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Since The Layoffs
Reviewed By Steve Nester Imagine being laid off from your job. Not an improbable occurrence these days, and not only are you laid off. The factory that employed you has disappeared, the local economy it once supported has died and your girlfriend has abandoned you for a more viable breadwinner. There is nothing left for you in your town, where only the businesses of desperation are booming. This is the situation in which Jake Skowran finds himself in Iain Levision's Since the Layoffs. Having established the situation as dire, to what extreme would one go to make money? What criminal activity would one be willing to perpetrate in order to pay the rent, put food on the table, ensure one's survival? Correct: murder. The tractor parts factory has left rural Wisconsin for the NAFTA manufacturing paradise of Mexico and just everyone in the small town where Jake lives is unemployed and on the dole; and those with any aspirations have left town for good. Ken Gardocki, a local bookie and rust belt crime lord needs a favor. His wife, Corinne, an ex-stripper, is having an affair. Ken wants her dead, and he's willing for forgive the almost $5000 in gambling debts Jake has accumulated with him if he does the deed. Game and in arrears, Jake agrees. So well, in fact, is he a hit man, that for a while, he is Ken Gardocki's triggerman of choice. Since the Layoffs is a dark comedy and a boisterous rumination on employment and corporate America. Thinking on the economic landscape around him, the disposability of workers by capitalists, to what egregious extent management will go to squeeze a profit from workers and materials are examined to such a humorous and insightful extent that Jake, had he a pen and paper in this first person narrative instead of an unregistered firearm, could have supported himself as an economic commentator. Jake has no problem justifying his becoming a hired murderer. This is dark humor that only an optically challenged reader could miss. Jake whines and rages against the unfair treatment of corporate America of its workers, but the axe-wielders in the boardrooms never come remotely close to murder. Jake's inventive justifications allow him to whistle while he works. Jake is now able to support himself to a degree not attributable to the remuneration of a minimum wage job. He continues to work, even though his barroom buddy has set him up with a clerk position at a local convenience store, the Gas-n-Go. More importantly, for diatribe purposes he is able to vent his murderous rage at being a pawn of a capitalist system. As much as Jake can make light with the wisecracks and wry humor at his and the nation's economic tailspin, his anger and disillusionment with the system is powerful and frightening. He wishes for a real bloodbath, to equal the financial and emotional one that has just been drawn for all of us. The action of Since the Layoffs moves quickly, for first it is a platform for Levison's political and economic views. This is not merely a rant; Levison's first book, A Working Stiff's Manifesto, a memoir containing potent and pithy observations of what it is like to be a minimum wage worker in a country where the goal is to be stinking rich at any cost. Angry, yes, but with a little bit of humor, easy to swallow and enjoy. |
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