I finished a book last week. One that I think may be a good, if not great American novel. You won’t find it on any top 100 list, though you probably should. You won’t recognize the name of the author if you are a serious (read, snobby) consumer of literature.
You will recognize the name, however, if you are familiar with the unkempt recesses of standup comedy. Not the shiny kind, tailored leather jackets or tonight show suits. The kind that still exists in clubs with low ceilings, even when the act punches far beyond the seating capacity. The kind that puts specials out on YouTube, bypassing the industry gatekeepers. The kind that asserts itself as the driving cultural force in our age. Whether it is driving culture as the current of the mainstream, or away from the center as a prescient example of counterculture is a topic for debate. The name Sam Tallent is synonymous with this kind of standup comedy.
I first heard the name when I was living in Denver, Colorado where he is a legend of the local standup scene. My wife and I had our first date at Comedy Works, the top club in the area and one of the best in the nation. We attended many shows in our time there, especially as the world emerged from Covid and the clubs began to fill again. I would go to shows alone when my wife was not my wife and we were long distance, heading to the Thursday shows after class at CU Denver. I never saw Tallent play the club, or at any of the small shows in the area, but he was one of the names that came up in the podcasts featuring Denver comedians, and his reels found their way to my feed as I scrolled.
I heard he wrote a book in 2020, which I thought was an interesting choice for an emerging comic in the middle of a pandemic. I assumed it was a memoir and filed it under “disinterested.” This last year though, I saw Tallent as a guest on podcasts where he talked literature. I watched his special, “The Toad’s Morale” on Youtube. He is crass, witty, incredibly funny. There are moments when he asks me to think, but never moments when he asks me to stop laughing to do so. There is the classic edge, and that quality indicative of the great comics; he is not trying to offend in that way some of the anti-cancel-culture comics make their vulgarity into their personality, nor is he attempting to politicize in a different direction. He simply says the funniest thing.
I get the sense that it is almost Randian. He says the funniest thing to him, and if we the observers do not agree with him, then it doesn’t matter. We are voyeurs anyway.
All that to say, I got the book. Audiobook because I still thought it was a memoir, and I refuse to buy memoirs if I can help it. I noticed some names on the cover, readers of the audiobook. The readers were all comics of the same ilk as Tallent, an added bonus for me as a fan.
I immediately realized that Running the Light was, to my surprise, a novel. I braced for it to suck. To suck the way a concussed fighter’s musings on world conflict after a fight suck. To suck the way your grandmother’s ideas about “the little things you write” suck. You would think that two of the things that I consume at a steady clip, comedy and literature, colliding would excite me. I once had a chocolate covered piece of bacon at the state fair. Things you love don’t always mix, and sometimes they can kill you.
I was so wrong in my expectations. The book is funny, brutal, simple yet containing depth of language and literary ideas, much like Sam Tallent’s comedy.
Running the Light is the story of Billy Ray Schafer, an over the hill comedian whose life has stopped being funny. This is a useful literary device, the character who is defined by a thing that is not true at the root. Think Graham Greene’s priest who never prays, or Lessing’s writer who cannot write. He tours around the country telling jokes for the gigs no one wants, nursing alcoholism, feeding cocaine addiction, and taking up with women who will have him until he leaves in the morning for a new city. He is not so much spiraling as he is trudging down the funnel, a face-down-in-a lazy-river kind of feeling.
In the last movement, the third act, readers find Billy Ray back in his hometown of Denver, with his gig cancelled due to circumstances beyond his control. He ventures to his home club, from which he has been banned, in order to see his friend Norm Macdonald perform, and to score cocaine and possibly a guest spot. We get snapshots of his past life in Denver as he heads back, and the reader gets the sense that the return could be the beginning of something fresh, if only he could figure out the thing he lost.
There is an epic chapter purported to be an excerpt local report about standup comedy from Billy Ray’s younger days, read by several standup comics. It is funny, but impressively so because the whole thing reads like a fever dream for Denver standup fans. Tallent concocts a scene from real people and names, and the knowledge of their reality made me a part of the joke rather than a watcher.
You would think this is a distraction, but really this is the kind of thing that separates great novelists from popular ones. Tallent doesn’t feel the need for you to get the joke, because it’s not yours until you read it. McCarthy doesn’t explain calculus to his readers in the Passenger, and Melville spends a long time detailing whales, but not the knowledge required for hunting them, which is an interesting thing on it’s own. Melville shows you that the whale is knowledge, to be analyzed and sought out. But the hunt for knowledge is sacred, a mystic quest unique to the individual.
Tallent tells you all about Denver. He describes Comedy Works and their comic’s entrance. He gives you street names and feelings and weather patterns. He even tells you some of Billy Ray’s jokes and describes standup comedy in detail. But the part he does not give away is what part of the novel, of the joke, is true. If you know, if you can relate, then your experience is enhanced. If you don’t, then you can still pass through on your own. Either way, the reader has the sense that Tallent is writing a kind of love letter to Denver and to comedy. To know the names is to understand a bit more, to have a grain of access to the author and to Billy Ray’s sense of place.
Billy Ray finds his way to the club in the cold. Up until this movement, the novel reads like a descent, but the scenes with Macdonald read like a last chance. Billy Ray sees Norm again and meets young comics who have heard of him, and then goes up to do a guest spot and crushes with crowd work and tried material. This set feels different than the others where he does well, maybe because his life has been a droning series of disappointments as we have seen and have been told to see it. Even the moments where he has a good set are punctuated with personal disaster borne from self-loathing. This time though, he feels, and we by proxy, like there is a new wind moving across him.
He follows his set with an epic hang, and the Norm Macdonald lines are surprisingly Norm Macdonald-esque. He steps in to defend Norm Macdonald from an aggressive fan demanding an audience, and his penchant for violence is viewed as an asset among the younger comics. He scores coke in the process and a place to sleep because of Norm. The next day, riding his various highs, he calls one of his sons he has not seen in years and makes plans to see him. The two reconnect after a rough start (the son assumes Billy Ray is dying, which he may well be), and we finally see that the missing component for Billy Ray is this exact thing, a family. All of his striving, his addiction and self-loathing, is a product of his moral failure as a man. He abandoned his two sons and ruined the marriage to the love of his life.
The subtext of this moral failure is haunting as Billy leaves his son to do one more night at his home club before he goes to see his ex-wife and flee town. Billy seems happy and hopeful, but there is an uneasiness about him that is evident to the reader. The closeness to his son, the possibility of real and meaningful connection and reparation has made him afraid. The fear response readers have watched him condition himself with is drug use and rage.
So he uses drugs. And he rages on stage. This night, after seeing his son, he refuses to go into old material and to continue in some sort of nonsensical death knell. He talks about his family, and the kind of man he is. And he admits that the things he is talking about are “not funny anymore.” As he runs off stage, he is caught by Norm Macdonald. As he apologizes, Norm is congratulatory. “Never apologize for telling the truth.”
Billy Ray cannot see it. He cannot see that his salvation is not in comedy, in the joke, but in his family and in telling the truth about himself in his comedy. Comedy is not a path towards self-actualization, but a result of it. Comedy comes from connection, and not the other way around. He cannot face up to this moment. If he could, it might save him. This is the first moment in the book we have seen him do something honest, especially on stage, and the weight of confronting himself in his art breaks him. He leaves the club, gets stoned, gets mugged and assaulted to the point of unconsciousness, and wakes up an indiscriminate amount of time later having pissed himself, shirtless and penniless.
The reader is coming to understand that Billy Ray does not want to think about the night that he told the truth. Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. He gathers himself to go see his ex-wife, who lives about an hour away. He has no plan, really. He will drink and get there on what little he has left, and he will see.
Readers who are used to my bloviation on Christian intersections with culture may find themselves in the crosshairs of a modern novel that deals with it only in shades, hidden behind the sheer worldliness of life. Should you read it, you will not find some lightly veiled messianic tale (though I do believe Billy Ray might have shades of the messianic, to his regret), nor will you find a bible story retold. The novel is bawdy and crass and vulgar and inappropriate and you may find yourself offended by it.
It will not edify you.
Unless of course it is true.
And it is. It is true that the selfishness and loneliness that comes with the pursuit of one’s passionate pursuit of self-actualization in a career or lifestyle at the expense of others may come at the cost of all good relationships, all good, the self found in others. For what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?
It is true that we find fulfillment first in relationship, and second in repentance. And that the latter should be sought when the former is unavailable or destroyed.
It is true that the places we come from shape us, and that they have a healing quality when they are at their best.
It is true that telling the truth is our only path forward out of our own smallness. That truth, when told even in a fleeting moment, is an opportunity to become better.
It is true that a man will destroy himself if given the means and opportunity and freedom.
It is true that Norm Macdonald was a prophet. That standup comedy is the last place where truth and untruth come together to make us think while we laugh. That a book about standup comedy is perfectly positioned to be a great American novel, because standup is the great American art form.
It is true that should we get the chance, we should go out laughing, having set ourselves right if only for a moment and only in our minds.
The book, a fiction, is full of truths. I could say more about it, because there is always more to say about great novels. I could tell you that being a conservative and a Christian should make me engage more with culture and not less. But there’s no time and this essay is running long.
But I will say, if reading hard things scares you, then you should avoid the Old Testament. And the martyrdom stories. And the saints. You should avoid literature altogether. Running the Light reaffirmed what I knew to be true, what I discovered as a younger man wrestling with my faith: the tension I feel between seeking out what is right and consuming stories about people who do wrong is produced from my own fear. God is not small. He sees sin, it grieves him. But he calls people who can find the truth and live it out, especially in a world that is committed to untruths on all counts.
He is not small. And neither is truth. That’s why it can be found in a story about a drug addicted standup comic who has sex and curses and lies and cheats and steals. Should you find yourself likely to repeat the sins of a fictional character, then, humbly, I posit that the problem is not with God nor with the author. Maybe you shouldn’t read it then. Or anything, and that would be right for you. But it is possible to find God in great books. Where truth is found, God is there too.
So if you can find truth in dark places, you should read the book. It is good and true, and despite what my Sunday school teacher may have told me, good and true is next to, well, godliness.
Next week, I will post my first piece of fiction to the stack. I recently resurrected from the deep recesses of my hard drive the first short story I ever finished. It won’t be good, but it will be a start for more fiction to come. See you then.
“ It is true that the places we come from shape us, and that they have a healing quality when they are at their best.” I can already tell that this is a line that will be stuck in my head for some time.
I appreciated this review and found myself wanted to read the book if only to resonate (like you did) with Denver street names and Comedy Works. The larger connection to the spiritual was a thoughtful mediation on the lack of distinction between sacred and secular. I agree and firmly believe God points us to Himself not just in hymns. Thanks for this post and I look forward to reading more of what you put out!