THE MELANCHOLY STRUMPET MASTER - Zeb Beck

 Gilmore (Gil) Crowell is working on his doctoral thesis - and has been for perhaps a bit too long.  He's doing an anthropological study of the prostitutes of Tijuana.  He pays them for their time and then only talks with them, asking questions and recording their responses. To earn money to pay for these interviews, Gil teaches English in a jail. The income does not equal the expenses and Gil struggles to keep up. But at the same time, he is almost addicted to his visits with the streetwalkers down south despite never taking advantage of their professional services.

In looking for another method to pay for his visits, Gil builds the workers a website (or, rather, has one built for them since he has no computer skills himself) but the idea is met with much resistance from the girls to whom he offers the chance to 'advertise'.

But things go south (metaphorically speaking) for Gil. First with his job when he's fired, then with his dissertation as his one and only supporter leaves, and then with his apartment as his landlord kicks him out. And he has fallen in love with one of his subjects.  Coming of age gets harder to do the older you are when it happens. Fortunately for Gil, good things do sometimes happen to good people.

Author Zeb Beck has written a wry and (to use his own term) melancholic comedy. Nothing here will make you laugh out loud. In fact you're more likely to agree with those around Gil and think he deserves whatever he gets.  Not because he's a jerk or in anyway bad - on the contrary, Beck goes out of his way to make sure we understand that Gil is a good guy.  But he really lacks drive or ambition.

Because of this, I really went back and forth on my feelings for our protagonist.  I didn't dislike him, but I really wanted him to take some responsibility for SOMEthing in his life.  He is really obsessed with talking with the prostitutes in Tijuana and we never really learn why that it is. We do, however, see that they have more drive and ambition than he.

SPOILER ALERT ... things do fall in place for Gil at the very end, and while an argument could be made that it comes about because of action he took (action that I would argue is pretty unrealistic but in line with this sort of comedy), he still hasn't really stepped up to be responsible for anything and has simply gotten lucky. Is it lucky that there's interest in his dissertation?  I think so, especially given that we really don't know much about it other than the very general subject.

I will note that I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would once I had the book in hand.  I'm not a fan of the cover art (knowing nothing about the author or the story, seeing this on a shelf would not have gotten me to pick it up to check it out) and I think the word 'melancholy' in the title might make it a hard sell.  Who wants to spend time with someone who's 'melancholy'?

This is a hard book to classify, and while I wouldn't put Beck in the same category as these authors, you could think of fiction like A Confederacy of Dunces, Slaughterhouse 5, or Catch-22 but a little less ambitious.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher, through LibraryThing, in exchange for an honest review.

3-1/2 stars

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The Melancholy Strumpet Master

author: Zeb Beck

publisher: Broadly Reviled Books

ISBN: 9798378201969

paperback, 273 pages