Small-town screwballs and surprises

In a 1925 essay, Freud unearthed an important linguistic truth about the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich). He noticed that it had drifted very close to its apparent antonym heimlich, which starts out as ‘homely’ and can, via ‘private and personal’, become ‘secretive and repressed’. This enabled him to offer the more important psychological insight that things closest to home can be the most disconcerting, that often the familial is really the least familiar.

J. Robert Lennon has written a book of 100 anecdotes — between a couple of paragraphs and a couple of pages long — that chart the unpredictable nature of small-town life in middling America. And his use of the uncanny is, well, canny. He introduces us, very briefly, to such modestly eccentric locals as a woman who spells out the letters of every word instead of saying it, a man who can only cope sanely with human interaction by dressing and acting exactly like his psychiatrist, or

two professors of literature who were good friends until one night, at a party, when they entered into a debate about the proper spelling of a certain word. One argued for ‘grey’, the other for ‘gray’.

The collection as a whole becomes a five-fingered exercise in such virtuoso mediocrity; Lennon’s left-handed pieces strike a constant chord of credulous description to accompany accounts of not credible (but not quite incredible) events. His naturally neutral prose allows him initially to cover a lot of narrative ground by filling his tales with wide-ranging summaries, with what might be termed life sentences: ‘In my second year of high school, along with two other boys, I attempted to drive mad a fourth boy, L., who was the shyest and most awkward of our small group of social outcasts’; ‘Our elderly aunt, long ago widowed, has spent the past ten years touring the world as part of an old ladies’ travel club, despite a chronic social paralysis that prevents her from so much as taking the bus to the grocery store without a companion.’