Like Any Other Monday (2014)

Last fall, I went to the annual Buster Keaton convention in Muskegon, Michigan, ‘cause I’m cool like that.  One of the presenters among the assembled Keatonians was Canadian author Binnie Brennan, who told about the process of writing a novel inspired by Buster’s life.

Like Any Other Monday follows “Boffo” Billy Pascoe, the stone-faced star of his family’s long-running vaudeville act.  Though we open on Billy’s first experience onstage as a small boy, the story really starts much later, when Billy is 21.  His father’s drinking forces the act to dissolve, and Billy, eager to provide for the family, finds himself working up a new routine with a new partner.  Lucinda Hart is another young performer from a family act; until recently, she sang and danced with her sister Norma, but Norma has been sidelined by a pregnancy and Lucinda still has to earn a living.  Their sensibilities are pretty disparate – Billy is, of course, an athletic slapstick virtuoso, while Lucinda dances ballet and sings like an angel – but together, they work up a routine that fuses their different styles together in an arresting way.  As the pair takes vaudeville by storm, they grow slowly but inexorably close during their time on the road.

The meat of the story, Billy’s working/personal relationship with Lucinda, is an invention, but Billy is unquestionably Buster.  Some details are lifted directly from Buster’s life (Billy’s parents are named Joe and Myra,) and others are barely disguised (the family summers at the Actors’ Colony in Muskoka instead of Muskegon.)  Important bits of Buster mythology, from his first stage appearance to his first day at Fatty Arbuckle’s studio, are intact pretty much exactly as the stories go.  The set-up is also true; Buster and Myra broke up the Three Keatons largely due to Joe’s drinking.  Essentially, Brennan has found a tiny, unoccupied fragment of Buster’s life, the few months between the end of his vaudeville career and the start of his Hollywood career, and created a fictional enterprise for her Buster avatar to partake in during this interim.

I’d say that fictional enterprise is fairly good.  I like the idea of the clown and the songbird, the unlikely vaudeville pairing.  It’s cool to watch them work:  how Billy weaves ideas for comedy out of everything around him, how he improvises around any and every roadblock, and how Lucinda learns by degrees to play his straight woman.  Brennan’s descriptions of Billy’s tumbling could have only come from someone who really values the way Buster did it, although I think that, by and large, the actual gags Billy invents aren’t as impeccable as Buster’s (to be fair, that’s a tall order, and a book has the added disadvantage of being non-visual.)  Similarly, I like the depiction of vaudeville life in general, the nomadic existence that revolves around the unparalleled sensation of stepping onstage two or three times a day.  Brennan paints a vivid picture of the excitement, the uncertainty, the struggles, and the successes of this unique lifestyle. 

My only major complaint about the book is that I find it a little too dramatic.  Brennan’s prose is lovely and well-written, but it doesn’t really feel Buster.  Reading My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Buster Keaton Remembered, and Bluffton, I had so many laugh-out-loud moments over Buster’s crazy experiences, sly retorts, and just-plain-audacious stunts.  Not that these books have no serious moments – they do, as did Buster’s life, significant stretches of it – but the prevailing impression is always comedy, and I don’t get that here.  Despite the comic routines and some funny dialogue, the bent of this novel is different, and as such, while I enjoy it, reading it doesn’t give me the same feelings that watching Buster’s work does.