Review by meganeuridae - The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

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meganeuridae 's review for:

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

3.5

challenging emotional reflective

man! i really wanted to like this more than i did. weird, ponderous mundane journey through the daily life of The Minotaur – having survived theseus and the labyrinth – sounds so incredibly up my alley it’s insane. it was more uncomfortable than i expected, though, in good ways and bad. it made my skin crawl. it made me think about my own place in the world as an outsider and a person and a man; it made me think about my own voyeuristic tendencies – to watch my life as it passes me by unnoticed. it made me reckon with my reactive disgust. but it also just describes every woman in the most objectifying manner possible.

the good first: i really enjoyed the prose. the writer is completely taken with the small & mundane and describes every situation so lovingly and vividly. detail is ever-present and rarely unnecessary. has some first-novel awkwardness at times but nothing you can't look past. M as a character resonates with me in so many ways. lonely, awkward, inadequate, embarrassed, inappropriate – i have been him and will probably be for many more times in my comparatively short life. it made me feel queasy; a strange mixture of empathy and second-hand embarrassment, anger and shame. i understand the complaint some people have of this being too slow and slice of life-y but i loved the mundanity; both as a contrast to M but also how he slotted into it. the restaurant scenes – when something didn’t go horribly wrong – were my favorite in this.

onto stuff i didn't like, though; as much as i did enjoy the slice of life tone & pace, the consequences are that plot points frequently get left by the wayside, and near the end the attempt made to bring all of themes of the novel together feels rushed and sloppy. i really hated the ending of this book. it is absolutely emblematic of everything i disliked in it. as i mentioned before it has a real problem with the way it describes women – if a woman is introduced, you'd best believe it's paired with a description of her boobs, ass, or both. it would feel strange regardless, but since this book has so much to say about how hegemonic masculinity harms the outsider doubly so. i guess it doesn't have much to say about how it harms the women affected by it. the one female character with any sort of depth – and that’s saying something for how shallow she feels – is kelly, the minotaur's pseudo-love interest. there is a fragment of something interesting in their relationship, the way the book wants to parallel their experiences, but the time given to it and her is so short it feels like we end the book knowing next to nothing about her. and when it does get to the ending – where M and her have sex, interrupted by a seizure on her part, M just leaves her there; takes all of her life savings (!) and goes with no explanation on his part. the worst of it all is that she forgives him. they've been co-workers for a couple of months at best, started getting to know each other a few weeks ago – it would take a LOT of character work to convince me anyone would forgive the minotaur for this, that M himself would do something do drastic. it feels like the author wanted to write a climatic and eventful ending to a book that, frankly, did not need one.

ultimately; would i recommend this? not really. there's a lot of parts i really enjoyed and i don’t regret reading it, but the ending soured me on it.

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