Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

No sooner did I last post a semi-snarky mention of Nick Cave’s second novel than I ended up getting my hands on an advance copy. Busy as I’ve been, I haven’t been able to say anything at all about it until now. Good thing that I got it, as Nick still hasn’t let go of his countercultural roots in any way, shape or form. Despite the 20-year gap in novels, Cave still apparently maintains that if he’s offended one person with Bunny Munro’s escapades, then it’s all been worth it, thank you.

First off, not sure how seriously I’d take the promotional blurbs coming with the book. People like Irvine Welsh and Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield have grown up listening to Cave’s previous bands, the Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, and probably still attach an inordinate amount of teen idol worship to the man’s output. And if you’ve ever seen his execrable remake of The Wicker Man, you’ll know that Neil LaBute probably shares some women issues with Bunny, so I don’t know if he likes this book for the right reasons or what.

But never fear, because Nick has certainly developed an, um, LIVELY character in Bunny Munro, a charming yet callous sex-addicted beauty supplies salesperson. In the first half of the book, he’s talking down his clinically depressed and maritally neglected wife Libby over the phone one minute, and getting head from a sullen prostitute the next. Pretty soon, you see this guy is good, as only a few hours later, he’s also bagged the hotel waitress serving him brunch. Call it a gift.

For all of the garish sexual fantasies Cave concocts, there’s no small degree of moralizing to the book. Munro’s not above dosing his prey with roofies and one moment shows him coming onto a prepubescent girl in a Pizza Hut, and being a parent himself, Cave clearly illustrates the cumulative wages of Bunny’s sins through a mood-reflecting forelock. His mental decline is precipitated by Libby’s suicide early on in the book, and the panic he faces in confronting his young son, Bunny, Jr. Self-aware enough to know the mess he is, he first tries to pawn his precocious, withdrawn namesake to his angry inlaws, who blame Bunny (correctly, it appears) for his wife’s death. When this fails, he decides to take Bunny, Junior under his wing and show him how to be a salesperson, just like his equally screwed-up father before him.

From here, the activity of the book becomes far more cartoonish, with the goofy Bunny getting his ass handed to him by angry boyfriends, getting wasted, and desperately trying to regain his mojo. In the meantime, his son continues to memorize an encyclopedia Libby gives him, and even receives a visitation from her ghost at one point. Cave doesn’t insist that you take him seriously – apparently, he gets a big kick out of talking about the vaginas of Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavinge, and he gets in a few good jabs at Bunny’s expense (My favorite being a moment where Bunny, driving through his hometown of Brighton, England, gets so turned on by the seedy beachfront tableau that he stops to jerk off into an encrusted sock he keeps under his seat for such occasions). But one also feels we’re supposed to be disturbed by all of this, too, and Bunny is far too exaggerated a character to take very seriously. And this is coming from a guy who had a friend who walked into a “To Catch A Predator” sting house a few years back. That guy was a salesman, too, but a person whose real-life struggles with his personal demons were far too easily concealed to compare with Bunny’s phantasmagoric scenario, which suggests some restraint probably would have made for a far more disturbing and revelatory read. final meeting with his father seems somewhat contrived, as if Cave recognized he had to pull him in at some point to give Bunny’s pathology an explanation And what’s with the “All That Jazz” style deathbed vision? Because Bunny, Jr. is almost as inscrutable and incidental to the reader as he is to Bunny, one only feels so engaged in his story or to his ability to break through Bunny’s rampaging narcissism as he apparently does at the end of the book.

Fan of Nick Cave? Definitely read the book, no matter what I say. Hey, if you’re a fan of sexual deviancy, you’ll be entertained for a bit. But just like any old-school punk, Cave still wants to piss off his parents, and it would appear it’s at the expense of more profound storytelling experience.