Novel Approach

A good Renaissance man is hard to find, but with the emergence of 29-year-old New Orleans diarist-novelist-painter-singer-songwriter-performance-artist Michael Patrick Welch, the search might just be over. Welch and his multimedia circus will be blowing into Super Happy Fun Land this weekend, performing under the unlikely nom de renaissance the White Bitch.

Welch promises to perform a full-on spastic stage extravaganza, with dramatic readings from his novel, The Donkey Show, interspersed with skits, story-related soul songs crooned in his self-taught falsetto and synchronized video-projection screens.

So just how did a Florida-bred punk scenester wind up penning a novel with a title that sounds like it came off a marquee in Tijuana?

“Well, I don’t know if the term ‘blog’ existed yet,” Welch explains. “But I started an online diary several years ago when I was still living in Florida and was amazed at the response. It was probably small potatoes by any realistic corporate-type standard, but I was expecting nothing, so any reaction at all would’ve seemed huge.”

The enthusiasm that greeted Welch’s “Commonplace” Web site infected the fledgling author with the self-publishing bug. He collected his online nonfiction entries into a book of the same name and then spread the word through grassroots promotion. Soon one of his stories was accepted by McSweeney’s magazine. That brought Welch’s writing to the attention of Equator Books, a tiny California-based publishing house. Equator asked him for a novel, and the result was The Donkey Show.

The entertaining book follows a rather Michael Patrick Welch-esque character as he adjusts to a recent move to New Orleans, slogging through a series of dead-end food-service jobs while suffering near-terminal loneliness. Eventually “Patrick” finds an odd source of stability: teaching creative writing in a notoriously rough public high school (where, during an altercation, one of his students unwittingly provides him with his future stage name).

Equal parts breezy Louisiana travelogue and tortured inner monologue, The Donkey Show is not without its forebears. Any modern novel that takes place in the Big Easy is going to attract comparisons to John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious New Orleans tale, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Welch is more than aware of this.

“A lot of Toole’s novel followed Ignatius Reilly’s ridiculously pretentious journal-writing as he went from one terrible job to another,” says Welch. “During the first section of my book I was purposely sort of echoing that, as my character gets put through the same process. Also, I found out when I was well into the writing process that one restaurant I worked at is actually in the same building where Ignatius buys his lute string on the first page of Confederacy. The elevators still have musical-instrument advertisements in ’em, even though that music store’s long gone.”

Strong parallels also exist between Welch and Charles Bukowski, whose own working-boy novel Factotum begins in New Orleans. In fact, Welch’s writing style here might be best described as a sort of post-Gen X, post-9/11 counterpoint to Bukowski’s, only with a far less gruesome attitude toward women — and ecstasy and painkillers in lieu of booze.