“The town turned out to be a movie set.” “The town turned out to be a movie set.” This sentence from Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! typifies the game-playing that enlivens Mark Binelli’s funny and intelligent first novel. He treats movie scenarios as real life and historical events as slapstick. (Surely you remember Sacco and Vanzetti, those rivals of Abbott and Costello, and their antic films, especially A Couple of Wops in a Jam and that art-house favorite, Ventriloquism and Its Discontents.) Binelli opens the novel with a quirky overview of the 1920s trial and execution of the real Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants charged with robbery and murder. “A couple of wops in a jam” was an observer’s comment on the trial. Both defendants were anarchists, but anti-immigrant bias rather than evidence propelled the trial. “The following,” Binelli adds, “is not their story.” Instead, he has metamorphosed the pair into clowning actors. At first, as Binelli recently told the Review of Contemporary Fiction, he simply thought that “Sacco and Vanzetti” sounded like a comic duo. “I took cartoonish movie characters and tried to make them somewhat more ‘real,’ but neglected to remove them from their cartoonish movie scenarios.” The idea led him to many links between anarchy and comedy, from commedia dell’ arte to vaudeville and early films. He explores, for example, the way that so many early farces pit downtrodden nonentities against the official establishment, and how the heroes disrupt drawing rooms as well as police stations. The novel is also an irreverent look at ethnicity and assimilation. Scorning the cartoon accent affected by Chico Marx, Binelli’s Sacco and Vanzetti refuse to speak in dialect. Binelli has cited ethnicity-conscious performers such as Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Ali G as inspirations for his take on his own Italian-American background. In the novel he describes Vanzetti in Allen terms: “He considered himself a nihilist, more or less assuming things would remain mired at a comparable level of bad until the sun exploded, at which point they would be slightly worse.” Melancholy, distant from humanity, Vanzetti reads fat tomes and second-guesses his and his partner’s every move. “The sentimental existentialist,” Sacco calls him. Sacco, in contrast, remains in touch with his inner brat. Fat and homely, he womanizes and gourmandizes and pulls tablecloths out from under dishes. Rudeness is his art form, and he seldom forgets to practice. Naturally Vanzetti analyzes his partner in turn: “I’ve considered that I may have latched myself to the likes of Nic to live out a vicarious anarchy, and perhaps goad it along as well.” He admires Sacco’s “ability to enter a crowded pie-shop and see nothing but possibility.” Appropriately, Binelli’s own style is free to the point of lawless. In response to a feeble joke, the duo’s manager chuckles “at a volume equaling but not exceeding 10 percent of a genuine chuckle.” When a debutante hiccups in public, she blushes and looks “like a small, downy creature startled by predators.” Categories of scream include “A man being nailed to a crossbeam. A roomful of schoolchildren being denied cake.” Both comedians constantly analyze humor, weighing how much is just right and at what point it goes over the top. “Sometimes,” observes our narrator, “the most obvious joke also happens to be the most appropriate.” Appropriately, Binelli’s own style is free to the point of lawless. In response to a feeble joke, the duo’s manager chuckles “at a volume equaling but not exceeding 10 percent of a genuine chuckle.” When a debutante hiccups in public, she blushes and looks “like a small, downy creature startled by predators.” Categories of scream include “A man being nailed to a crossbeam. A roomful of schoolchildren being denied cake.” Both comedians constantly analyze humor, weighing how much is just right and at what point it goes over the top. “Sometimes,” observes our narrator, “the most obvious joke also happens to be the most appropriate.” In his day job, Binelli writes features for Rolling Stone. His first venture into fiction is a montage—narrative, film reviews, transcripts, diary entries, footnotes, interview excerpts, the occasional photograph and encyclopedia entries (complete with spurious Pauline Kael quotations). Historical figures include the Marx Brothers, Ezra Pound, Fatty Arbuckle. We visit the 1933 World’s Fair and the funeral of Rudolph Valentino. We glimpse Keaton and Chaplin, and there are allusions to Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy. A jealous and egomaniacal Bob Hope shows up on, of course, a USO tour. The sentence quoted at the beginning of this review opens a wonderful scene in which actors from various movies-in-progress gather for a panoramic photograph. As the camera slowly pans, many pose and then race behind the crowd to reappear down the line. In the photo there is a haunting detail: “Boys goofed around a few boys down from themselves, linked only by a smudge of warped air.” The sad, lyrical tone of this comic novel remains with you long after you stop laughing.
