PUPPETS WIN TODAY

Fleming’s fable unfolds on the planet Urftoo, which has a purple sun, a religion based on the orgiastic worship of a Christ-like lobster, and an economy run on the labor of sentient puppets. When puppet-maker Miltro Miggugen dies from eating a poisoned pistachio made by the Power Chemicals conglomerate, his creations, including a wizard puppet, a dinosaur puppet, and a urine-scented ant puppet, must fend for themselves with nothing but couch-stuffing to eat (and then vomit). Thrust to the fore is straight-arrow engineer puppet Felty FuzzPalace, who leads the others against attacking birds and human thugs who threaten to sell the puppets for scrap to pay off Miltro’s debts. Felty’s maturation accelerates when he meets a “squishy”—a silicone-bodied sex puppet—named Stephy, who demonstrates that sex and other emotionally fraught experiences can temporarily turn puppets into humans. Enjoined by Miltro’s bathroom-dwelling ghost to avenge his death, Felty takes a job at Power Chemicals, where the novel turns into a broad, jaundiced spoof of the corporate world, complete with an executive who’s literally an empty suit. Felty’s sense of engineering rectitude is offended when he’s tasked with designing a substandard plastic lid for machinery that makes a dangerous neurological drug—but he finds that his body is now attached to puppet strings hanging from the office ceiling and labeled “mortgage,” “fatherhood” and “promotion,” which make him unable to resist the company’s directives. Fleming offers up a colorful fantasia that feels like what would happen if Franz Kafka and David Lynch teamed up on a reboot of The Muppet Show. It’s dedicated to making the mechanisms of bourgeois conformism, which rob people of individuality and integrity, luridly visible, and the author shows a rich comic inventiveness in his puppet’s-eye view of the world. He also presents a brilliant vernacular that mixes grandiloquence with banality: “Good and evil: outmoded fairy tales sung by the weak and the lethargic in the throes of a drunken, ill-DJ’ed karaoke party.” The result is a vigorous, if not exactly subtle, social critique and an imaginative picaresque.

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