by Nathan Tyree, Bookmunch

I had not heard of Robert Levin before “When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot” arrived in the mail. I'm not really sure how I had missed him. Much of his work has appeared in publications that I sometimes read, and yet he had slipped completely beneath my radar. That fact is something of a shame.

When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot is a slim volume, split about in half. The first forty or so pages are devoted to Levin's short stories, the second forty or so made up of his commentary. It is the first half of the book that interested me most.

Levin writes rude, bawdy, strange, idiosyncratic tales. His characters are obsessed with sex and with themselves. They tend to be losers and bores (but are never boring). Levin crafts stories often in the first person, with a raw wit and free Id. There is a discomfort (with life, existence, sexuality, the body) that bleeds out of his characters. These are not the strong, sleek, beautiful protagonists that hang about so much of today's fiction. These characters owe something to Bukowski and Burroughs.

All of the tales that make up this book deserve some level of mention, but a few truly stand out. "Dog Days" is disturbing. "Peggy (or sex with a very large woman)" is hilarious. I found myself putting the book aside while reading that story, to compose myself and let the laughter trail off so that I could finish reading it. "Spinning the Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception" has one of the best titles I have seen in years. Sadly, it is one of the weaker stories in the book.

The title story is most deserving of discussion. "When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot" is a fascinating and nasty tale. It follows an unattractive man. He describes himself thus: "Just under average height, more skinny than slim, and with long, usually unkempt hair hanging over my ears and forehead and down the scruff of my neck, I also have heavily lidded eyes, sunken cheeks and a pallor that's cadaverous." Reading that self description, one may be surprised that our narrator "Gets his pipes cleaned" all the time by a variety of women.

His secret is that a certain type of woman will mistake him for Al Pacino, or Dustin Hoffman, or Bob Dylan, or some other celebrity that doesn't meet the standard of beauty in the modern world. We are presented with a holy litany of the times he's been laid due to mistaken identity.

Eventually he falls into a relationship of sorts. He begins living with a girl that has no idea who it is she is sleeping with each night. This girl has the improbable name Roger (her father had wanted a boy). She is one of the strangest characters I have ever read about. Something in her reminds one of Anthony Burgess' Enderby. She is flatulent and sort of disgusting in her habits. This girl is a fountain of malapropism, mixed (or twisted) metaphor and strange construction. When excited she is "excruciated". She wonders why strangers don't "notarize" her boyfriend (who she initially believes to be Dustin Hoffman).

The two of them make a strange pair in extremis. It is, in its own way, a sad tale. We know from the start that it can’t end well, and of course it doesn’t. Along the way we are given some of the best characters to appear in a long time.

Any Cop?: I’m tempted to call Levin a sick comedian, but how then to account for the pathos and the genuine sadness that permeates these stories? How to account for the fact that I am about to set aside several other books so that I can read this one again?