Just finished another book to-day, the lucent Ulrich Haarbürste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm: Plus Additional Stories, by Michael Kelly (whose name is nowhere on the book). This one was supremely silly, and also weirdly beautiful. I have not read a sillier novel in recent memory. Andrew Shaffer’s Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again come close, but this one takes the cake.

I came across the website with the Roy Orbison in Clingfilm stories sometime in early August 2020. Now here was a writing niche I never knew existed (or had so much depth to its wellspring of ideas): the microgenre of rock star Roy Orbison being wrapped in that kitchen staple, clingfilm (or cling wrap, or Saran wrap). The hallmarks of this microgenre: a contrived situation in which the narrator, Ulrich Haarbürste, must wrap Roy Orbison in clingfilm; a paragraph lovingly describing the wrapping process, which culminates in a sentence asserting Ulrich’s immense satisfaction; the announcement “You are completely wrapped in clingfilm”; the stately presence of Jetta the terrapin (which I later learned, to the disappointment of my imagination, is a type of turtle).

But I think what really clicked with me was the delightfully off-kilter prose. It was wrong and eloquent. Wrongly eloquent. Eloquently wrong. For a simulacrum of writing by a make-believe German fellow with an intense fetish for wrapping Roy Orbison in clingfilm, it had no business being this beautiful. The audacity of writing all dialogue and narration in the stilted style of “I had envisaged making urbane small talk on topical matters of the day” tickles me beyond measure. But the prose takes on a heightened beauty in the passages where Roy Orbison is wrapped in clingfilm, the similes so sensual as to make an aspiring writer weep. Who knew there were so many different ways to erotically narrate the process of wrapping Roy Orbison in clingfilm? As an exercise in vocabulary workmanship it is, erm, unexampled. And the descriptions of the clingfilm factory at the end of the novel gave me goosebumps in their sheer poetry. Here is a talented writer who has too much time on his hands and, for reasons unknown (“Who can plumb the mysteries of the human heart?”) chose to devote it to Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm.

Incidentally I did listen to three Roy Orbison albums recently, as that black-clad rock star with the trademark dark glasses had been running through my mind in the weeks leading up to and following my procurement of this book. They were his first three released by Monument Records: Only the Lonely, Crying, and In Dreams. This turned out not to matter, for nowhere in the book did I catch a reference to Roy Orbison’s actual work. I think this was a deliberate artistic choice on the part of the author.