Brian Lindenmuth reviews: Kockroach by Tyler Knox
It is the mid-1950s, and in a fleabag hotel off Times Square, Kockroach, perfectly content with life as an insect, awakens to discover that somehow he’s become, of all things, a human. Step by step, he learns the ways of humans—how to walk, how to talk, how to wear a jaunty brown fedora.
Kockroach, navigates through the bizarre human realms of crime, business, politics, and sex, he meets with both great triumph and great disaster. Will he find success or be squashed flat from above? Will he change humanity, or will humanity change him?
In some ways Kockroach is a success and in others not quite. The first part offers a great version of Times Square and New York in the 50’s where junkies, gangsters and prostitutes eat in the same diner as the early members of The Beat Generation. It’s told in idealized broad strokes but they are efficient at painting, and affirming a certain pre-Giuliani mental image that probably never really existed. But it’s a hell of a ride and a lot of fun.
Kockroach is a problematic book though and part of this lies on the shoulders of Mite, one of the main characters and the conduit through which we read the story.
Through the character of Mite Kockroach cant decide if it wants to be a gangster pulp parody or if it wants to play it straight and as a result it never really attains either. Mite’s character reads, at times, like a pale amalgamation of so many pulp characters; on the surface all of the words, slang and rhythms are there but it’s laid on so thick that it really just approaches caricature. When this becomes really noticeable is when the time frame of the story shifts from the 50’s to the 60’s and Mite’s speech characteristics don’t change as well, this lack of change speaks to the inability of Mite to progress as a character and the basic two dimensionality of the other characters.
Harder to quantify though is what bugs (intended) me the most about this book. A story about a cockroach that turns into a man is, at its heart, a weird premise and the final product stopped being weird very early on. It should have been, and could have been, weird, odd, maybe a bit horrific but instead it’s a little on the sterile side.