Book notes: Strange crew

Have we, at long last, run out of “regular” characters to read about? While Clifford Chase’s debut novel, the 21st-century fairy tale Winkie (Grove Press, July 18), and French-lit giant Michel Houellebecq’s philosophical pseudo-sci-fi meditation The Possibility of an Island (Knopf, May 23), appear to have little in common, they both feature some of the oddest protagonists in recent memory: a sentient teddy bear accused of terrorism, and an aging humorist-provocateur and his 24th- and 25th-generation clones.

Winkie begins with an FBI raid on the title teddy bear’s shack in the woods, then proceeds to intercut between his strange modern-day predicament and his episodic past, in which Winkie gradually becomes aware of his humanlike abilities. Possibility, meanwhile, reads like a cross between Woody Allen and Kurt Vonnegut, in which Daniel, a famous comic performer whose forte is thumbing his nose at PC targets (his most popular show is called We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts), senses encroaching mortality, dumps his wife and joins a bizarre health cult. But the real story is the running commentary provided by Daniel’s clones—technological neohumans who populate a distant future when ordinary Homo sapiens have been reduced to a pathetic herd of wild animals roaming on the horizon.

Despite their outlandish, fantastic characters, these stories ache with a longing for the earthy charms of mere mortality. In their own unusual way, these two odd books are love letters to the messy realities of the mundane.—Bilge Ebiri