Review: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work.

Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He is immortal and ancient, but he is also just trying to get through the day.

That contrast is the most compelling thing in the novel: the depth of this being who has lived so long, stumbling through a (what could be argued but yet isn't) trivial and maybe even boring life, partly because he cannot communicate well, and partly because his passivity keeps shaping what happens to him. The novel's final arc is about where takes action and where fails to act.

The question is whether M has really escaped the labyrinth. Or maybe he escaped the literal labyrinth only to find himself in the much larger labyrinth of the world: social interactions, bodies, work, desire, expectations, loneliness, other people’s assumptions. In the labyrinth, at least, he understood the confines. He knew the expectations. The roles were clearly laid out. There’s almost something protective about it, something like comfort. Outside of it, he is free, technically, but freedom does not mean he knows how to move through the world.

M’s body tells a story of trauma, of harms experienced and harms enacted, often without needing to give the story to every mark. His body heavily sits on M.  There is awkwardness in his relationship to his own body, but he is also settled in it. Other people see him as an oddity, not as the immortal being he knows himself to be. They see freakishness before myth. 

That's what feels compelling about the novel. M obviously sticks out in the world, but the world also makes room for him as just another kind of oddity. There are so many people who feel their bodies are part of what alienates them from others, who feel disconnected because of what they think others see as normal or freakish or what have you. M is a mythological creature, but the alienation is recognizable. There are elements of what he goes through that most people can probably recognize, sometimes in themselves and sometimes in how they view others.

The novel separates being desired from being known. M can be physically wanted. There are characters who fetishize him, or who are drawn to what makes him different. But that is not the same thing as connection. The book is interested in who he allows in, and what it means to be seen as a body versus being seen more fully. His longing for love or validation does not always feel like some grand romantic quest. Sometimes it feels like trying to find fulfillment just like everybody else.

I'm always down for some mythology, especially if it is different or intriguing takes on old tales.  This depiction of the Minotaur feels very different from others that came to mind while reading, like Victor Pelevin’s The Helmet of Horror or Sara Douglass’s The Troy Game series. Less so with Pelevin and more so with Douglass, Sherrill's novel plays with the idea of the Minotaur as a character seeking, if not redemption, then normality or an opportunity to not have to be the role or the creature in the labyrinth. It does not make M louder or more spectacular than he needs to be. It lets him be wounded, strange, passive, physical, lonely, and still open to something more. The novel is not always exciting in a conventional sense, but that almost feels like the point. Its power is in watching this mythic creature navigate a human world with a body that is not entirely human, and realizing how much of that navigation still feels familiar.

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