Review: Dancer on the Ceiling by Mark Nutter

A gleefully bizarre collection of stories, Dancer on the Ceiling: More Darkly Humorous Tales by Mark Nutter is an unforgettable work of absurdist fiction that will have you scratching your head and laughing in equal measure. Abandoning the normal boundaries of narrative structure, character consistency, or reality itself, this is tongue-in-cheek writing at its best.

There are stories of divinely gifted carpet artists, a massage master who can coax life back into a severed limb, a casino fat cat who markets to children, and a size-obsessed billboard baron, just to name a few of the oddities scattered in Nutter’s strange array of storytelling. Many of these tales start off normally enough, but soon sink into a surreal style, like Kurt Vonnegut with a bit of Dr. Seuss thrown in for good measure.

Some stories have a clear allegorical bent, while others remain mysteriously hung off a cliff, like the fate of Uncle Sid and Bernard as they shrink into the quantum realm. One of the most charmingly odd pieces is “Love’s Sweet Song Under the Table,” in which a man who spends his life beneath tables at an Italian restaurant falls for the perfect pair of knees. It is the nearly Dadaist nature of these entertaining tales that pulls you forward to the next page, as you can never know what to expect around the corner.

Quick with an eyebrow-raising turn of phrase, the plots of these wild tales may vary wildly, but there is a signature wit and puckish glee that infuses much of the prose. There is a range of societal commentary woven in as well, some heavyhanded and political, with other tales merely tossing a casual dig at modern foibles and contemporary failures. Weaving these jabs and jokes into the messy tangle of surrealist writing makes them occasionally feel like esoteric Easter egg hunts, where you need to dig for the deeper meaning among the punchlines.

At times, Nutter pushes a linguistic moment too far, or forces a surreal stretch of the imagination in an otherwise rational scene. There are also passages that are nearly too awkward to imagine, such as a woman repeatedly allowing her partner to patronizingly spit coffee in her face. The family vacation to an island filled with poo-hurling primates is another hard story to stomach, although there are some revolutionary undertones near the end that make the grotesque exposition worthwhile. A final editing sweep might flesh out some of the more abrupt moments that feel like cut corners, rather than jump cuts in Nutter’s cinematic vision, as well as catch the occasional missed letter or preposition.

While some of the stories run off the rails too far, that is also part of the pleasure and uncertain footing of this oddball collection. The execution of these stories can feel slapped together with a comedic sledgehammer, but that is precisely the point, so criticizing the book on its haphazard nature seems superfluous. Some of the stories may land harder than others, but overall this is a highly entertaining collection, which is marked by madness bordering on the profound.