The Men Inside

“All of this is a joke in a vacuum.”

The Men Inside is often likened to Fantastic Voyage, but instead of submarines the protagonists are spelunking into the human body via the cave-like entrance in the — well, you know — southern region. Leslie Blount is a Messenger, one of the chosen few to be Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’d down to an eightieth of an inch and remove tumors from the aristocratic patients who can afford the operation. It’s all gross, scatological, body-obsessed, and riddled with unsavory liquids and the internal machinations of a complete psychopathic loser. All of these lovely qualities make reading Malzberg like returning to an old sardonic and cynical friend.

The novel follows Leslie, who is a Malzbergian Raskolnikov gradually convincing himself, the reader, and the metafictional audience to prepare for the murder of his patient, Yancey. Malzberg presents Leslie as both protagonist and projectionist of his own film, which is the book you are holding, a typical example of how Malzberg effortlessly weaves various observer-audiences as fourth-wall entities. If Dostoevsky was born a century later, dodged Siberia, sailed to America, became embittered as a failed literary author and discovered he could sell smut and science fiction, then here’s your beloved Russian novel.

I usually find ways to dissect Barry’s work and applaud his style, existential poignancy, and the apperception of his protagonists, but The Men Inside is not the Malzberg I’m most fond of and is a bit more garrulous in word padding than his other novels, although I will applaud him for actually being funny. Newcomers to Malzberg who enjoy his style will likely be at home here but later discover that he handled these themes masterfully in novels like The Gamesman and The Cross of Fire. In the impossible future where the film rights are bought to The Men Inside, I nominate Todd Solondz.

“Insanity is merely another way of coming to terms with the environment in a healthy fashion.”