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Read There's A (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going To Hell: A Novel Of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, And Big Trouble (2007)

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble (2007)

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3.55 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0812975723 (ISBN13: 9780812975727)
Language
English
Publisher
villard

There's A (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going To Hell: A Novel Of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, And Big Trouble (2007) - Plot & Excerpts

There's a (slight) chance that this may not be a very good book.Maye Roberts is a thirty-something freelance journalist living in Phoenix, Arizona who is suddenly uprooted to a small town of Spaulding, Washington when her husband is offered a teaching post at the local University. Maye struggles to make friends in the new town and instead finds herself in several embarrassing situations. She even manages to develop an enemy or two, including the local postman who thinks her dog is a menace and the wife of the Dean of the University, Rowena Spaulding, who is a descendant of the sewer pipe magnate for whom the town is named.Eventually Maye decides to enter the local sewer-pipe pageant (open to all ages and genders apparently) in an attempt to be more likeable. To do so however, she must have a sponsor in the form of a previous sewer-pipe pageant Queen. Her best chance is to locate the mysterious Ruby Spicer, who 50 years ago was the town's most beloved pageant Queen, but who left town shortly after her reign ended and was never heard from again (all of which happened at about the time as an unexplained string of arsons). It is up to Maye to find Ruby, practice her singing-dog pageant act and solve the arson case, all in the pursuit of finding a single friend to make Spaulding feel a little more like home.Laurie Notaro is a humor writer and this was her first novel. I read an on-line review and thought I would enjoy this, in the same way I enjoyed Dave Barry's first novel, "Big Trouble." Unfortunately, this didn't measure up. I'm still trying to sort out the reasons why, but I have a few theories.First, Notaro seems intent on making nearly everyone in Spaulding a freak. Dave Barry does similar things with his Floridian characters, but because our protagonist, Maye, is from the big city, the effect is of an outsider coming in and mocking the local culture. The vegan meet-up, the cult-like recycling rules, the Wiccan book club, the jogging mailman, all of it feels like nothing more than a subject for ridicule. For me it didn't come across as very funny - more just cruel. I think the difference with Dave Barry is that when I read his stuff about Miami, I always feel like I am looking inside out. Barry actually has some affection for his characters and is not merely trying to mock them.Second, despite the fact that everyone in Spaulding is dysfunctional in some way, Notaro doesn't push the silly hard enough. There is a strong thread of absurdism in the novel (e.g. a killer raccoon makes an appearance) but this is juxtaposed with the continued normalcy of Maye - as if she is the only sane person in Spaulding. I think the novel would have worked better for me if the absurd situations had continued to escalate. Dave Barry's books always wind up with scenarios that are so far-fetched that no one would believe them. In a Barry novel, the initial set-up in reality is long forgotten by the end and the reader feels a little breathless, like they just completed a thrilling amusement park ride. Reading this book felt more like jolting along in a broken down car with a transmission problem. Start. Stop. Start. Stop. The absurdist arc needed to keep moving on, like something the late Douglas Adams might have writtenFinally, the plot is simply too predictable. Everything is telegraphed and nothing feels terribly original. Now, I'm not a stickler for originality in plotting. Obviously many of our greatest works of art borrow stories, themes and motifs from the past. But if you're going to rehash old ideas, I think you should at least do so with style and panache. We continue to read variations of the "Romeo and Juliet" story because we like new variations on a theme. But this book does not seem to offer anything particularly new to a hackneyed story, either in terms of plots twists or unique style. It is neither particularly funny nor particularly mysterious and I found myself mostly just happy to be done with it.My best description of this book? Imagine a Lifetime movie written by Dave Barry and you might come up with something like this. Recommended only if you have very few options for what to read - or insomnia.

I will admit, at first the endless similes and run-on sentences bugged me. It's stuff like this, where Maye explains why she hates Pat Benatar's 80's hit "Love is a Battlefield:" "Well, um, it's not that I don't like it, but when I hear it, I'm transported back to 1983 and a red headed mongrel of an adolescent with a whitehead the size of a nickel on the tip of his nose is attempting to shove his slug of a tongue down my throat a I'm sitting in a swiveling bucket seat in the front of his dad's Chevy van on the bad losing end of a double date while my best friend has basically completed a conjugal visit with her companion, who just got out of juvenile detention the week before setting fire to an apartment building." Or, "Once they got the incredible news that Charlie had been chosen to join the faculty at Spaulding University, things had to happen as quickly as the ceremony for a Catholic girl who needs to get married." (Okay, not one of the more endless examples, but phrases like this come fast and furious in the first few chapters and it tended to overwhelm.)And Maye's painful adventure moving to a small, Pacific Northwest town brought back painful memories of my own, when I was kicked out of the mom and babies group I'd joined to make friends after moving to a small island in Washington's San Juans. But Maye's experience, which started out hitting too close to home, ended up becoming hilariously and fabulously over the top in every way.And, by the end of this story, I was in love with Maye and Spaulding, and of course, Ruby. Laurie Notaro has a new fan.

What do You think about There's A (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going To Hell: A Novel Of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, And Big Trouble (2007)?

First off, let me just say that I love Laurie Notaro. I've read and loved four of her previous books, and find just about every short story she writes completely hilarious. With this in mind, I was really excited to read this book, her first experiment with fiction - I figured if the nonfiction stories Notaro wrote nearly made me pee myself laughing, just imagine what she could write if she were allowed to make everything up!And that's the problem: Laurie Notaro's first novel is about a woman named Maye, who works as a freelance writer and used to be a reporter, adjusting to life in small-town Washington after moving there from Phoenix with her English-professor husband and their dog. For anyone who has read even one other Laurie Notaro book, this is starting to sound very familiar. Also, in the about-the-author section of There's a Slight Chance I Might Be Going to Hell it says that Notaro "recently moved Eugene, Oregon, a town that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the fictional town of Spaulding, Washington." Uh huh. Amusing as that is, Laurie, that doesn't excuse the fact that very little of your novel appears to be genuinely fictitious. As I read through the book, it was so easy to see which parts of the story were real, which parts were exaggerated, and what was made up. From my point of view, there was very little in that last category. In fact, it made me wonder if the stories in Notaro's nonfiction books are really all true, because they were so blatantly similar to everything that happens in her "fictional" story.One more thing bugged me, and it may have been in Notaro's other books too, but this was the first time I noticed it: she has a habit of going out of her way to create awkwardly long, nonsensical similes that seem really out of place and forced. For example: "Crawford Lake Road was not paved, and not only was it a bumpy dirt road, it was full of potholes that looked more like spots where meteors had bounced off the face of the earth the way a basketball inevitably rebounds off the head of the fat girl in freshman gym class." And: "her eyes got wider and her expression took on the proportions of a teenager in a Wes Craven film who had just had dirty sex with her horn-dog boyfriend and was about to get her head ripped off her body like a grapefruit plucked from a tree by a psychopath." There you have it: not one, but two examples of similes-within-similes. And you thought it couldn't be done. (and yes, they're similes, not metaphors. I looked it up.) Those aren't the only examples I could find, but I'll spare you the rest.In conclusion: there is nothing wrong with writing what you know, but Laurie Notaro, gifted as she is with funny prose, seems incapable of doing anything else.
—Madeline

This book gets two stars (instead of one) because I actually managed to read the whole thing. I've never read anything by Laurie Notaro before but picked this up because I was in the mood for something fun and light. Well, fun and light is what this book is supposed to be and it probably is for most readers. However, this book gets two starts (instead of three) because several scenes were a little too slapsticky for my tastes. I started to get bored reading about Maye's ridiculous and desperate attempts to make friends. Maybe I'm just too unsociable to empathize. Instead of laughing at her efforts (which were supposed to be funny), I rolled my eyes. A lot of Notaro's depictions of the wacky townspeople are stereotypical and almost cliche in their attempted zaniness. The story picked up about a hundred pages (!) in when Maye finally decided to enter the pageant and began hunting down the vanished former pageant queen she wanted as a sponsor. The mystery aspect of the story spurred me forward although I was by no means biting my fingernails and sitting at the edge of my seat. Disappointingly, the entire last chapter is one giant plot dump It's a complete summary, most of it given in dialogue. That, among many other aspects of the story, just didn't work for me.Notaro's writing style uses lots of unusual and long-winded comparisons and similes. Again, it's supposed to be humorous. I can think of a few friends who would probably appreciate it more than I do.
—Lindz-o

Absurd . . . But Pure Laurie Notaro Change the names, create an absurd little scenario, and call it fiction. As a fan of Notaro's essay collections, this story, There's a (Slight) Change I Might Be Going to Hell, didn't surprise or disappoint. It doesn't stretch too far from her roots in writing first person vignettes about a funny, irreverent woman, however, the woman in this story happens to be named "Maye." Maye is clearly a Laurie alter ego, and it helped to have read her earlier collections to get a full picture of this likeable, humble creature.Maye and her husband, Charlie, move from Phoenix, Arizona to Spaulding, Washington, because of her husband's new job. The plot centers on Maye's insatiable quest to make new friends. She is very unsuccessful--mistaking a coven of witches for a book group, infiltrating a meeting of vegetarians only to be busted eating meat later that night, and making a fool of herself at her first faculty gathering by getting stuck in her sweater and doing a striptease of sorts. She makes an enemy of the town matriarch, Rowena Spaulding, and her postman, who makes it necessary for her to take her dog, Mickey, to obedience training. Ultimately, Maye decides to win friends by attempting to win the annual "Miss Sewer Pipe" crown. She obtains a sponsor, the mysterious former Queen, Ruby Spicer, and as their friendship develops, the story grows more interesting. In spite of all the characters bantering back and forth in overly clever repartee and an annoying abundance of similes, I couldn't help but turn the pages just to see how the town pageant would unfold.No great piece of literature, but fans of Laurie Notaro will love this book, and I applaud the author for giving "fiction" a crack, even though according to her acknowledgements, she seemed forced into it. Just keep writing Laurie. You make us laugh.
—Michele

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