Still Punk: A Review of Wallop
Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins
Nathaniel Kennon Perkins lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a bookseller and publisher at Trident Press. He is the author of a short story collection, The Way Cities Feel to Us Now (Maudlin House, 2019), a previous novel, Cactus (Trident Press, 2018), and an ongoing literary zine series, Ultimate Gospel. His writing has appeared at TriQuarterly, Noncanon Press, decomP, among other places. In 2014 he was the recipient of the High Country News’s Bell Prize.
To all those grown up punks out there, Nathaniel Kennon Perkins’ work is for you, but almost anyone will enjoy it. His most recent book, Wallop, is forthcoming with House of Vlad Press and might be his most sympathetic book yet. If you can’t personally relate to the unnamed narrator, you likely know someone who can. The novel tells the classic tale of an unexpected pregnancy between two people who don’t want a child and are not responsible enough for one anyway. Perkins’ novel is a realist fairytale version in which a punk goes on a journey under the rain cloud of the impending abortion — a journey that is one part idiotic and one part fantastical.
The book’s narrator is a sweet enough guy, troubled by his conservative start in life and his father’s early death. He is stuck in a state of youthful debauchery even in his early thirties. In his own words, he is “an unfeeling trash boy” who doesn’t know what he’s doing in life, oscillating between apathy and self-loathing despondency each time his inadequacies come to mind. While his girlfriend waits to get an abortion, he proceeds with a previously planned hitch-hiking trip to Kansas City, MO. The whole trip is humorously irresponsible, poorly planned, and an excuse to get very intoxicated.
Perkins’ unique brand of self-deprecating humor reminds me of David Sedaris. He writes, “Instead of going inside to see the second band, Danny and I ate more mushrooms and bought and did half a gram of cocaine and scurried around the yard finishing off half-drunk and abandoned cans of Hamm’s or Natty Light. We were like squirrels gathering spilled peanuts. Little rodents. Scavengers. Prey animals.”
He imagines immaculate conception as “God just plowing into Mary while Joseph sat in the corner and filmed on his iPhone,” and reflects: it was “only slightly more immaculate than the conception I had unwittingly achieved, all sweaty, my hairy ass pumping away, blasting my rotten load into Lauren.”
Earnestly attached to a sense of humanity and desperation, this morose narration is self-aware in a way that impels the reader to laugh along. We are reminded that most of us are flailing. We know we could be more impressive, but struggle to rise above our own existential dread enough to achieve anything dignified. Wallop reflects this while pointing out its own ironic absurdity, never taking itself too seriously with chapter titles like “I Got Drunk,” “I Visited Another Bar,” “Our Dumb Journey Continues,” and “What Happened While We Were Tripping and Drunk and High.”
While contemplating the possibility of having his own child, our narrator compares himself to Pinocchio. He tries to revert back to a youth in which he doesn’t know better than to follow Treasure Island’s alluring indulgences. All the while, he reflects on love, parenthood, goodness, self-worth, and why anyone continues to keep living and breathing at all. Because of Perkins’ unique charm and humorous realism, we giddily go along with our 32-year-old Pinocchio, gung-ho and laughing the entire way.
Leah White is a poet originally from Tempe, Arizona. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado where she teaches creative writing, works on TIMBER, and runs reading series Static Parade.
Issue 10.2