Steven Sherrill: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

You've never heard of this book. Neither had I, until I saw it on my editor's desk. But the instant I read its title - easily the most intriguing of the year - I had to pick it up and look it over. Putting it down again proved impossible.

The Minotaur, contrary to legend, did not die in the labyrinth of Crete. For 5000 years he's wandered the world, immortal, lonely, and increasingly baffled by the changes in human society. Today he works as a line chef for Grub's Ribs, deep in the American South. His co-workers call him M, and take no great interest in him. Just one more freak with a history, trying to get by.

Melancholy social realist fiction does not, on the whole, tend to focus on the likes of a 5000-year-old misfit with a bull's head. Nor does magic realist fiction generally lend itself to quiet, painful reflection on the lives of ordinary folk trying to survive their own inadequacies. Somehow Steven Sherrill - American, never written a novel before, and now you know as much as I do - manages to fuse the two.

Actually, "manages" was the wrong word to use there, because it suggests strain, and Sherrill writes like a god. Every page of this book is alive with the kind of easy clarity most writers can't achieve at their rare, inspired best. As unlikely as the Minotaur's clumsy fumblings towards human intimacy are, it won't occur to you to find them incredible or absurd, because anything Sherrill describes, whether mythical or mundane, immediately takes up residency in your brain as though you'd seen it happen yourself.

This is a sad book, and though it's also a funny one, the humour is intensely cringe-inducing. You won't put it down with a merry smile on your lips. It's a richly intelligent meditation on loneliness and alienation. It's one of my books of the year.

Canongate, $34.95