Pluto’s Garden

by: Rick Zabel

Published by: Egress Books (July release)

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

Rick Zabel’s protagonist in his debut novel, Pluto’s Garden, is one of those people who peaked early. In fact, the high point in Guthrie La Rue’s life was in 1968. She was a member of the Young Rebels, a group who threw excrement at the police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Oh yes, Guthrie was a terrorist through and through.

Flash forward to the post-9/11 United States. Guthrie is planning to bomb the shopping mall in Shakespeare, Indiana. She wears a rusting electronic monitoring device that she clamped on her ankle many years before. Her life centers around writing haikus, which are apparently awful; self-publishing book after book of poetry; recruiting members of her writing group to aid her in her illicit activities; and waiting to hear from a “real” publisher that she has finally moved into the big time.

Pluto’s Garden opens with Guthrie getting a back-alley abortion. It’s unclear in the beginning how old Guthrie is, and although her age is never divulged, the reader must assume she is approaching sixty, which makes the whole abortion seem off track. She’s so matter of fact about it that readers are left to wonder if this is her first abortion or the latest one in a long line of abortions. With the opening time frame feeling somewhat off, the rest of Pluto’s Garden never really quite gelled for me, and I was thrown off course several times. I also felt that the narrator was almost as unreliable as The Great Gatsby’s Nick.

Still, Rick Zabel’s Pluto’s Garden is a linear tale of middle-age pathos when Guthrie and her husband Myron, realize that their lives are a joke and that they never succeed in making any of their dreams come anywhere near true. Guthrie’s desire to feel the same adrenaline rush that she experienced in 1968, and the pain of a not-so-clean abortion, holds the story together.

I didn’t get the title, as Pluto’s Garden is poor trailer park, so much unlike the higher-class trailer park Guthrie and Myron inhabit called Abraham’s Bosom.

Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer’s comments.

Author’s Web site: http://www.RickZabel.com