesitation.

You could accuse me of being biased to his writing, because a few of the stories were read under the unusual circumstance of being read a) out loud, b) by a boy with big eyes and really adorable side-cheek wrinkles that crop up when he grins, and c) being read in my favourite place in the universe: Bed. Snuggled up to my nose in blankets.

Don't get ideas... They aren’t romantic stories; they aren’t touching stories; they are on the contrary, sordid, frisky little minxes of tales with gutter-mouth elaborations, side-comments thrown smarmily into parenthetical asides, and raging inappropriateness busting out of every plot. Also busting out of every plot? Lines that I want to use everywhere, but probably won’t have any opportunity…

I think I’ll give you kids a sampling and if you don’t want to borrow this one from me, I am putting our friendship, as it is, on probation. Just so’s you know.

The Chimney Sweep Comes Clean:

(Summon up, if you dare, the fetid insolence of steaming sprouts.)

[that was the ending. Aren’t I a vicious spoiler…yes, well, here is the beginning…]

“The bird in the bed-sit next door blows her nose all the time. Is it a flooding, virus-victimized nose she is dealing with? A nose that should be delivered up to hydraulic engineers? Does she have a secret and unresolved thing with it? (A love of one’s nose, in other words.) Or is she trying to communicate with me through our shared walls and doors?

I lean toward the final suggestion, if you will permit me. I have examined her nose, at a thwarted distance, of course, and I can assure that: 1) it is dry as a bone; and 2) there is not a single sign of vice or corruption to it. Oh, it’s had its moments, I’m sure, as what nose hasn’t? But as for programmatic license, absolutely not.

Dear lord! There she goes again. She’s going to deviate her septum at this rate. And do you know what time it is? Two-thirty in the morning. She knows that I’m in bed, with not a stitch on. And I can tell you where she is: standing with her head against the wall that separates us. What exactly is she telling me? Is she waiting for me to make some delicate physical sounds in response? Shall I cough? Sneeze? Scratch on the wall like a starving mouse eating through eternity?”

The “peeker under perfectly decent scabs” that he is, he breaks down the door and engages in odd sexual congress with her on the floor, and simultaneously form an “appreciation” of Yorkshire pudding and brussel sprouts.

“Brussel sprouts and Yorkshire pudding can be loads of fun, it turns out, but only if you’re getting laid while eating them. Which is what happened, give or take a false notion or two.”

And possibly my favouite quote of the entire book:

“All I know is this: blowing one’s nose is one thing, but having it blown is something else again.”


Stories in Chimney Sweep tend to range from the obscene to the curious (but I can only speak for myself) to the familiar. Such as the brief bit about having his food stolen by his roommates.

“'vermin! Secret agents from another stomch! Assassins of gluttony! Stop stealing my bloody food. '

I pasted this perfectly understandable statememnt onto the door of the white refrigerator. Then I ate three pork chops I’d been saving for two future meals. For reasons thata are basically self-explanatory (if they are anything at all)"


“I stand weeping amidst the flagrant crumbs of their toast orgy.”

[Yes, well, I think we’ve all been there…]

Dirty Books for Little Folks:

Hansel ad Gretel: why should sleeping dogs be permitted to go on lying?
[...to let you know how silly/disturbing this gets...]

They had been into sibling incest fot a long time, ever since they had learned that their little friend Oedipus , who lived down the block and who knew a good thing when he saw it, was plowing his mother. “

…Hansel and Gretel were celebrating their little victory with a big joint of Lebanese red.
“Let’s play rape tonight” said Gretel, who was really getting turned on by the hash.
“OK,” said Hansel, letting out a little smoke. “I’ll be Nigger Jim and you can be Tricia Nixon."

[And in all the obscenity and spunk, a few more sensitive examples of craftsmanship…]

Postcards...:
[extremely brief descriptions of “towns”]

Vanishing Point, Florida:
Distance means nothing here. It is a nostalgic artifact.
“We know a lot more about density here than we’re going to let on,” the town mayor has said on more than one occasion.
Children race around the streets as though carrying secrets far beyond their years.
Lots of old-timers while away the daylight hours standing on the bluff staring off into infinity. That’s what it looks like anyway. They’re not fooling anybody. Actually, they’re trying to dope the past.
There is no unemployment problem here. “That’s our business,” folks will answer when questioned.

Lying Low, Virginia
1.Here in Lying Low the apples torture Newton by falling diagonally.
2.Children play cricket with crickets.
3.Boys say to girls, “I want to take your cherry and jump into a pit.” (Hence the town passion is cherry pit jam)
4.The traffic cop is a reformed skydiver and is called Our Boy Bunky the Muffler Diver.

Shifty Sacred Songs:
[a collection of breakdowns of word-entities like “silence” “sadness” “grief”…]

“Sadness:
One thing you’ve got to say for sadness. You don’t have to dress for it. Never.“