The Land of Laughs and Other Fictions

The Land of Laughs is a Thing in flux. It is a text-based retirement community for the heroes and bad guys of a Technicolor childhood. It is Calvinism in an afternoon juice box.  It is a glossy brochure of fear and obsession in Anywhere, America. It is a children’s book masticated and digested by lurching Cynicism in a trench coat. It is the buffer zone between desire and manifestation. Mostly, it is a reminder that reality in the hands of intention is totally malleable – we write our own stories as we go.

Obsession marks the connubial common ground Thomas Abbey and Saxony Gardner find themselves on. She: marionettes; he: indigenous masks. Both: the books of Marshall France, children’s books author, Jewish refugee in flight from the 20^th century’s land of monsters, across-the-board dog-hater, and former recluse (now dead and ever-dying). It is Marshall France that brings the two together and Marshall France that caravans them to Galen, Missouri, where France spent the last half of his life.

On leave from the New England school where he teaches English and in flight from a childhood in the shadows of a famous father, Thomas commits to doing a biography of the little-known children’s author. Saxony accompanies him in the capacity of research assistant, but their professional relationship quickly disintegrates into a mess of sex, resentment, and, of course, their mutual obsession with France. Things between them are further strained by the seductive and weird Anna France, Marshall France’s daughter and the single greatest barrier between Thomas and the end of his book.

As he and Saxony explore the town of Galen and its inhabitants, strange disturbances interrupt the otherwise syrupy flow of small town life. A child is hit by a car, but he isn’t laughing the moment before like he is supposed to. A man dies by electrocution almost fifty years before he was supposed to die by natural causes. And what’s with the cult of bull terriers that have taken up residence in Galen? Hints and suspicions scaffold narrative skeleton and there the pinking flesh: a shadow thread runs from the puckered bellybutton of France’s writings to the hidden navel of the town. Thomas Abbey is the tightrope walker that traverses it, guided by France’s books and his mysterious forty-odd volumes of the Galen Journals.

This novel is all about the magic of our own fictions. Thomas Abbey writes Marshall France. Marshall France writes the clowns and saints of cosmic Anywhere, America. And in closing with the possibility of Thomas writing his father’s biography, he finds the chance to finally rewrite his own childhood. I am left wondering at my participation in the writing of The Land of Laughs through my particular interpretations and visualizations. I am left wondering at the moments of my own life as they bloom pregnant fruit from the personal fictions that clutter my bookshelves and brain tissue.