Debut novel ‘Puff’ crude but charming

“Puff” is un-PC, rude, crude and flat-out hilarious. It’s a debut novel by Bob Flaherty, it’s only $13.95 and buy it, already.

What? What is it about? OK, but it’ll be like trying to explain why the Three Stooges are funny by telling the plots of their movies – part of the point, but not the point point, if you get my drift.

Here goes: Two brothers, John and Gully Gullivan, live in a working-class Irish suburb of Boston. They are in their early 20s. They have not gone to college. Neither have they gone to work – at least not steadily.

It is the late 1970s and they have just driven their cancer-stricken mother to the hospital, probably to die. So they get back into their van – an old panel truck from the days their now-dead father distributed newspapers – and decide that what they really need to do is score “one exceedingly fine ounce of Dominican Sin” from their old bud, Worms Faulkner. Who happens to live several suburbs away.

Not a problem. Except that it starts to snow:

“It snows like the End of the World. A blinding, strafing, blitzkrieging snow, of a kind not seen before. Three nights and three days does it rage, nonstop and nearly horizontal, as if it were attacking from across the sea. You can barely stay out in it long enough to move the rabbits to the cellar, so hard and unforgiving it is. And it seems to want in – clawing at the shingles, rattling the doors, sandblasting the storm windows, forcing you to go full volume on the TV.”

Does this snow deter John and Gully from their excellent adventure? Nah. They just borrow some Red Cross magnet panels from another old bud, Doody Levine, which they slap onto the battered van, and skid into the whited-out world.

They’re practically the only folks out, but they somehow manage to get sidetracked by one fearsome monsignor; one homicidal cat named Puff; one arch-nemesis from high school, now a cop; one old flame of John’s; one bucket full of hot cabbage rolls; one manic knife-fighter named Pelo; one frozen basset hound; one tractor; and at least three separate visits to the emergency room. Good times, good times.

John tells the tales, all of which involve other reminiscences in which he covers just about everything that has happened to the Gullivans and their neighbors since he was born. And nothing happens to the Gullivans that isn’t fodder for a joke.

Yeah, sure these are tall tales, told broadly, but who cares, with Flaherty’s writing? When their van finally runs out of gas, John and Gully decide on a desperate act:

” ‘I think we should break into the school,’ I declared, the words hanging in the frigid air like underpants on a line. The idea was not met with resistance.

“Surprisingly, my brother and I had never broken into a school. There was never much of a reason. We weren’t thieves, really. The idea of loading up the van with electric typewriters and selling them to some fence in Revere never occurred to us, though it had been suggested by several of the lowlifes we knew.”

That’s about all I can quote before running into one of the hundreds of creative ways John and Gully employ various four-letter words. Imagine how really smart and under-educated young men with plenty of ‘tude would talk, and you can guess how a lot of “Puff” reads.

But that’s cool. Cynicism and hatred in a novel offend me a lot more than some new euphemisms for bodily functions.

And there’s no cynicism or hatred in “Puff,” which is its charm. I had so much fun with John and Gully Gullivan, filtered through Flaherty’s generous eyes, that I kind of hoped the streets of Boston would never get plowed.