Pretty Ugly (Hardback)
(Thomas Dunne Books; 294 pgs., $25.99)Full disclosure: I know Kirker Butler, the author of Pretty Ugly. In Mrs. Taylors sixth grade class, while working on Ancient Rome shoebox dioramas, Kirk turned to me and, in his best Comicus voice said, We Romans have a god for everything. The only thing we dont have a god for is premature ejaculation ... but I hear thats coming quickly. In response to my blank stare, Kirk then enlightened me with both a fairly accurate description of premature ejaculation and a summary of Mel Brooks History of the World. That was pretty much the highlight of sixth-grade social studies, definitely my most vivid memory from that class, and it was classic Kirk. So no one in Hartford, our town of 2,000 people, was very surprised when he moved to Los Angeles and became a successful writer for Foxs Emmy-winning animated sitcom The Family Guy.
Butlers most recent creative venture is a satirical novel that draws upon his childhood in Western Kentucky, where his mom was director of the Ohio County Fair beauty pageant, which one year featured a dance routine to Neil Diamonds America, choreographed by Butler. And this is the world inhabited by the characters in Pretty Ugly.
Miranda Miller, former Miss Daviess County Fair, 1991, has one driving ambition to spawn a pageant contestant so successful the family is awarded its own reality TV show, which she pitches as The Princess and the Queen. While Miranda is the ultimate monomaniacal stage mother, her 9-year-old daughter, Bailey, has had enough, so much so that shes forcing an early retirement from a lifetime of pageant successes (128 wins and 96 runner-up titles) by secretly binge eating. In response, Miranda, whos seven months pregnant when the novel opens, turns her focus to soon-to-be-born daughter Brixton.
As Miranda writes in her memoir: I was famous, which meant I was special. And in a world that reveres such things, why wouldnt I want the same for my daughter. And that is the crux of Pretty Uglys satire what David Brooks has recently called the culture of the Big Me billions of narcissistic worlds, each one revolving around a starring character whose primary goals are self-promotion, self-celebration and in the case of the books patriarch, Ray self-medication. Ray takes full advantage of his nursing profession to fuel his pharmaceutical hobby: indiscriminately popping random pills and guessing what they are based on the side effects. Among the side effects is Rays 17-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Courtney. The plot of Pretty Ugly culminates with the whole family (Courtney too) at the Chattanooga Christmas Angels Pageant, where Mirandas mother, Joan, is conspiring with Jesus in a murder plot.
Butlers writing skewers its comedic targets with surgical precision. The satire is merciless and truly cutting as he operates in this Southern world of beauty pageants. Ray doesnt share Mirandas dream of starring in The Queen and the Princess because he had never seen a reality show that treated its subject with a shred of dignity. That goes doubly for the Miller familys being written into the Pretty Ugly world. The humor is at their expense and the readers immense (if guilty) pleasure.
Kirker Butler
Wednesday, April 15, 7 p.m.
Carmichaels Bookstore
2720 Frankfort Ave., 896-6950