Review: Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage (2006)

Firmin the rat, runt of the litter, is born in a bookstore and must munch on the inventory when his siblings hog all the other food. It turns out that a diet of paper more than makes up for its lack of nutrition: Firmin soon discovers that he can read, and becomes voracious for stories rather than their bindings. When his family moves out to join the next phase of their gutter-dwelling lives, Firmin embarks on his own quest to devour all the classics. But so many vicarious adventures leaves him unfulfilled, and he endeavors to make his way in the wide world with a heartbreakingly human understanding of himself as an outsider to people and rats alike.

I've never seen Ratatouille, but after reading Firmin, I can only hope that Remy the Rat (as I believe he's called) speaks exactly like Firmin. The book is great precisely because Savage knows just how to write like a rat with a tendency to romanticize. Firmin narrates in long, colloquial sentences and a double dose of self-deprecating sarcasm. He walks a tightrope of knowing he's romanticizing and doing it anyway, which style gives this character a level of depth beyond what you often see, even in the most celebrated novels. Firmin's contradiction is one between lowliness and great dreams, which is healthily modern without being modernistic. He's adorable precisely because he tries so hard to avoid self-pity.

The plot itself is modest, which is appropriate given that it's supposed to be the autobiography of a rat. There's a touch of the inverse-culture trope in which the rats find the humans disgusting, and Firmin is a freak for wanting to cuddle with human women rather than violently mate with his own siblings, but fortunately the theme there isn't overdone. Most of Firmin's time is spent speculating on the gutters through the lenses of the great authors, and later on through an author of Savage's invention, a broke old man named Jerry Magoon. Magoon is the spitting image of both Savage's picture on the dust jacket and of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, even down to the fact that he writes short, bizarre science fiction books that elaborate on the poverty of the human condition in a not-so-subtle way.

In spite what you might think from the summary, Firmin is definitely not a children's book. Even from a lowly perspective, it can make you want to laugh or cry. It's a picture of the individual with spirit: perhaps not someone who can shake the world, but who feels its weight nonetheless.