Psychological Methods to Sell Should Be Destroyed: Stories by Robert Freeman Wexler

“They are genuine artistic gems,” Zoran Živković comments in his introduction to Psychological Methods to Sell Should Be Destroyed: Stories by Robert Freeman Wexler. With a wink and nod for Wexler’s anti-conglomerate marketing themes, Methods’ innovative fiction pushes physical boundaries, speaks to bread, belays jungle walls, listens to disembodied sages, and escapes anti-utopias. If this isn’t enough to satisfy the reader’s cerebral thirst, Wexler throws in a teaser chapter from his upcoming novel, The Painting and the City. With a recurring dose of magic realism, Wexler builds strong settings, complete with clear and active characters.

In “Suspension,” four-armed, 320-pound Quatrain Brauner introduces himself from a bed of snow atop a sidewalk on which he has fallen. Bruised and stunned, he sees the people who pass beside, over, and sometimes on top of him—benign comments, forced ignorance, snickering jibes—and takes them all in stride. He is a four-armed monster man who has accepted his solitary path in life. A seeming Cyrano de Bergerac (except instead of an oversized nose, he has two extra arms with two extra hands that feed his extra hunger, evidenced by his weighty stature) to the others around him, but to the reader, his hunger is something that a hundred hands could never feed. His lack of intimacy is made doubly clear to him, as he has an extraordinary perceptiveness, and he wishes that others might experience the “infinite worlds of sight, smell, and sound [that] lie beneath every surface.”

With his sixth sense, Quatrain “excavates” human relationships from his supine position in the snow. He is the objective archaeologist, pondering the layers of bones beneath the walking masses. In his cold, white bed, he wonders what life might be like if only he were more like everyone else.

A self-perceived loner and drifter, Quatrain symbolizes the conventional misperceptions that so often plague society. Wexler uses this thematic imagery to further “excavate” the “Spawn of Satan,” an almost Jungian image, an impression from which Quatrain seeks release in his hopes for intimacy. Without any true connection to friend or lover, he reflects upon his status quo with a surprising peacefulness. Then the unexpected happens, and the unexpected lingers with the reader and resonates with hope.

“Tales of the Golden Legend” is a collection of yeast-inspired narratives aptly titled in sections: “Prolog: Bread,” “The Bread Dialogs,” “The Sound of Crust,” and “Epilog: Aria.” Beginning with a third-person introduction in “Prolog,” the scene is established with semolina, baguettes, ryes, and a “hawk-faced” girl, henceforth named “Hawk Face.” “The man” enters the shop and buys a loaf of semolina, and the stage is set.

In the next section, “The Bread Dialogs,” the man is given voice, first person, where he describes his relationship with different loaves of bread in between witty exchanges with, you guessed it, bread. He instills the breads with personality:

“White breads are the least interesting, whole grains the most thoughtful. Bagels don’t make much sense. Bread has told me that maybe one out of five million people can understand its language.”

“The Sound of Crust” is told from the bread’s point of view. From creation to digestion, this loaf takes the reader on an edgy ride, a bread’s-eye view, complete with serrated orgasm. This reader will never cut bread the same way again.

Finally, in “Epilog,” Hawk Face rejoins the scene along with various bread voices, and a little girl who seems to understand the bread language enters. Wexler’s narrative, both meaningful and humorous, brings the yeast-bearing culture of bread to life. Creating a cult of bread-ism, Wexler effectively satirizes in near parody the personalities that connect and clash in everyday society. Recommended.

A wandering adventurer, Rex exercises a juxtaposition of hope and futility in “Valley of the Falling Clouds.” Rex is in love with Apple Jane and is driven by the dream of independent sustenance as he seeks to begin life in a valley of his own making, echoing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:

[Rex] considered himself a social being, and found easy friendship wherever he went. Restlessness does not equal a desire for solitude. This valley, then, and his time here, represented a point between an unlocked and unoccupied time

Along a trout rich stream, he builds a straw shack covered in mud, grows vegetables, and makes furniture, all with the plan to bring Apple Jane to his new home as his wife. Foreshadowing arrives in the form of a blind man on a white horse. Rex ignores the blind man’s warning and instead focuses upon his own plan.

Wexler crafts opposite images masterfully to symbolize the true depths an individual will go to retain the shiny lacquer of perception. When Rex must choose between the temptation of the wild and the comforts of civilization, Wexler gives him the depth of character to make the organic choice, to follow the natural path. Characterization, symbolism, and irony all run deep through “Valley of the Falling Clouds,” as man faces nature and society, and finds that in the end, there are more similarities than differences.

Wexler turns an urban brick wall in Little Italy into a three-dimensional adventure for Erickson, the protagonist and art studio peon in “The Green Wall.”

…the wall had become a giant movie screen, displaying a shadowy jungle filled with hidden dangers and undiscovered beauty. Monkeys danced through the foliage. An endless snake flowed down a branch. The projections had to be part of the festival, though, he couldn’t imagine how the jungle had any connection to the patron saint of Naples.

Between the cement grind and his berating, eccentric boss, Erickson fantasizes about a tall woman in a green coat while simultaneously watching with obsessive frequency the green wall—an evident symbol of his longing for nature, his longing for escape. Stagnant and craving reconnection to life, he makes a desperate leap of faith in order to experience that which he does not have.

The false sense of claustrophobia that urbanites can sometimes suffer and their need for shock therapy, punching out of the grind to experience the wide world of trees, grass, and civility is beautifully rendered in this piece. Erickson is the quintessential concrete junky, stuck on culture-painted commerce, in need of a little R&R, which he seeks in a tragically humorous conclusion. The imagery and interior dialogues are well done, witty, although at times drawn out, as Wexler resorts to overexplanation instead of relying on the genius of his subtle and already clear meanings. This reader would encourage him to have faith in his ability to convey depth and movement of plot and character.

In “Indifference,” Brown is a down-and-outer whose wife has left him; his life is a shadow, images of her “superimposed over everything”:

Nights were the worst. He got into bed and sleepless hours passed. He would chant, silently, over and over: I am a man with an indifferent heart. But even his indifference was failure, for one would think that a man with an indifferent heart would be able to sleep. One night, he crawled out onto the fire escape and howled with laughter at the absurdity.

Absurdity describes this piece succinctly. The disenfranchised lover is so lost in his own world that he must visualize a floating head that he cannot capture and with which he cannot even communicate. As it spouts one- and two-line pieces of sage advice, Brown realizes that this head knows him better than anyone—tragic, as it cannot offer more than words.

When Brown finally finishes his recent project and sets out, he notices four people in the street bending to grab something in the snow. This link between Quatrain and Brown, two loners connected unknowingly, is the perfect tie between this story and the first in the collection. However, the dénouement of “Indifference” siphons off the otherwise resonant impact by attempting to further explain the conclusion as it impacts the protagonist. Wexler should trust himself and his readers more; his language and characterization need no curtain call explanation.

In a cross between Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Wexler continues his anti-utopian theme with “The Sidewalk Factory: A Municipal Romance.” Here, the protagonist and his love interest seek to escape governmental control, the Lord Mayor’s “Proclamations and Municipal Dispatches,” opting for independence upon the sea and in the world abroad. Yet, in all his hopes to escape wrist measurements and the “Rods of Obedience,” he shows a waning connection to the island society, a society steeped in satire and the absurd.

Wexler uses an entertaining and effective tone. His subtle wit mirrors that of the forever classic Jonathan Swift, creating a landscape where society and the systems that his society create force readers to critique the actions around them, but “The Sidewalk Factory” is not just a socioeconomic commentary packaged in a pretty narrative. It supersedes its genre to combine both anticipatory plot with a bone-chilling conclusion. Wexler takes the reader for an in-depth ride through a Big Brother gauntlet that at times echoes close-to-home issues without making direct accusations that could lose the attention of extremist readers who might otherwise turn away—the hallmark of an effective satirist. Highly recommended.

The chapbook for centuries has been a principal vehicle for the masses, speaking to an audience that might otherwise encounter difficulty in accessing printed texts for reasons of cost or opportunity. Though the expense of printed text is not likely to hinder access for readers in the twenty-first century, the rise in big publishing conglomerations does not bode well for political, social, or economic satirists or their non-mainstream, commercial styles. Wexler’s use of the chapbook medium, in this reader’s opinion, speaks volumes and serves to benefit the interests of his readers as well as send a message to the broader publishing industry as a whole.

Publisher: Spilt Milk Press (2008)
Price: $5.00
Chapbook: 80 pages