Catchin' the Drift O' the Draft

When you enter L.D. Brodsky’s Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, you find yourself in the surreal world of a master satirist. Imagine staring into a mirror and recognizing your reflection as that of a chimpanzee, before you swing to work on a vine, or consider the possibility that you and your spouse are the newest additions to the ape house at the zoo, where your every move is being scrutinized. Prepare yourself for Brodsky’s auto-factory-assembly-line worker from south St. Louis, who takes the stage in six pieces that set up a chronological continuity around which the other fictions swirl. His humor is boisterous, whimsical, condemnatory, at times even self-deprecating, his language a study in fractured English that nonetheless debunks conventional wisdom and political correctness, exposing the cant and hypocrisy of 1990s America. These fast-paced fictions, about persons bedeviled by phobias and physical afflictions arising from the realities of old age, racism, and too-rapid change, are pieces of life that examine the world and revel in its absurdities. If Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka, and Richard Brautigan could collaborate, the result might be Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, a highly original, satirical, and altogether entertaining collection of forty-one short short fictions. Delight in them.