Mr. Breakfast by Jonathan Carroll

First published in translation in Poland in 2019; published by Melville House on January 17, 2023

Mr. Breakfast is constructed from fantasy elements that are popular in modern romcom plots. I’m not typically a fan of those elements (how many variations of Groundhog Day does the world really need?), although I make obvious exceptions. Dickens used similar elements — motivating choice by providing access to alternative lives — in A Christmas Carol. Who doesn’t love Scrooge learning the truth about himself by gaining a new perspective?

Graham Patterson learns the truth (or possible truths) about himself from a tattoo that only a select few share. Graham is a struggling comedian who rejected a friend’s advice to take an edgier, more daring approach to comedy. His girlfriend, Ruth, left him, in part because his career and life were going nowhere, in larger part because he did not want children.

Graham decides that he will never make it as a comedian. He buys a Mustang and drives from the east coast to the west, where he expects to make a conventional life, perhaps working for his brother. He buys a camera so he can take some pictures along the way. One of the pictures is of an abandoned diner in Nevada called Mr. Breakfast. Graham will become a celebrated photographer unless he decides to reject the track his life is on.

Graham’s car breaks down in North Carolina, where he enters a tattoo parlor and impulsively chooses a “breakfast tattoo.” The tattoo comes with a lot of rules, but the short version is that it will allow him to visit two other lives that he is apparently living in parallel realities. He samples them and learns that in one he is a successful comedian who took his friend’s advice about edgy jokes. In the other he married Ruth. He has the opportunity to choose among the three lives. After making the choice, the tattoo will disappear. If he makes no choice, all the lives will merge and the result won’t be fun.

Other characters with the tattoo (including Anna Mae, the tattoo artist) demonstrate the possible outcomes of varying choices. For example, one learns something in a future life that allows him to succeed in his original life. One decides to embrace the pain of her current life rather than escaping into a different one because “sometimes you’ve got to be lost to find yourself again.” All the tattooed lives intersect with Graham’s at different points.

As if the premise doesn’t provide enough fantasy, more mystical events occur as the story progresses. A blind girl and a dead friend tell Graham about other rules associated with his tattoo. Only certain people can see certain pictures Graham has taken; everyone else sees a blank page. A significant turtle and an extinct but very nasty bird make unlikely appearances in Graham’s lives. Graham and another tattooed character learn something about the afterlife. Believe me, you shouldn’t be in a hurry to get there.

I struggled to find a coherent point to the conflicting messages that the story seems to send. Anna Mae suggests that by trying on alternative lives, people can choose the one that best suits them, but then must do their best to make the life work. Doing so puts positive energy into the universe. But if the choice turns out to be wrong, you might get hit by a train, so what good does the positive energy do? Maybe your energy helps other people. Maybe getting hit by a train is the tradeoff for living your best life. Maybe the point is that making a choice, even the wrong choice, is better than making no choice. Maybe the novel’s point is that the best choice, with or without a tattoo, is to live an unselfish life, although another character does well by focusing on self-interest. That’s a lot of maybes in a book that often seems to be moving in circles.

In an alternate life, Ruth makes the argument that whether it is good or bad, nobody deserves the life they have. Life is what it is. Lives are determined by the choices you make but also by health, the circumstances into which you are born, and other factors over which we have no control. Graham thinks about a girl herding cattle in Africa who has the intelligence to be a groundbreaking medical researcher but will never be given the education needed to make that choice possible. He thinks about the difference between a special life (defined by fame and accomplishment) and a peaceful one (defined by love, family, and an unchallenging job that pays the bills). Graham does a lot of thinking but the choice he makes is ultimately based on the need to respond to a crisis, not by calm meditation on which of two lives will fit him the best. Maybe the point is that we shouldn’t think so much.

The story could also be viewed as teaching a “the grass is always greener” lesson. Graham’s alternative lives have their merits, but they also have the pain that is part of life. Maybe the point is that we should be content with making the most of life even if that means enduring pain and hardship (although if I’m a wealthy sultan with a harem in one of my possible lives, I’m jumping to that one).

None of the potential lessons are particularly original. Nor is “visit alternative lives and see how they might turn out” an original plot device. Still, Jonathan Carroll assembles strong characters to tell a muddled but entertaining story. Make of it what you will. I recommend it simply because I enjoyed reading it, not because I regard it as profound.

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Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll

Published by St. Martin's Press on October 21, 2014

I didn't know what kind of book Bathing the Lion was before I started reading it. A quarter of the way in, I still didn't know, but that's a good thing. By the midway point I understood that Bathing the Lion is sort of a comedic science fiction novel with some elements of fantasy that makes some serious points about reality.

Much of Bathing the Lion is about the vagaries of memory, its unreliability, its tendency to reshape reality into something more pleasant. Bathing the Lion is also about transformative experiences and the impossibility of predicting what -- a book, a song, a person, an idea, a place -- will transform us. But by the end Bathing the Lion proves to be about humanity, about the qualities that make us human.

Dean and Vanessa Corbin are married, although they do not like each other much. Kaspar Benn, Dean's friend and business partner, who may or may not be having an affair with Vanessa, agrees that Vanessa is an unlikable drama queen. But she may also be a gifted lounge singer (and diva wannabe) who may or may not have saved Jane Claudius' bar from going under.

What begins as an ordinary domestic drama takes an odd twist when a little girl named Josephine tells Kaspar "everything happens today." She encourages Kaspar to find William Edmonds, a recent widower. Edmonds has been lamenting his inability to recall more details of his happy life with his wife, but (according to Josephine) the true nature of Edmonds' life has been hidden from him. Yet Edmonds isn't the only character whose true nature is concealed from the reader in the novel's first half.

Separating what is real from what isn't is part of the reader's challenge as the story moves forward. It is even more of a challenge for the characters as they encounter chaos, a force in the universe that seems unstoppable -- unless they can find a way to stop it.

Many people believe that they benefit from divine guidance. Bathing the Lion imagines that we receive interventions rather than guidance and that the interveners (who view Earth as something of a backwater) are less than divine. They're more like cosmic technicians -- they are, in fact, called mechanics -- although some behave less professionally than they should.

I won't reveal anything else about the surprising plot. It gains steady momentum as it moves along and eventually proves to be absorbing, even if I had the sense that Jonathan Carroll was making it up as he went along with no overarching plan to guide the narrative. I have often thought that every work of fiction is made better by the inclusion of a dog; the two dogs in Bathing the Lion contribute additional humor.

Molecules of wisdom float through the story, waiting to be absorbed, as do its humor molecules. The capacity for wisdom and humor are part of the human experience (the novel reminds us), as are generosity, hope, fear, sadness, and all the mortal emotions that blend within us. The cacophony of human experience seems chaotic but Jonathan Carroll argues that it produces a harmonious whole that keeps chaos at bay. Bathing the Lion is itself a surprising blend of literary qualities.

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