Mark Wisniewski

Holy kee-RAP, but this is a good book! I mean, holy sh-, oops, I don't think Amazon allows that word, ubiquitous though it may be in everyday speech. I mean, I LOVED this book.

But why? Why did I like it so much? That is the question. Because it seems so unlikely to be a successful story. Author Mark Wisniewski is obviously this white Polish-American guy, one who can write "like nobody's business," as my dad used to say. But WATCH ME GO has two main characters that are so unlike him, and so show more unlike what his own personal experience must have been, that it's just difficult to quite figure out how it all WORKS so damn well.

The two main characters here - both narrators, as the PoV shifts back and forth in alternating chapters - are Douglas "Deesh" Sharp, an African-American inner-city Bronx guy, mid-thirties, stuck in dead-end scut work jobs; and Jan Price, early 20s, child of a dead jockey, who returns to the Upstate Finger Lakes region with her mother to revisit the Corcorans, a horse-racing - and gambling - family who'd been friends of Jan's parents before she was born. So you see what I mean - I hope. Somehow Wisniewski manages to get inside the heads of an inner-city black guy and a young horse-loving woman from Arkansas, brought back to the Upstate horse country where she was conceived, and where her father died before she was born. And I say "inside the heads" because their stories are told as mostly interior monologues, with a little dialogue thrown in here and there. And, despite the fact that everything is presented in perfectly standard English, with no attempt to duplicate inner city black street dialect or Southern chick talk, it WORKS.

There is murder in the plot - three of them, in fact. There is much about the pull of gambling addictions and family relationships. There are bits of basketball, brotherhood and betrayal, from Deesh's high school days with Bark and James, two close friends. Race and stereotyping play a part. Love and hate are examined in great detail, often by the most unlikely characters, one of whom explains to Deesh that this country is "just one big old melting pot of hatred. And it just keeps boiling."

In a similar scene, Jan, considering the sickness of gambling, thinks, "Sure, winning felt good, very, very, good, but a victory in a horse race takes very little time, a very small fraction of your life. And then there ends up being the whole rest of your life, where you feel caught in this tangle of beauty and ugliness."

Or on love, Jan, who is falling for Tug, the Corcorans' son, wonders if Tug might ever have himself -

"... wondered why his father and mother had kissed for the first time, touched each other, made love, married, taken vacations, cheered for horses, argued, retired, kissed for the thousandth time, ignored each other, spent days with him, lied to each other, stared at their aging nakedness, bet on strangers' horses, slept."

The stuff of life, of living, in other words. Told in long, looping, often doubt-ridden interior monologues, stream-of-consciousness style, the interwoven stories of Deesh and Jan move inexorably toward a heart-rending intersection and shocking conclusion, like a long-shot come-from-behind finish. The writing here flows so naturally, it looks so easy. So you know it's not.

When I first began reading WATCH ME GO, I thought often of another horse-racing novel I read several years back, Jaimy Gordon's LORD OF MISRULE, which won the National Book Award. I thought too of DRIVE, HE SAID, Jeremy Larner's classic basketball novel from decades ago. But in the end, although Wisniewski's novel shows an intimate knowledge of both horse racing and basketball, its message is more about love and human relationships than those things. It is also one hell of a ride. I'll say it again. I LOVED this book, and cannot recommend it highly enough. In fact, I gotta call this Wisniewski guy, because ... Well, because I'd just like to talk with him. Bravo, Mark - well done!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Short declarative sentences, few wasted words. Mark Wisniewski has obviously read and studied his Hemingway. It shows in the writing style. But that's where the similarities end. Because I can't recall Hemingway ever making me snicker, chuckle, snort, and guffaw the way CONFESSIONS OF A POLISH USED CAR SALESMAN did. Because, yeah, this is a very funny book, filled with deadpan humor, as Wisniewski pokes some gentle fun at the Polish-American community of Milwaukee, a slice of society he show more refers to as the 3Ps - "poor Polish person."

We meet his unnamed narrator first at ages 5 and 6. (Well, we do learn later that his last name is Wirzhbinski, but never do learn his first name.) He never knew his parents. He lives with his 3P grandparents, sleeping on a burlap mat in a sewing closet. There are scenes of Bingo games, scrounging, flea markets, and more. Soon after that he is shuttled off to live with a huge (ten kids) family of 'Indians' (i.e. Native Americans), the oldest of which is probably a convicted killer, back from prison. Jump to age 12, when he apprentices himself to - what else - a used car salesman (and worm farmer on the side). Then to age 17 and beyond, and ... Well, I don't wanna give anything away. How could a story of a poor kid with such awful beginnings be funny? you might ask. Well, trust me, it is. Have you ever heard the expression, "About as funny as a fart at a funeral"? There's one of those in here, and it WAS funny. But there are some hard times for our young narrator too, and those are not so funny. Like the time 'the Indian woman' locks him in the basement without anything to eat. Or when her murderous eldest son attempts to saw off our hero's hand with a dull kitchen knife, causing him to flee at full speed, until he finds himself in downtown Milwaukee where he meets Norb Hike and Liquid Johnny, and begins to learn the tricks of the trade of selling used cars.

The 3P's use an expression - Inna? - as in "... she's got ten kids ... You knew that, inna?" It brought to mind a similar speech tic I enjoyed in Darryl Ponicsan's stories of Hungarian-Americans in Pennsylvania coal country, except instead of 'inna,' they say 'ain't?" Just that, just 'ain't' - nothing follows. You'll find it in most of Ponicsan's books - THE LAST DETAIL; ANDOSHEN, PA; and others, as well as in the hilarious PI stories he penned as Anne Argula.

I enjoyed too the way the car people here referred to mechanically sound used cars as "good runners," a term that puzzled me at first, until I remember all the classified car ads that read "clean, low mileage, runs good." Not 'runs well' - no, it's always 'runs good." Hence, a 'good runner.'

CONFESSIONS OF A POLISH USED CAR SALESMAN has been around for nearly twenty years. I was motivated to read it because not long ago I read Wisniewski's newest book, WATCH ME GO. It's not a humorous book like this one, but it was so damn good that I wanted to read another Wisniewski. I'm glad I picked this one. It's a hoot. I loved it!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Full disclosure: I am a confirmed fan of the fiction of Mark Wisniewski. His two novels, CONFESSIONS OF A POLISH USED CAR SALESMAN and WATCH ME GO, hooked me. And that hasn't changed after reading his 2001 story collection, ALL WEEKEND WITH THE LIGHTS ON. Diverse, funny, crude, disturbing, entertaining, strange, quirky, unconventional, politically incorrect. I'm trying to figure out how to characterize these stories, and all these terms apply. You're never quite sure what to expect from show more Wisniewski's colorful cast of characters. There's the world weary cocksman basketball star at a Catholic college in Texas who agrees to participate in a "blessing for healing" ceremony for a sex-addicted girl friend ("Double Bad"). Or the envelope- stuffer and the lonely grocery checkout clerk who hope to "replace all despair with belief" in "Night Vision." Or the hapless Polish brothers who run a Milwaukee bakery, confronted with a perfidious woman, in "Three-Quarters Stitched." And then there's my personal favorite, "Birdie," about a girls high school basketball team, mostly black, who make it to the Texas state finals behind the sharpshooting skills of the new kid, Birdie, and its unexpected, totally-out-of-left-field ending. The first person narration and dialogue here are pitch perfect, further enhancing the story.

I loved all of these stories. (And, incidentally, it did not escape my attention that they also earned a laudatory cover blurb from Oakley Hall, another favorite writer. ) Well done, Mr Wisniewski. You're still on my "favorite writers" list. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Funny, grotesque, and, finally, fairly frightening. That kinda sums up Mark Wisniewski's 2011 novel SHOW UP, LOOK GOOD, with its tough and diminutive heroine, thirty-something Michelle, who flees a ruined relationship in Kankakee to try to "make it" in the mean and heartless streets of Manhattan in the year 2001. Some of the characters she meets, in her continuous search for stability and shelter - an old woman who wants a very personal bath from her nightly, a swinger couple from Astoria, a show more group of pretentious, aspiring writers, and Ernest Coolridge, a cancer-disfigured ex-Yankee - made me think of Flannery O'Connor's Southern grotesques. It figures that NYC would have its own. Consider James Leo Herlihy's MIDNIGHT COWBOY, just for starters, which could easily be a not-so-distant ancestor of SU,LG. (And I'm not gonna try to explain the title, as that might constitute something of a spoiler.)

While there's nothing terribly deep or profound here, it is a most enjoyable and thoroughly entertaining read. Highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less