The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Dear Mr. President, by Gabe Hudson
reviewed by Irving Malin

Gabe Hudson. Dear Mr. President. Knopf, 2002. 155 pp. $19.00.

Although Hudson has been influenced by the war novels of Vonnegut and Heller, he is not a mere imitator. His first collection is a remarkable weapon; he fights war—however it may be defined—with metaphor and hallucination. He moves swiftly; he attacks patriotic clichés. Hudson creates a world in which bodies turn into parts, minds overwhelm official speech. The narrator of “Cross Dresser,” who is in the mental ward of a VA hospital, makes a fashion statement: instead of an official uniform, he says, “I tape my penis down between my legs and put on a pair of flowered panties. I put on one of my mom’s dresses and too much lipstick and eyeliner and admire myself in the big mirror in the living room.” (Hudson laughs at masculinity in many stories.) In “Dear Mr. President” the narrator writes to President Bush to explain his transformation. He sees that he is losing parts of his body (and mind) and gaining new ones: “I figure if you can get an ear or a mouth, then it’s possible to get a set of wings. And, of course, if I had wings I could fly out to my mother-in-law’s house in Seattle, and I know that if Mrs. Laverne looked up in the sky and saw me flying with my new wings, she would get over the ear and mouth and nose thing. Who could turn down a man with wings?” Hudson deliberately destroys the logic of hierarchy. He knows that war is not so much a matter of transcripts, briefs, registered documents—a paper world—as a wired (weird) machine inhabited by mentally challenged visions and disintegrating bones.