The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck

""Death is a long series of disappointments,"" reflects the protagonist in this airless meta-noir debut. The first disappointment is that death smells like ""withered flowers doused in gasoline"" and the second is that death may not be real. Someone seems to be dead, though, and it's probably Savior Neck. In the crumbling mill town of Discord, N.Y., the dead (or not dead) Neck is arrested, keeps getting knocked out or poisoned and apparently changes size from time to time. He encounters a host of punnishly named characters like Fred Herring, Grace X. Machina and Harold Esquire, Esq., all of whom are wrapped up in a warped noir thriller. The novel walks an unsteady line between fantasy and reality, while also veering erratically in perspective from first to second to third person. Like Carter Scholz or George Saunders, TeBordo mines absurdist territory, but murky writing (""an overcast sky rested atop the building"") and metaliterary babble (""Savior Neck was dreaming a little dream of me. Well, I was there. But then, so was everyone else, everyone else who was in on it"") exhaust the reader's patience, and possibly that of the characters as well. As the narrator puts it, ""I'm so tired of this that I can hardly manage the poetry; I can hardly bring myself to pretend to care while pretending not to care.""