Poetry, prose and all-out rant intersect in Mary Robison’s “Why Did I Ever.”

Money Breton, the main character, narrates this 208-page novel, which is in form similar to a diary, albeit a rather strange one.

Each “passage” is either given a number or a title as a header. There are 563 entries total, with titles ranging from “What a Rip,” to “Here Are My Questions For Today.”

Money makes up questions she would ask her three ex-husbands; glues, paints and nails everything in her house to the wall; and spends time talking to both herself and her cat, Flower Girl.

Money reworks scripts for a large Hollywood film company. The script she adds and subtracts from throughout the novel is a story about the fictional Bigfoot, who has fallen in love with a girl named Justine. In the script, the duo goes on fantastic adventures, and Money adds in characters and scenes from her own life to the chagrin of her high-strung editor, Belinda.

Money’s son Paulie was the victim of a violent and gruesome crime, and is in the witness protection program, bouncing from hotel to hotel under guard in New York. Money visits him a couple of times, and has phone conversations with him, selections of which appear in the novel.

Mev, Money’s daughter, works and lives near Money (they live in a town in the South, the name of which is never given). Constantly on a methadone high, Mev and Money participate in their strange activities together, searching for the oft-lost cat and making necklaces for themselves out of a box of mixed beads.

“Why Did I Ever,” took awhile to grow on me. At first I was wary of the strange format, and many of the random statements made by Money seemed neither glib nor funny. After figuring out what was going on in the story, I found the novel to be a hoot.

Money’s neurotic and sarcastic nature is in the novel’s foreground, and seeing the world through her embittered eyes gives a fantastic and hilarious spin to a realistic world.

Here’s a selection of one of the many, many crackpot actions performed by Money: “I drive all over the American South, all night long, and nobody gives me trouble. Maybe this farmer would, but I buzz down my window and scream at him, ‘Remember Goat’s Head Soup? What an album! To my mind, it is worth hearing again!'”

Robison is bold and yet grounded in the way she develops the novel’s characters, and seems to tease out the quirks common to everyone by contrasting them to Money’s wild personality.

The reader is given great insight into Money’s personality, even though she and the plot are both presented fragmentarily — indeed, the novel as a whole has a definitely fragment nature.

The format of the novel drags a bit at the beginning, but by the end I had warmed up to it, and it seemed as if the passages themselves became funnier and more sarcastic.

The mood of the novel is very well represented in this passage: “There’s something wrong with this day, and with every day that I’ve spent here. Work, lunch, a cigarette, and they’re over. ‘You’re kidding me,’ I say, each night before sleep. ‘That was it?'”

Robison successfully extracts the random and silly manner with which we live our everyday lives and presents the reader with a witty distillation of the frantic human persona.

Her writing, though, is not in itself silly, and she treats the subject matter with grace, rather than taking the easy route of rendering the absurd psyche of Money and the even more absurd plot into something immature and downright dumb.