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Minus the Imple
Robert Chandler
Lulu
Copyright © 2008
ISBN 978-0-6151-9772-2
After I had finished reviewing I Miss Your Purple Hair (Review 136), Robert Chandler offered to send me Minus the Imple. He warned me that Minus was a different book entirely, less fiction and more fictionalized auto-biography. As soon as I started reading though, I was hooked just as I had been with Purple Hair. Chandler’s writing is just compelling to me, it ebbs and flows with a calculated stream-of-consciousness feel.
As we join Bobby or Robby or Robert, he is in a mental ward doing a very poor job of killing himself. So poor, in fact, that he lives and has to come to terms with what brought him to this point. Turns out, he has always been different and it bugs him to no end. Whereas most of us are only dimly aware of our aura, his has a mind of its own and likes to pop out for a visit during times of stress. His aura even merits its own name… Minus. Minus is an Imple, as auras tend to be. Here Chandler describes a sighting of Minus, one of the few times that he really gets to see the little guy:
The second time I saw Minus was the day after Christmas. It’s still nearly impossible to accurately describe him, all these years later. I woke up in the middle of the night again, and my little TV set was still on. It was so late that all that was on was static. I sat up on the side of the bed and leaned to turn the TV set off, when I saw him out of the corner of my eye. My arm was just frozen in place, barely touching the on/off knob. I couldn’t move a muscle. First I thought I was seeing things, so I blinked my eyes very quickly and then I realized it was real. There, at the foot of my bed, was a blue glow of a pleasant hue I had never seen before, just hovering in mid-air.
While Minus is the title character, he’s a relatively minor character in the book. He stops in once in awhile to keep things interesting, but most of the time Robert struggles to keep him hidden so he’s not seen as the weirdo. The rest of the time, we follow him from a young boy through adolescence and then into his adult years. We watch as he struggles to define Minus and even to look for help from the medical community which, as it turns out, isn’t quite ready to admit the existence of imples. We are brought along as he is blessed with a daughter, Violet, who goes on to feature prominently in Purple Hair. We continue on through heartbreak, lost jobs, lost desire to live, and on down into the darkest depths of the human psyche.
90% of Minus is a descent. With the opening scene setting the tone, we are shown what it takes to bring a man to this point. If I had any complaints with the book, it is that the 10% that deals with the ‘back up’ part of life speeds by in the last two chapters. We get heavily invested in the main characters’ struggles and, naturally, would love to experience the ups with him as well. Unfortunately, we don’t really get to, we hear about them, but we don’t get to celebrate them.
Do yourself a favor and climb aboard the Robert Chandler express. I’m convinced that it won’t be long before he is a household name and the author of many mind-expanding books. You won’t believe every word of this book but it will leave you with enough ‘what-if’ moments to make it seem very plausible indeed.