Barbie and Ken Were Fucking...

The 11th chapter of this slim, deceptively slight and surprisingly moving novel opens as such: “Barbie and Ken were fucking. They were fucking and screwing and doing it.” The Jim Thompson-esque story, about a judiciary candidate whose daughters are kidnapped by a religious cult, has a peculiar twist: the victims are mice, the culprits are Sunshine Family figurines, and the private detectives on the case are Mattel’s iconic doll-couple—who, when they’re not putting the screws on underworld sources, are screwing each other wildly and weirdly: Barbie will remove her arm and Ken will put his hand in her shoulder hole, or they’ll put each other’s heads on their own neckballs and slam their bodies together.
You might be thinking this sounds stupid, and I don’t blame you; such pop-culture subversion was already facile back when people got into it in the 90s. But Reifler’s aim isn’t to make you reconsider animals or the innocent toys you may or may not even remember (I mean, what’s a Sunshine Family doll anyway, right?); instead, it’s to tell a real-but-absurd story in the only manner that makes sense: by stripping away its verisimilitude to reveal the cold preposterousness beneath, as if it’s the only way to capture the unreality of real experience.
Is it real experience? Near the book’s end, we learn that, years later, one of the kidnapped mice-children “would sit down with a pen and notebook and begin to write down what happened. She would get no farther than two sentences. Those sentences would disgust her...” I don’t know if Reifler or someone close to her was kidnapped by crazies as a child, but that’s how the book reads to me—a fantastical-yet-truer alternative to those two sentences. Its 103 strange pages reject the title character’s Panglossian philosophy, which holds that everyone is inherently good unless corrupted by outside pressure, not by averring that there are also intrinsically evil people, but by showing that some people are horrifyingly empty, like mass-produced plastic dolls, operating outside of ordinary ethical boundaries.