Published 8.1.2017. New York: New Directions. Translated by Anne Tucker.

Eka Kurniawan’s second novel, Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, is a poignant meditation on precarious masculinity in post-Suharto Indonesia–I’m kidding, it’s a novel-length dick joke. But oh, how that dick joke swells and deepens (no apologies) into so many off-the-wall permutations, into endless slapstick gags about erectile dysfunction, the romantic complications resulting from the same, Buddhist self-reflection and enlightenment, bracing Fast and the Furious-style semi-races on mountain roads, and the fast-cutting stylized violence of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo. And yes, behind this prick-based humor and impotence-driven action is a gentle ribbing of a Pulp-ish masculinity, couched in a deadpan style that allows the author’s message to sink in while we enjoy his riff on the genre.

Ajo Kawir and his friend Gekko are two adolescent street toughs who like hot, chesty women and brawling, though Ajo Kawir particularly takes to fighting since he has a certain problem that makes romance unviable: simply put, his dick won’t get hard. He tries everything under the sun to get “Bird” (the affectionate name he gives his penis) to stand up: looking at porn, masturbating furiously, getting Gekko’s father to take him to a prostitute who tries an array of sex acts on him to no avail, and then even more outré remedies like applying hot peppers and live bees to his junk, but these only result in burning and swelling and no erection. He begs and pleads with his anthropomophized member, but Bird is sad and has been so ever since Ajo Kawir and Gekko witnessed two soldiers raping a traumatized woman in an abandoned house.

So our doomed hero takes up street fighting, his incapacity serving for him almost like Samson’s unshorn hair, a weakness that becomes the source of his strength. He is moved by a woman’s sad story to beat up her abusive husband— “I’m a demon from hell,” he says as he crotch-kicks the man—and thereby attracts the attention of a crime syndicate boss named Uncle Bunny, who promises to pay Ajo Kawir handsomely if he kills a rival crime lord known as the Tiger. This all seems like a great set-up for a clichéd action movie shoot-em-up, but the way things actually turn out takes the piss out of all the machismo-pumping action movie outcomes you were expecting: Ajo Kawir takes on five guys like Jack Reacher, but then unexpectedly gets the crap beaten out of him. He meets a girl—Iteung, a femme-fatale-ish student, acting as a bodyguard for Uncle Bunny, who also kicks the crap out of him—and she accepts Ajo Kawir despite his impotence, but then cheats on him for money (the book is rather funny on the subject of sex-for-money, but I’ll say no more.) When he finally gets around to fighting the Tiger, that vaunted fighter is now old and retired, making killing him an unmanly act that lands Ajo Kawir in prison for murder. Afterwards, the formerly violent Ajo Kawir discovers introspection, mortifies his impotent flesh, becomes a semi-truck driver, and ultimately finds spiritual peace. (It’s as if David Lynch were allowed rewrites on a Tarantino script.) This subversion of pulp convention is all the more effective due to the laconic (sometimes even epigrammatic) speech of the characters, and the deadpan narration (for which some credit must be given to the translator, Annie Tucker), which make Kurniawan’s parody feel like the real thing.

Now, what does it mean to say that the novel has a “deadpan” style? It means it does the opposite of what I’m doing right now, explaining, giving context, providing reasons; that’s not deadpan. Deadpan means there is no explanation, no analysis; things don’t have reasons, they just are. Gekko and Ajo Kawir are street toughs because of course they are, Indonesia was and remains a violent country. Ajo Kawir beats people up because impotence is unmanly, and all Indonesian boys want to be seen as men. Justice is what we’re after, the indignant knee-jerk reaction that satisfies. When Ajo Kawir hears the story of the woman abused by her husband, he exclaims, “What a son of a bitch! . . . A man like that should be hung, and his corpse dragged along the road for all to see.” Then, for comedy, Kurniawan throws in a thematically appropriate kicker: “And his dick should be shredded to bits.” A third of the way through the book, we inexplicably find out that Gekko’s parents, Iwan Angsa and Wa Sami—who previously were just two adorable old people–were involved in some rough business back in the day—murdering communists, performing hits on rival gangs—and our narrator just drops that into the story by way of explanation for how Iwan Angsa is an old friend of Uncle Bunny, and oh yeah, Indonesia has some dark events in its recent past (for more on which, see the films of Joshua Oppenheimer.)  This deadpan affect is hilarious—and, at times, horrifying—because it treats remarkable circumstances as totally normal, and so this disparity between the expected and the encountered unearths a new insight, which is the essence of a good joke; and fortunately, Vengeance is Mine has a lot of those.