By Chaim Bertman

AS LAPTOPS AND bookstores across the country spill over with stories I'm told are touching and telling, their magic seldom comes over me so fully that I can say I've been hypnotized. When it comes to quantity produced in plastic or literary arts, you'd think this were ancient Ireland, a nation of druids and bards. For the most part, I'd rather be a fly on the wall of the Greyhound station in Sacramento and spy on some authentic human madness than yawn through 300 pages of something hardly more distilled than another lazy dream of the supposedly self-critical middle-class American psyche.

For someone in the misanthropic mood, stumbling onto Jon Longhi's writing for the first time is a lot like being reluctantly dragged to a party on a drab Tuesday night, expecting nothing; and just when you're sure that everybody in the city is a robot, and that you might as well drink yourself subcognitive, you realize the shadowy figure in the kitchen passing you a beer has the divine or diabolical spark that occasionally separates humanity from the other animals, and is one of the funniest people you've met in a decade.

In part, this is because Longhi has the rare gift of being able to make himself small, like a fly on the wall, with a thousand eyes and a taste for anything rotting, fecal, taboo, or otherwise embarrassing. The laughter is in seeing humanity lower itself. By removing vanity and the mask of conventional standards from his universe, he is free, like a fallen, urban Hieronymus Bosch, to paint lovely, wretched portraits of himself among a bestiary of America's damned: the underemployed, drug-addled, demented, defeated, anachronistic, and nakedly absurd.

Although Longhi's latest work, Wake Up and Smell the Beer, has a few names and themes holding it together as a nearly 200-page narrative, he is the master of an oral art that translates best on paper as the pitch-perfect 2-page anecdote. In the 1980s the book's protagonist moves, with his pal Dada Trash, from the thriving art punk scenes of Philadelphia and D.C. to San Francisco; for a decade, he blissfully snorts speed, drops acid, guzzles beer, heightens his awareness of the city's exhilarating weirdness, loses any judgmental attitude he might have had to the bleariest, unsupervised hedonism of the era, plays anthropologist among intriguing freaks who serve as never-ending fodder for his painterly vignettes, then suddenly throws in the towel and gets married, and realizes that life goes on.

Just as it is not a mark against a poet never to have written a full-length novel, it is no failure of Longhi's that his book doesn't exactly plow a linear plot. Longhi is a zoologist, and his passion is in the accumulation of powerful, unusual details; his superlative craft is in telling a character's history in a few swift lines, honing in on what makes each of us an astonishing creature, and in the juiciest brevity with which he stage-manages every preordained, comedic, breathtaking collapse.

Wake Up and Smell the Beer is not so much a portrait of its art punk protagonist as it is a picture of one of the famous cities that coexist alongside a dozen other noteworthy San Franciscos. It is a testament to Longhi's literary nose that, after reading several of his pages, whatever city one walks in takes on a slightly Longhian smell. The normals seem exceedingly dull, and previously innocuous faces suddenly seem to be hiding their own few unproud stories. The joy and aliveness of Longhi is that he quickens the reader's nose to sniff out where those poignant, unflattering stories may be hiding in real life.

It seems to me, however, that Longhi's material would have been more powerful had he limited himself to fewer freaks, gone deeper into each, and illustrated how his characters got to be the way they are, by drawing from a broader palette of the invisible forces that work on every individual, such as history, the times, family, youthful sorrows, ambivalence, thwarted ambitions, class warfare, stubborn delusions, and above all, the thousand vestiges of lapsed normality behind every unrepentant freak. It is striking, even perplexing at times, what Longhi has chosen to leave out of the narrative. For example, the protagonist gets married, somewhere deep into the book, when it hasn't even been clear that he'd had a girlfriend. Suddenly she has a name, Jenny, and we're told they've been together for five years, and yet, in this book full of morbid delight in the madness and creepiness of the human heart, we never hear a good, solid Longhian anecdote about her. This jolts the reader ever so slightly from the book's spell, as it hints that "Jenny" is a real person, complex, dignified, historical, and thus cannot be portrayed in the same tones as the other figures in this fable.

In many ways, Longhi's work can be compared to the comics of Robert Crumb, who drew the wonderful illustrations of urban desolation for the book's covers. But while Crumb energetically plumbs the same pregnant cosmos of America's steep decline as Longhi does, he doesn't divorce himself so completely from the conventional world, but instead paints it enthusiastically, in complimentary colors that intensify his depictions of weirdos and freaks. But even more than that, Crumb, at his best, delights in showing how the sleepy normal world doesn't know it's mad, that it embodies the very sickness of which the weirdest subculture is only a symptom – and how Crumb himself is a child of Eisenhower's America.

This is not to say Longhi stumbles. On the contrary, his imagination is fertile, his eye is lucid, and everything his deft hand touches reveals his artistry. But a wider glance outward to show a creature's circumstances by including a vision of all the nice, boring idiots who share the world, would allow his work to tell a slightly bigger truth and resonate to the enormous iron cauldron of the history that gives birth to us all. Although his is the art of the quick and nimble punch, my ideal for a writer of such talent would be to linger longer, and touch more of whatever freakiness he wishes to portray – its creeping roots, its gnarled trunk, its delicate leaves, its innermost thoughts, its place in the cosmos – and trust that the longer an elephant takes, the farther it goes.

Chaim Bertman is a novelist and critic who lives in San Francisco.

Wake Up and Smell the Beer

By Jon Longhi. Manic D Press, 192 pages, $11.95 (paper).