I give “Jerry with a Twist” 5 Stars!

Jerry, a talented but out-of-work actor, confronts a dilemma that unrelentingly twists his life—cognitively, emotionally, even physically at virtually every step.  He’s been offered a promotion to assistant manager at his day job at Office Max, a new position that would obstruct his hitherto flexibility to appear at auditions.  As his girlfriend is pregnant and the family will need the additional income, Jerry confronts a choice that would have confounded Thomas Hobson.  

Just as James Joyce reveals so much by taking his readers along with Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin, Chris Meeks—with his usual incisive insights into his characters’ struggles and their condition in millennial American life—has us join Jerry during a morning in his hometown, Santa Monica.  As the hours, each more tortuous than the next, unfold, the depth of Jerry’s anguish deepens: reality will not allow him to escape the near-certain futility of realizing his dreams or of reconciling them with the mistakes of his past.    

While James Joyce was a trailblazer in the genre of literary fiction, Meeks surpasses him with crisp plainspoken prose abundant with brilliant humor and wit.  Despite this stark contrast with Joyce’s convoluted storytelling, it is fair and instructive to compare Leopold Bloom’s twisted June 6^th journey through Dublin with Jerry’s morning odyssey from his rent-controlled apartment to Santa Monica’s world-class beaches and an epiphany that would have been inconceivable when he awoke that morning.

Chris Meeks is one of those rare prolific and masterful writers whose stories and novels leave his audiences with a sense of satisfaction and an enriched view of the human condition and humanity.