As in Pink’s previous books, the characters in his latest brim with unflinching idiosyncrasies and experience muted epiphanies ... his distinctive candor is captivating, profound, and personal ... his stories have an effortless credence. The beauty of writing people from personal experience is that you’ll neither fetishize nor pity them. In his latest collection, Pink bares his all—teeth and heart—and it’s a sight to behold.
In Pink’s writing style, words cascade down the page as he creates a line break after every sentence. The ample white space means it’s never long before the reader is turning the page, creating a momentum often at odds with his story’s protagonists ... Pink’s writing captures the flared tempers, the petty grievances, and employee solidarity of the 9 to 5—but most of all he skillfully conveys the toil ... Pink’s writing is made increasingly palatable by the very same thing used to get through the tedium of the working day: humor. Each of these stories is buoyed by Pink’s off-kilter sensibility and comedic nonsequiters.
... Pink’s style: brief paragraphs, often mere sentences or fragments, descending in short order toward what might be an insight, a judgment, or a joke—or one of the phrases repeated like an incantation throughout a story ... In 'The Machine Operator'...Pink’s narrator is a noticer, a recorder, a performer of his observations in a world where little beyond the moment matters, conversation is mostly a matter of trading wisecracks and insults, and circumstances are beyond one’s control. Pink can make perfect little sentences...or poke fun at the tools of his craft ... He can be funny, faux-profound, loopily self-aware[.]
Pink drifts away from bizarro fiction a bit here, instead delivering short stories about job-deadened urban life ... Don’t expect roller coaster rides. These stories are strictly detached slice-of-life affairs; often the central conflict is something like a new stack of dishes to scrub. Pink’s prose is sharp and tight, with short sentences fired off in rapid succession. Consequently, even longer stories like 'Blue Victoria' can be read quickly, and the whole collection could be finished in a day. Readers who miss Charles Bukowski’s blue-collar-centered fiction will find lots to like here.
[Pink's] books are gritty, it’s true; also cynical, often vicious, funny in a wry, despairing sort of way ... the feeling one leaves a Pink novel with is less world-weariness or disgust than the recognition of a tremulous, wavering kind of belief in tenderness, beauty, and hope. Expressing itself in Pink’s signature single-sentence paragraphs, and replete with onomatopoetic belches, squelches, slurps, and titters, the voice that narrates this book is no exception to this rule ... Pink continues exploring a world of the relentlessly profane with the kind of tender humanity usually reserved for stories more interested in the redemption of their characters. Pink is far too honest to fall into this trap. His characters don’t need redemption so much as they need a sandwich, or a blanket, or someone to talk with in order to pass the time, and herein lies the collection’s greatest, and most surprising, strength ... A voice like none other writing today—Pink is riveting.
Pink’s light touch turns the ordinary into the surreal in his humorously understated collection ... Pink’s incisive, empathetic collection will resonate with readers who share an appreciation for the absurd.
