Beef Ham, a Case of Merlot, and the Levity to Get Through a Crisis (or not): A Review of Mike Nagel’s DUPLEX
Reviewed by Alex Gurtis
Life during the height of the pandemic felt soul-crushing with a tinge of terrifying and the simultaneous mundanity of drying paint. As the pandemic drags on, many of us are still trying to wrap our heads around what the hell the past few years have been. Mike Nagel’s DUPLEX is a brilliant CNF novella that intersperses photos of the namesake duplex with moments of levity and reflection as the speaker navigates their thirties, the pandemic years, and the end of the world in the most honest and, at times, humorous way fitting for the circumstance. To quote Nagel, “‘I think sanity is the most profound moral option of our time,’ Renata Adler says. But that was fifty years ago. Fifty years ago and counting.”
In writing a pandemic book without chapters, Nagel successfully links the pandemic’s removal of life milestones to a work without checkpoints for the reader to look forward to. However, do not mistake this for narrative weakness or lack of focus. Nagel’s storytelling is gripping and hard to put down. Look no further than the way Nagel uses the intro to DUPLEX to set the mood of the book. “The story goes that my family was once future heirs to the Jack in the Box empire. At the last minute my grandfather backed out of the deal and now I drive a used Nissan Sentra. I have no idea if this story is true, but it has always defined my life in reverse. I am living this life instead of that one.” Offering more than just a way to set the book’s tone, this intro leads the reader down a rabbit hole of moments that often offer levity in a time of endless tragedy and poor mental health.
DUPLEX is a memoir that acts as a character study of life during a modern period of extreme upheaval. It is a memoir that serves as a character study in relatively bad coping mechanisms as the speaker and his wife “pass the bottle back and forth. It sloshes around. There’s something making scratchy sounds above us. Look for a way in, I guess. Or maybe looking for a way out. We choose not to hear it. It’s easy. We’ve been choosing not to hear things in this place for two and half years. Hearing things is optional.” Yet, it's also some of the most relatable content in the book. Who hasn’t been coping poorly since at least 2020 if not 2016?
The speaker’s voice is a breath of fresh air echoing the sentiment a lot of millennials pushed around the internet during the darkest pandemic days. Actually, who am I kidding, this dark sense of humor permeates a generation born into decline, suffering from an acute case of market crashes, climate change, and war. In one section the speaker tells us, “One New Year’s Day the Marines announce they will be issuing silencers to troops around the world. The wars will continue but they’re going to try to keep it down. I’m at the grocery store buying more wine. I need more wine for a thing I'm doing later. The thing I’m doing later is drinking more wine. I put six bottles of Yellowtail Merlot onto the checkout conveyor belt and they wobble their way toward the lady. $5 a bottle. 12.5% alcohol by volume, same as me.”
DUPLEX takes place in the Dallas metro starting before the pandemic and follows the speaker through the tragic Texas freeze and the beginning of 2021. While the book refrains from chapters, it does offer different photos of the titular duplex for the reader to explore in conversation with the next phase of the book. It is not until the speaker reaches the Texas freeze that we start to feel the wheels grip the tarmac and you know that the time spent in the duplex is coming to an end. It is not quite a seamless transition, nor should it be. Nagel provides a tinge of friction particularly around the Texas freeze that echoes the crumpling duplex our speaker resides in, signaling that the pandemic is starting to give way to the other hellscapes the reader has ignored up until this point.
Early on the speaker introduces us to the recurring “BEEF HAM, an animal I can only assume has gone extinct,” which serves a metaphorical commentary on the absurdity of the suburbs and the often romanticized 1950s. Although there are numerous references to Dallas, the novella’s sense of place is rooted in absurdity and recurring motifs of Beef Ham, squirrels, and alcohol. It’s a sort of cacophony of the damned that leads to collapsed roofs and veins of vodka pumping through the heart in Dallas suburbia. When the speaker notes “All the sad parts of this book are true,” readers looking for a book that humorously captures the past few years will no doubt relate.
Maryland born but Florida bred, Alex Gurtis is a poet and book reviewer based in Orlando. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Eunoia Review, W&S Quarterly, Rejection Letters, and others. A Ruth Weiss Foundation 2022 Maverick Poet Award Finalist and a winner of Saw Palm’s 2022 Florida Flora & Fauna Poetry Contest, Alex is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida. Find him on Twitter @alexgurtis and online at https://alexgurtis.squarespace.com.
Mike Nagel's essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. His essay "Beached Whales" was a Best American Essays 2017 Notable Essay. His first book, DUPLEX, is available now from Autofocus Books. Find him here: michaelscottnagel.com.
