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The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Picador, 313 pp., $14

The romantic tug of the FryDaddy may be somewhat inobvious to those whose culinary yearnings lean toward the less utilitarian, but it's here, among the deep fryers, prep lines, surly kitchen help, and flirty waitrons -- at a country restaurant with the truly inauspicious moniker of "Grub's Ribs" -- where Steven Sherrill has set his debut novel, and by the final page you're sorely pressed to come up with a better locale to encapsulate love and eternity and a wayward Greek myth. Crete just wouldn't cut it. The Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull offspring of King Minos' wife Pasiphaë and an ivory bull gifted by Poseidon, doomed to wander the Labyrinth until felled by Theseus' sword, has one of the more interesting lineages in a myth cycle full of obscurantist wild cards. Sherrill's novel anthropomorphizes the bastard bullman way past what the Greeks found satisfactory -- here he's a line cook in a backwater chowbarn, single and at loose ends. As an eternal, he's spared the ravages of time, but cursed even more so by the same procession of centuries and the perpetual outsider status thrust upon him by the perpetual dropping away of friends, homes, empires, and ages. In short, the Minotaur is a lonely guy, perhaps the loneliest guy in the world. And who knows more about the ambiguity of loss and the bluntly banal trident of anxiety? Sing it with me, Roy Orbison -- "Only the Lonely." Apropos of Orbison's tune, Sherrill's Minotaur spends his downtime planning "that hopeless scheme only the lonely scheme," awash in vague, dreamtime semimemories of his own past (full of thunder and the bloody breasts of virgins consumed within his breathy maw) and musing on his place in the present. He lives in a claptrap trailer court on the outside of town (the "Lucky-U Estates"), keeps busy when he's not at the restaurant by repairing the dog-ends of old cars, and inexplicably begins to pine for the new waitress on the block, Kelly, who might (or, just as likely, might not) be the back-country answer to his unspoken prayers. Disparate echoes of everyone from Faulkner to a sun-bleached Flannery O'Connor abound in Sherrill's clean, neat prose, but The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break -- which he does, often; no cancer for the eternals, apparently -- is far closer kin to Neil Gaiman's splendid, myth-unmaking American Gods, as well as his wildly popular Sandman series. Sherrill might cringe when he hears he's been compared to a comic-book author, but both he and Gaiman are transposing the mythological with the banal and are doing a perceptive, charming, oddly sweet job of it as well. Love is all around, then. Even a Minotaur can sense that.