Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas
I first met A.D. Thompson (or Dan for the people who know him), author of Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas, at my first meeting of the Bangkok Writers’ Guild early in 2008. An active man with a loud personality Dan was, at that time, a lecturer at Thammasat University, but is now residing back in his native USA. Diner Dharma was published by Publishing Imprint Lulu in 2007, and is considered by some, as: “Thompson’s enduring masterpiece.”
Diner Dharma gathers together between its covers the author’s love for folktales, many of which he had collected during his travels around the world. A storyteller himself, Dan listened carefully to the people he met in Asia, Africa, Native and Latin Americas and absorbed their insights and wisdom. Later on, Thompson regurgitated, in his own peculiar style, the stories his mind had gathered over many years and, lo and behold, he “gives birth” to a Buddhist Monk, the central character in Diner Dharma.
Following the structure of a roman à clef, characterized by the description of real life behind a façade of fiction, A.D. Thompson chooses a diner in the small town of Ataboy in West Texas as the place where Monk will amaze his audience with his witty tales. The diner is a micro cosmos for the town itself, with a long chain of characters that come to or are drawn into listening to Monk’s stories.
Red, the narrator, is a writer who’s having a hard time with an annoying writing block, and decides to listen to Monk in the hope of gaining back his inspiration. Over the course of the novel, Red develops a disciple-like relationship with Monk, being maybe the only person who was privy to all of the stories he had to tell: “I was thus accustomed to have time after Monk departed, generally well before me, to write out his adventures of the day on my faux-linoleum table under the oh-so-unsubtle glare of the florescent lights that had me and the truckers not much better than pies under warmers, waiting for the tired waitress to throw us out at closing time.”
Some of the characters of the book include: Tony, a greedy small businessman; Betty, the aged beauty queen; Chick, the lying cook; Isabela, the gossiping waitress; Rique, a Mexican busboy; Miller, the incompetent police chief; Prof, the pompous school principal and mayor; Lionel, the fire chief; Jerry, the mechanic; Pete, a married farmer involved in a love triangle with two lesbians; Mags and Martha, the lesbians; and several other passers-by.
The vague storyline that connects all the dots in Diner Dharma is the arrest of Rique for a crime he did not commit. Of course, the real criminal is known to Monk, but he lets life follow its own course, although Red tries to interfere. One of my favourite characters is Isabela, as she is the omniscient witness to all events at the entire diner, a woman who mostly speaks in proverbs: “If you throw the water at the jar, you spill more than you collect” or “The heart is a vessel we can never fill.”
The writer’s love of the French language is quite obvious, as A.D. Thompson makes use of several French words throughout the book: “Monsieur le Ministre,” “Grand Dame,” “du genre,” or “chaperone” to name just a few.
As a personal comment, I see the reason why a writer might want to leave one space between each paragraph in a work of non-fiction, as this can make a difficult text more reader friendly. However, I don’t agree with this trend in the case of fiction writing as I interpret it as being a method to simply extend the book’s page numbers.
Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas is a book that comes with a recommendation from Gary Dale Cearley, author of Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness, who said that Diner Dharma is “funnier than a duck at a cock fight!”
Preview the book, or if you would like to enter Monk’s world full of stories, then purchase this book and enjoy… your order!
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[...] and former Bangkok resident born in 1971 and reared (not bred) in Texas. In 2007 he published Diner Dharma – A Monk in Trouble in West Texas, a roman à clef considered by some his “enduring masterpiece.” In this interview, Dan talks [...]