Homesick for Another World - Ottessa Moshfegh (2017)

Ottessa Moshfegh came to my attention through The Paris Review Podcast (Episode #7), in which she read her story, "A Dark and Winding Road." I hadn't heard of her before. Because Dead Boys and Try made the Best Books list (both many years ago), so too must this.  She is a contemporary, just a couple years older than me. I am jealous of her. She is a great writer. She is not boring. Her concerns are not trivial. Yet they sometimes are? It's o.k. She's hilarious.  She is hardcore.

Story collections often make for difficult reviews because there can be so much ground to cover, but like Dead Boys, the stories here seem to have enough elements in common for an overarching theme to emerge. At first blush (or second), one could write off this work as going for "shock value." And indeed, few of these characters are completely uncontroversial. The teacher in the first story pounds 40's and sleeps in a sleeping bag in her classroom after hours. More than one male character uses make-up to try to hide their acne. Crystal meth is consumed by several characters. Two older male characters half-stalk women they vaguely know and pine for. Few of them seem to have "enough" money, and none of them have lives that anyone would aspire towards. Almost every single one is flawed, and deeply so. Great literature often portrays characters that are internally flawed--they appear normal outwardly but something happens that causes them to become unhinged. Here, everyone is basically already unhinged. And we can debate back and forth all night about the merits of writing about flawed characters, but the sad fact is, from what I have seen, people just keep getting stranger and stranger. So this is a great book for our times, one of the best books I have read in the last couple years. 

To run through the stories: "Bettering Myself" is a story about a teacher in New York City, perhaps in a bygone-era, pre-2004 (smoking allowed in bars), who resigns for personal reasons.  "Mr. Wu" is about a man who has a crush on a woman who runs an internet "arcade" and who engineers a scheme to secretly text her and meet up with her.  Once I gave my sister a book of Raymond Carver short stories and put an asterisk next to all the ones I thought were most worth reading, if she didn't have the time or interest to read them all.  This story would get an asterisk.

Before we run through each of the stories, it is prudent that we include an excerpt, because the book is due back at the library today.  So even though it is probably the most widely publicized story in the book, one passage from "A Dark and Winding Road" particularly hit home for me:

"I rolled a joint in my car with the lights on and smoked it sitting in the armchair, in the dark.  There was no cell phone service up there, which made me nervous.  I don't know why I continued to smoke marijuana as long as I did.  It almost always sent me in an existential panic.  When I smoked with my wife, I had to feign complete exhaustion just to excuse myself from going out for a walk, which she liked to do.  I was so paranoid, so deeply anxious.  When I got high, I felt as though a dark curtain had been pulled across the world and I was left there alone to waver in its cold, dark shadows.  I never dared to smoke by myself at home, lest I throw myself from our twelfth-story window.  But when I smoked that night at the cabin, I felt fine.  I whistled some songs, tapped my feet.  I whistled one difficult tune in particular, a Stevie Wonder song, which is melodically complicated, and after a few rounds I could really whistle it beautifully.  I remembered what it was like to practice and get good at something.  I thought of how great a dad I would be.  'Practice makes perfect,' I'd tell my child, a truism maybe, but it now seemed suddenly endowed with great depth and wisdom.  And so I felt wonderful about myself, forgetting the strange world outside.  I even thought that after my child was born, I'd still come up to the cabin once or twice a month, just to keep the secret of how great I was.  I whistled some more." (76-77)

And later:

"The cabin hardly looked any cleaner after all that sweeping.  In fact, I probably stirred up more dust than I swept out the door.  I sneezed and drank a few beers and relieved myself again and used more hand-sanitizing gel and sat in the armchair.  I smoked another joint.  That last one was a mistake, because after just a few minutes I was picturing my unborn son crying over my grave fifty years into the future, and I felt the gravity of his woe and resentment toward me, and I despised him.  Then I imagined everything bad he'd say about me to his own children after my death.  I imagined my grandchildren's bitchy faces.  I hated them for not worshipping me.  Had they no idea of my sacrifice?  There I was, perfectly wonderful, and nobody would see that.  I looked up and saw a bat hanging from the rafters.  I went to a very dark place.  The oceanic emptiness in my gut churned.  I pictured my old body rotting in my coffin.  I pictured my skin wrinkling and turning black and falling off my bones.  I pictured my rotting genitals.  I pictured my pubic hair filling with larvae.  And after all that, there was infinite darkness.  There was nothing.
Just as I considered hanging myself with my belt, there was a knock on the door of the cabin, and a girl's voice called out, 'MJ?'" (79-80)

It's these types of interior confessions, as inimical as they often are, which set this book apart from others.  I'm not sure if Moshfegh always writes likes this.  She does actually show some pretty incredible range here, writing tonally different stories that are told from diverse perspectives.  She does have her bete-noires, and that is why I compare this to Dead Boys.  Her bete-noir is L.A. and the illusions and dreams that go with it.  She could also be lumped in, easily, with Bret Easton Ellis.

It is perhaps worth noting that half (7 out of 14) of these stories were originally published in The Paris Review.  Several others were published in The New Yorker, Vice, and Granta.  Only the last story ("A Better Place") is printed here for the first time.  This speaks to the quality of the work.  They're all fairly polished pieces in spite of (perhaps because of) their raw subject matter.  That is, they feel untouched by any editorial hands other than the author's.  Truthfully, the book is gone and I can't recall the specific subject matter of each of the stories but I will give it a try, and asterisk those stories I remember being best.

"The Weirdos"* is a first-person (nearly all that I recall are first-person) narrative about a young woman in L.A. living with her wannabe actor/pseudo-landlord/psychopathic boyfriend and the travails of their failing relationship.

Is it possible the male character from "Malibu" and "The Weirdos" is the same?  I doubt it, but it's totally possible.  I always say this (and it's probably not always true) but an adaptation of this collection could make for a great film in the vein of Short Cuts.  Of course the danger is that it would come off more like The Informers.  It would probably end up somewhere in between the two.

"A Dark and Winding Road"* is about a successful Manhattan real estate attorney that goes up to his family's cabin and ends up smoking meth with his brother's girlfriend.  The narrator may rank as the most personally despicable in the collection, though the story is also hilarious.

"No Place for Good People" may have the most endearing and likable narrator in the collection, who is an early 50's man working part-time at a home for the mentally disabled, yet he is also far from perfect.  It is mostly about how he takes three of his residents out to a birthday dinner at Hooter's.

"An Honest Woman" is reminiscent of the oeuvre of Flannery O'Connor (I have gotten halfway through the complete collection of her short stories, and found it an impossible task to adequately review) about a man in his early 60's with vitiligo and how he befriends his new neighbor and tries to set her up with his nephew, drinking with her and failing to hide his obsession with her.

"Slumming"* is about just that--a youngish teacher slumming it up at her summer home in a lower class town.  Again, could this be the same narrator from "Bettering Myself?" It's possible.  "The Beach Boy"* is about a middle-aged couple that goes on vacation in the Caribbean and comes back home to New York to tell their friends about it--then the story takes a ridiculous turn that probably shouldn't work, but ends up doing so beautifully. 

"The Locked Room" is probably the shortest story in the book and is about a girl getting locked in a practice room above a music hall with her boyfriend.  It is probably the most lighthearted and casually amusing entry in the collection.

"Nothing Ever Happens Here" features another aspiring actor in L.A., though this character seems more innocent and sane than those of "Malibu" or "Weirdos."  As usual the story takes a depressing turn.  "The Surrogate" is about a young woman that acts as "surrogate vice president" of a company in order to be seen as a sex object and gain a business advantage.

"Dancing in the Moonlight"* could be the best story in the collection.  It feels more epic and like an actual "story" than the others, as it details a 33-year-old man's Christmas day spent alone, conspiring to travel from New York City to Providence to buy an ottoman so that he can ask the woman he pines for to restore it for him.  Along the way he gets drunk with an older polish lady at a nearby bar.

Finally there is the tonally-different "A Better Place" which is almost fairy-tale like in its simplicity and feels very deep, bringing forth ruminations on a different plane of existence.  It is about a young girl and her twin brother, and how the girl speaks of her wish to return to the better place she was before, and how her brother tells her that the only way to get there is to die or to kill a certain man that their mother has warned her against.  It is hard to tell what this story is about, and it is not one of the best in the collection, yet it would undoubtedly yield profound interpretations if taught as part of a course on fiction writing.

In summation, and upon greater reflection, not everyone will agree that this deserves to be in the Best Books category. Sometimes, the stories come off as primarily comic, and secondarily serious, with little overlap or subtlety of meaning. Perhaps it is just because I give special kudos to authors of transgressive fiction for taking risks with their work, but this book did it for me in a way that few others have lately. I don't have much else to say because I haven't had the book in front of me, and I recognize that this is not up to the standard quality of a NY Times Book Review. I know I could do better, and use the first person a bit less. Moshfegh could do better than this story collection, too. That sounds like a weird thing to say but it's meant to be a compliment. Perhaps she'll fade into the ether, but regardless, she's left behind something beautiful, specifically because it's not.

The Rise, The Fall and the Rise - Brix Smith-Start (2016)

I started listening to Turned Out a Punk, Damien Abraham's podcast, sometime this fall.  An entire post should be written about the podcast but suffice to say, Brix Smith was one of the first guests that I wanted to hear.  Her episode probably made me want to read this book.  I'm very glad that I did.  While it is not a perfect book and will not make the Best Books list, parts of it are so incredible that make it worthwhile.  I could not agree with Abraham that it was the best book I had read that year.  It was however, extremely entertaining and highly readable, at times.  As a huge fan of the Fall going back about 14 years, it was a totally amazing experience. On both the podcast, and in this book, Brix references being classmates with Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in the early 80's.  She does not aim for the heights of The Goldfinch, but sometimes lapses into Ellis-styled prose.  That is, her life could be one of his novels, particularly with the ending in the fashion industry.  What she ends up doing is completely her own.  It may not generally be as artful, but I personally found that I could identify with Brix very closely.  We are all Brix Smith, or Brix Smith is all of us.

I re-listened to the episode today, and forgot the two other Bennington classmates she mentioned--Jonathan Lethem and Jill Eisenstadt.  Apart from that there is not much else to mention--you can listen to the podcast yourself.  I will note that Brix has one of most unique accents I have heard--British valley girl.  She was born in L.A. and spent her childhood there, and splitting time between there and Chicago in her teen years.  She now lives in England.

The stuff about Chicago is fantastic.  On the podcast, Brix mentions that her first concert was at this outdoor venue outside of Chicago, where people have picnics, Rav-en-ia, where she saw the Carpenters and Neil Sedaka on a double bill.  Having recently seen Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with my family at Ravinia, I found it touching.

Most notably, there is the story of where and when she met Mark E. Smith:

"On Saturday 23 April 1983, Lisa and I paid the $6 ticket price and entered through the front doors of Cabaret Metro, 3730 North Clark Street." (144)

This was within a week of my birth, not very far away, so I have one more reason to feel connected to the band and this book.

Brix writes compelling stories through the first 75% of the book.  In truth I lost some interest after she left the Fall, and it was briefly exciting when she rejoined for a couple years in the mid-90's.  The opening of the book confused me--it's an account of her grandmother seemingly losing it behind the wheel and driving from the Disneyland parking lot through the main gates and into the park before plunging into the lagoon at the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride.  I thought it was real, but Brix later reveals it to be a dream.  I wonder how many other people have that reaction.  It seems like it could have happened, because so much of the rest of her life has been crazy that anything seems possible.  Her stories about her father are both hilarious and horrifying.  There are so many things I would excerpt from this book it's not even funny.  On that note, I should perhaps vault it into Best Books territory, but I think it is instructive to compare it to the other recent female rock musician memoirs that I've read.

If pressed, I have to say that it is better than both Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  Both are excellent books.  All three of these books are fantastic and totally worth reading, but Brix's is the heaviest.  To be sure, Kim Gordon's account of the dissolution of her relationship with her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, is the most powerful piece of writing in the bunch.  This is not to say that Carrie Brownstein's account of the dissolution of her romantic relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker is weak.  In fact, Brix's account of the dissolution of her relationship with husband and bandmate, Mark E. Smith, is the least evocative, in part due to the inscrutability of the man it involves.  Now I love Mark E. Smith but this book definitely sheds some light on him in an unflattering fashion.  It feels fair, though, because there are also moments of extreme vulnerability, humanity, and cuteness.

There are some parts of this book that are tough to read.  Yet even during the most atrocious moment, Brix offers some levity and resists victimization.  As I said, there are many quotable excerpts in this book, so I have to include one about Mark E. Smith that almost made me want to start crying:

"One night, a few months later, there was a knock at the front door of my apartment.  I opened the door to find Mark E. Smith standing there.  He was drunk and held a half-empty bottle of whiskey.  He begged me to let him in, and was in a state.  He told me he had made a mistake leaving me.  I let him in and tried to calm him down.  He asked if he could sleep over.  He was emotional.  I was torn.  Part of me was happy he'd come to his senses and realised what he'd lost in leaving me.  The other part of me was cold and shut down.  After having experienced the attentions and kindness of other men, I was no longer attracted to him.
But still, I felt connected to him.  That would never go away.  He had been my soulmate.  The songs we wrote together would forever be a testament to that.  I allowed him to sleep over, in my bed.  I made it patently clear he was not to touch me.  As he lay next to me, I felt sad.  The next morning, it would be years before I ever saw him again." (267-268)

The stories of the songs were surprising.  It always seems like the Fall are singing about conspiracies or manifestos but in truth are just slices of life.  For example, Brix writes about her sleeping problems and reliance on pills in "US 80s-90s":

"My mother's pills came in the prescription bottle with her name on it.  When we landed in Boston, immigration singled us out to be searched --this happened often, being in a rock group; when we came through carrying guitars and music gear we set off internal klaxons inside officials' heads; we practically had stickers on our foreheads saying 'Search me' -- and the customs officials were aggressively questioning us about the prescription pills not in our name.  This experience led us to write our version of a hip-hop track, 'US 80s-90s': 'Had a run-in with Boston immigration/to my name they had an aversion/Nervous droplets due to sleeping tablets....'  In the airport the signs would read, 'Welcome to the United States of America', but we would always get tormented by security and feel like we were entering a police state.  In the song Mark proclaims, 'I am the original white (big shot) rapper', and it's not hyperbole." (222)

She writes often about "Hotel Bloedel" and "LA."  She seems to consider these her best songs.  She wrote a lot of great songs with the band and I think most people consider the "Brix era" to be the second-greatest period in the Fall's catalog (behind the Hex Enduction Hour era).  Certainly she brought the band in a more accessible direction.  Other noteworthy song inspirations include "Carry Bag Man" (about how Mark E. Smith likes to carry around his stuff in plastic bags).  Actually, her causal dismissal of The Frenz Experiment (the last album she would record before re-joining the band as his ex-wife) is worth capture:

"'Carry Bag Man' is fine, and chugs along, but is a phoned-in effort from Mark, a song about how he likes to carry plastic bags.  'Get a Hotel' is just annoying.  'The Steak Place' is boring and conjures images of gross food, the kind of restaurant that might have photos of the food on their menu.  The most annoying song I ever had to play on was 'Oswald Defence Lawyer.'  I think it was the worst song we'd done since I'd joined the band.  It was interminable, and when we played it live I watched the audience switch off.  It makes me cringe today, just thinking about it.  I was expected to really belt it out, but it just sounds irritating and grating: 'Oswald Defense Lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain.'  It was cool to name-check Twain, though." (238-239)

Brix writes a fair amount about her post-Fall band, Adult Net, and I was dismayed not to be able to find anything on Spotify or Amazon Music.  I would definitely have listened to The Honey Tangle if I could.  Maybe Brix realizes that streaming services will net her approximately zero and that her fans will seek out old copies of the album.  Or likely it's the record label's fault.

I don't want to give away too many details about the book but can say briefly that Brix's parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Chicago and she moved around in fairly fancy places with her father in L.A.  There is more than a fair share of celebrity name-dropping in this book.  It's not always totally necessary, but if I was writing my memoir, I would totally do the same thing.  It's the tangents that usually end up being memorable, such as the story of her professional soccer player friend who soils himself on the field and fakes an injury, or the friend at her bachelorette party with a crazy party trick. 

She goes back from her father in L.A. to her mother in Chicago multiple times through her teen years.  She does not have kind things to say about Chicago, but her account of working at Marshall Field's in the Loop was especially charming (sometimes I like to reflect on the significance of being in the same place as another person in recorded history).  She meets Mark E. Smith at Smart Bar after seeing the Fall in concert at the Metro.  What happens is the definition of a whirlwind romance and is completely insane and showcases the true spontaneity of Brix.  She quickly decides to move to England, move in with Mark, and get married.  She becomes a member of the Fall and stays with them for another four years.  This will be the highlight for the majority of readers.  However, Brix's life outside the Fall is arguably more interesting.  For example, her section about being an aspiring-actress-waitress in L.A after being left by Mark and effectively kicked out of the band is especially compelling.  She meets Nigel, a classical violinist, who is apparently quite a sensation, and is led into a different world, seemingly a little more refined but no less debaucherous.  In fact, I'm sorry, but I have to give a snippet of her encounter with Courtney Love, who invites her to audition for Hole:

"....But as I went to sleep, I had a sixth sense that something was wrong.  A bad feeling.  Something was burning.  I got up, out of bed and rushed to Courtney's room and pushed open the door to the master bedroom.  In her room, she had a selection of candles and incense burning.  Two sticks of incense had fallen over and caught fire.  The carpet was aflame and I caught it just in time.  Had I been five minutes later I dread to think what would have happened.  I put out the fire by smothering it with a blanket and stamping on it.  Courtney was in bed, slumped over her computer.  I fleetingly clocked that she had been mid-conversation with Billy Corgan, of The Smashing Pumpkins.
She said, 'Get into bed, sleep on Kurt's side.'  So I did.  It was really weird, but I felt honoured to be asked to sleep there, in her bed, on his side.  Courtney was warm and kind.  I feel she's often misunderstood.  She is a complex person, as we all are.  At times she has been her own worst enemy, but when you get down to it there is kindness and warmth to her, that is not often talked about." (362)

She then proceeds to talk about how Courtney turned her onto Rohypnol, in one of the more outrageous habits detailed in the book.  Later on, she rejoins the Fall briefly, and then meets her current husband, who then opens a fashion store with her in London.  She also co-stars briefly in a reality series, Gok's Fashion Fix, which sounds like it would be amazing to see.  She has an amazing kitchen and is in love with her pugs.

That is pretty much the whole story, but Brix's mysticism is also worth noting.  She seems to have some sort of otherworldly presence.  One could easily write off her ramblings as hippie-ish, vaguely drugged out, but the realities she has known are so insane that I am inclined to believe her if she says she believes in ghosts.  The precognitive powers of Mark E. Smith are also referenced poignantly, in a story I had read before, about the origins of the song, "Disney's Dream Debased."  The story is that she had taken Mark E. Smith with her to Disneyland and they got in line for the Matterhorn and while waiting he said he didn't like the ride, that it was evil, and that he didn't want to go on it.  They rode it anyways and left.  A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the area, and Disneyland employees came out from hidden elevators and Disney characters tried to distract parkgoers' attention from the Matterhorn.  It came out that a woman was killed when she fell out of her car at the unloading zone onto the track, and the next car could not be stopped from dismembering her.  It's a horrifying story and it would be interesting to know what became of the incident legally, whether Disney has publicly acknowledged that it occurred.

There is another truly insane story about Disneyworld (Brix always goes to Disneyland, but goes to Disneyworld for the first time in her late 20's or early 30's) and how Mickey Mouse may or may not be trying to ask her on a date or hook up with her.  This story appears to be in there solely to detail the breakdown of Brix's mind at the time (it is a weirdly hallucinogenic chapter), but she later brings it full circle when she becomes one of the very few to get Mickey Mouse to appear at an event for her fashion store.  Her comment on the usual gender of the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume is poignant. 

I could go on a lot longer and pick out more passages, but I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this.  It's a great book, but it occasionally feels like Brix is going through the motions, telling the story because she has to and not necessarily because she wants to.  The grammar is correct and proper, but the writing is not especially complex and definitely devolves into purple prose at times.  However, I would want any friend of mine to read it, regardless of whether they liked the Fall or not.  I think it would make a great movie--"Scenes from Brix" or something, like Moonlight and three different periods in her life.  Not everyone wants to sell the movie rights to their life, but really, you would do it if you could, wouldn't you?

How to be Alone - Jonathan Franzen (2002)

I picked up How to be Alone at the Printer's Row Lit Fest, so it shares the dubious honor of being the second book after Rick Moody's Purple America to be purchased there and reviewed here.  I liked Purple America and I liked How to be Alone but for different reasons.  How to be Alone is a book of essays, and I don't know, I just kind of like reading essays.  Let me put it this way: I prefer to read "essays" over "articles," and I hope that my posts on Flying Houses are considered "essay-like reviews" rather than "article-like reviews."  But I digress - we must discuss the author.

The only time I read anything by Jonathan Franzen before was when I read a chapter from The Corrections that was re-printed in an anthology released for the 50th anniversary of The Paris Review (ironically, also purchased at the Printer's Row Lit Fest(!) - a decade ago when it was called the Printer's Row Book Fair).  I didn't really get into it.  So I never checked out that novel, or anything else by him.  But he seemed like the real deal after Freedom got so much attention so I figured I should give him a chance when I saw this book for $5.00.  And after reading it I will definitely check out more of his work.

But I can't go on without mentioning that I was put off by him before because he seemed like a kind of vanilla great writer--doing everything right, but lacking the ability to really engage the reader--from that little excerpt I read in that Paris Review anthology.  Mainly I compared that with "Little Expressionless Animals," a short story by David Foster Wallace that was also in there and is probably the best (and only) thing I have finished by him, and decided that Franzen just wrote pretentiously.
***
The book starts off on an almost impossibly high note with "My Father's Brain."  This is a remarkable essay that should be anthologized for any collection of 20th or 21st century writers studied by high school students (it could almost be an essay by Richard Selzer).  Franzen ties together autobiography and science to produce an extraordinary tribute to his father that is highly emotional as well as educational.  Having lost a grandmother to Alzheimer's disease, it was especially poignant for me when he mentioned how his father could still recognize the people around him as familiar, but could not identify their relationship to him.  To be clear, the last time I saw her before she went to a nursing home, she referred to her son and his wife (who had moved in with her to care for her) as two nice people who were letting her stay with them for some unknown reason.  Franzen's father similarly retained familiarity with his family members, but probably only thanked them for coming to visit in the nursing home because (apparently) Alzheimer's patients retain their manners and politeness, and other learned, ingrained social pleasantries.  This, along with several other observations and scientific hypotheses, tells the reader everything they need to know about Alzheimer's.  But what makes this essay even more amazing is the way Franzen branches off to discuss the nature of memory, and how writers employ it:
***
Before I go on, a confession: it has taken me a very long time to write this review.  Not because I have complicated feelings about it, but because I've been lazy.  Also I couldn't find a good quote from the first essay, so we move on.

"Imperial Bedroom" comes next and at this point I need to say several things: (1) that is the title of an Elvis Costello album; (2) that is almost the title of a Bret Easton Ellis novel; (3) a few days after starting this book on June 30, 2014, Bret Easton Ellis linked to an old interview he did on Facebook which referenced the most infamous essay in this book and also commented on Donna Tartt in June 1999; (4) this essay is about the Starr Report and was published in 1998; (5) this essay references the "zone of privacy" codified by the Supreme Court in the late 1800's, (6) this essay feels dated in a very charming way, like many of the other pieces in this book.  I will get more into this later.  But basically, this essay was o.k.:

"Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft.  All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs [!] and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap.  All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.  They say things like 'Should we have couscous with that?' and 'I'm on my way to Blockbuster.'  They aren't breaking any law by broadcasting these breakfast-nook conversations.  There's no PublicityGuard that I can buy, no expensive preserve of public life to which I can flee.  Seclusion, whether in a suite at the Plaza or in a cabin in the Catskills, is comparatively effortless to achieve.  Privacy is protected as both commodity and right; public forums are protected as neither.  Like old-growth forests, they're few and irreplaceable and should be held in trust by everyone.  The work of maintaining them gets only harder as the private sector grows ever more demanding, distracting, and disheartening.  Who has the time and energy to stand up for the public sphere?  What rhetoric can possibly compete with the American love of 'privacy?'" (53)

Okay, I'll admit sometimes I don't get exactly what point Franzen is trying to make, but let's just say he sounds like a curmudgeon in 1998 and he must totally want to kill himself with the state of things in 2014, as do I.  So I make this offer to him: the next time he is in Chicago, he should contact me and we should take the El together and yell at everyone staring down at their phones.  [Note: I have absolutely no problem with people reading Flying Houses on personal electronic devices].

The aforementioned infamous essay comes next.  "Why Bother? (The Harper's Essay)" is one of the main attractions of this book, but not for the right reasons.  I am sure there are plenty of people that would defend this essay as a "tour de force" and one of the finest essays about literature in the 1990's, but most people (and Franzen himself) probably consider it embarrassing and pretentious.  Originally titled "Perchance to Dream" and published in April 1996, Franzen writes that when he actually opened up the magazine to read it, "I found an essay, evidently written by me, that began with a five-thousand-word complaint of such painful stridency and tenuous logic that even I couldn't quite follow it." (4) He "cut the essay by a quarter" and retitled it, and hoped "it's less taxing to read now, more straightforward in its movement." (5) It is 43 pages long and only wasn't taxing for me to read because I was stuck on an airline commute from hell that majorly comprised a 15 hour travel day. Also, it was not taxing because I kept waiting to see what ridiculous thing Franzen was going to write next.  It is a gold mine for ridiculousness, but some valid points are made along the way.

As is the case for most of the essays here, it is spurred by something Franzen recently read.  In this case it is the short novel Desperate Characters by Paula Fox published in 1970. (As a side note, Franzen name-checks many, many writers throughout this book, most of them a bit more obscure than the usual names mentioned.  So it can be helpful also in terms of discovering new writers.) He writes a lot about how simple and beautiful this novel is and how symbolic it all is.  He also writes about his first novel The Twenty-Seventh City and how his ideas of what literature should be shifted throughout the years.  Now, I kind of want to read his first novel now, and I kind of get where he's coming from, even though I don't agree entirely with his stance.  But maybe I'm confusing this with the later essay "Mr. Difficult," which I think is probably the strongest essay in this book ("Why Bother?" done right).

He writes a lot about Shirley Brice Heath and the observations she made about the reading public.  He basically complains that nobody reads anymore.  There's a lot of confessional stuff about his own writing, and he is usually pretty funny and occasionally lands solid moments of truth:

"Unfortunately, there's also evidence that young writers today feel imprisoned by their ethnic or gender identities--discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture in which television has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the Self.  And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programs.  Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine, edited by MFA candidates aware that the MFA candidates submitting manuscripts need to publish in order to obtain or hold on to teaching jobs, reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: 'My Interesting Childhood,' 'My Interesting Life in a College Town,' and 'My Interesting Year Abroad.'  Fiction writers in the Academy do serve the important function of teaching literature for its own sake, and some of them also produce strong work teaching, but as a reader I miss the days when more novelists lived and worked in big cities.  I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience.  Even though social reportage is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by-product--Shirley Heath's observations confirm that serious readers aren't reading for instruction--I still like a novel that's alive and multivalent like a city." (80)

I can see what he's saying about the MFA contingent (and I've complained about them several times over the years here), but I have to admit that, even though I can't consider myself part of that group (because I didn't get in to one of those programs, I'm more of the novelist that lives and works in a big city), I feel like I have to retreat into the Self, at least for the first couple major works.  I feel like you can't truly understand the world until you've thoroughly examined yourself, and to give an idea of your perspective, you should publish at least a couple books that present it.    

I seriously could write an entire blog post about each essay--and this one is a doozy for sure.  But I have to move on as I'm doing the entire book and I think I've given an idea about the notoriety of this essay.  Bret Easton Ellis said it wasn't a good essay in its original form, and I'm not sure if he thinks it's any better in its revised form, but it's certainly worth reading because you can't help but have strong feelings about it.

"Lost in the Mail" is an essay about the decline of the U.S. Post Office in Chicago in 1994.  I loved it because so much of it is about Chicago, but as I was reading it I was paranoid that my city sticker wouldn't arrive that day in the mail, and that I'd get penalized for not having a new one on my windshield on July 1, but in reality they didn't start enforcing that until July 17th this year (and ironically, my city sticker arrived right after I finished the essay).  As is the case for most of the essays here, it feels dated, but then again I don't live on the South Side.  I feel like the Post Office has cleaned up its act over the past 20 years, but this is still an entertaining read because it is the first "live reportage" type essay here and feels like it's "from the front lines" and "an insider's look."

"Erika Imports" is probably the strangest thing in the book, but it's nice.  It's like four pages long and is a brief nostalgia trip about the first summer job Franzen ever had, working for his neighbors.  Maybe I only thought it was nice because it was so short though, and was such a counterpoint to the 30 page essay I was expecting.

"Sifting the Ashes" is a great essay about cigarettes.  However, I was confused at the beginning as to whether Franzen had actually quit at the time he was writing it.  Again, he references a recent book he read, Smoke Screen by Philip J. Hilts.  Though this essay was published in 1996, it doesn't feel that dated.  The only thing that's changed is that cigarettes have become subject to much higher taxation and have been banned from most indoor establishments across the country.  I feel like somebody needs to write an essay about marijuana right now so that in 18 years we can consider whether it feels dated.

"The Reader in Exile" is the 2nd example of the "quintessential Franzen essay" in this book, after "Why Bother?"  You can guess what it is about.  He references A is for Ox by Barry Sanders, but mostly talks about Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte.  I mainly remember this essay for Negroponte's relentless positivity about the rise of technology, and Franzen's skepticism.  It makes me feel like Negroponte was an early proponent of the robo basilisk paranoia, but I digress.

"First City" is an essay about New York City.  It is also about the nature of cities, and how they differ in Europe from the U.S.  Some interesting comments are made about urban planning.  He references Witold Rybczysnki's book City Life.  Further comments are made about The Encyclopedia of New York City, which are entertaining.  In general, this is a paean to New York as the most European city in the U.S. and it makes me want to write an essay titled "Second City."

"Scavenging" is probably the 2nd strangest thing in the book.  He also gripes about new technology here, waxing nostalgic about his rotary phone.  He kind of jumps all over the place in this essay, but he mostly writes about using outdated technology.  And it is here that we reach a milestone.  For I read this essay right before I accidentally destroyed my old laptop's screen, and felt very sad, but then felt very proud like I would blog on a semi-broken machine.  And I did that for a while, but at this moment, this post is the first post being written on my new laptop.

"Control Units" is about super maximum security prisons, and is a really great essay, actually.  It's not quite on the level of "My Father's Brain," but it's like a more compelling "Lost in the Mail."  Basically, Franzen is in full-on journalist mode here again, and he makes some great comments about the prison system in a particular Colorado town, and though it was published in 1995, this is another essay that has only grown more true as time has gone on.

"Mr. Difficult" is my favorite essay in this book.  It is mainly about William Gaddis.  I have never read anything by Gaddis but it made me want to--sort of.  Franzen gives Gaddis the highest compliments imaginable, but also openly admits that some of his later work is a mess.  This is one of the most fascinating essays in the book because Franzen seems openly enthusiastic about the material, and his opportunity to make a statement about it.  There is also the interesting revelation that the title of The Corrections is meant as a nod to The Recognitions.  Franzen also writes about his failed attempt to write a screenplay, because somebody told him that his movie seemed to plagiarize Fun with Dick and Jane (which seems weird for some reason).  He also talks about books that he couldn't finish.  He references The Sot-Weed Factor, and that is another notable example of a book that I tried to read while starting this blog, but failed to review as "incomplete." I guess this is about a certain period of American authors.  Franzen says he didn't particularly like any of them that much except for Don DeLillo and Gaddis.  Generally, I liked what he did with this essay.  Franzen seems to have a deep understanding of Gaddis's oeuvre, and I can appreciate an essay on this sort of subject matter.

"Books in Bed" is another essay that is kind of like "Imperial Bedroom" but is mostly about sex rather privacy.  It is also about watching CNN in airports.  He again references recent books he has read  This time it is The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict, which is a compilation of sex scenes in literature.  Franzen seems to view the culture's obsession with sex, and literary sex scenes, as another indication of the sad state of the modern world.  But along the way, as usual, he is entertaining:

"Until the Rules become universal, though, such comfort as can be found in the market economy comes principally from norms.  Are you worried about the size of your penis?  According to Sex: A Man's Guide, most men's erections are between five and seven inches long.  Worried about the architecture of your clitoris?  According to Betty Dodson, in the revised edition of her Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving, the variations are 'astounding.'  Worried about frequency?  'Americans do not have a secret life of abundant sex,' the researchers in Sex in America concluded.  Worried about how long it takes you to come?  On average, says Sydney Barrows, it takes a woman eighteen minutes, a man just three."  (273)

"Meet Me in St. Louis" is the last longer essay in the book, and is about Franzen's experience becoming a member of "Oprah's Book Club" and how a promotional movie was shot in St. Louis about his life.  It's awkward and is one of the other major highlights of this book.  In a way, it is similar to "My Father's Brain" because it delves into personal details about his life and his parents.  It's entertaining and emotionally engaging to see how a bigger promotional machine can twist the meaning of a work of art into something different than its meant to be in search of a bigger return.

The collection ends with a trip that Franzen took to see the inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001.  It's breezy and short--only "Erika Imports" is shorter.  But it makes a stronger impression than that essay.  It reads like a combination of "Journalist Franzen" and "Skeptical Franzen."  It seems like a reactionary piece to the Bush v. Gore decision, and it feels very raw and angry.  Obviously your political views may tint how you view this essay, but it seems like the vast majority of Frazen's fans will not take issue.

On the whole, How to be Alone is a nice collection, and was worth buying for $5.  I'm not sure I'll revisit it anytime soon (maybe in a decade, who knows), but it was a thoroughly entertaining collection that made me feel very literary for reading.  Anybody that wants to be a well-respected author that sells a lot of copies should read this to see inside the mind of one of them.  Franzen is generous in that regard.  Still, I can't help but feel that 50% or more of modern-day writers may claim he is full of it and you don't need to live the way he does to write great books.  I'm not sure how I'll review his fiction, but I hope to have the chance soon.

The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis

The context in which one reads The Rules of Attraction may color one’s view of it.  That was the case for me, at least.  The first time I read it was in September of 2003.  I was 20 and going to Paris for the semester.  I seem to recall reading the entire book on the plane flight from New York to Paris.  I seem to recall considering it a very good book for the reason of such speed—considered it to be on the same level of Less Than Zero.  Recently I have felt the opposite—that Less Than Zero is clearly the superior work, and that The Rules of Attraction is the “weaker sophomore effort.”  This is not the way I felt about The Beautiful and Damned (which oddly enough is the most popular review on Flying Houses—and by a long shot) and people tend to think of Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a similar vein.  For one, they both go by three names, which people generally do not take as a sign of pretension, but may be so (think of the “stature of the artist” view—or maybe just an attempt at accuracy for the names they were called).  They both write about young people and how their social lives affect their interior and exterior selves.  They both had success when they were very young (Ellis younger, however) and both were tagged as emblems of the generations they sought to capture in literature.  Popular films have been made out of their novels and short stories—and they continue to be made. 

They have also both been equated with the characters they portrayed.  And it would be too hard to ignore Ellis’s recent doings: the recent New York Times article about The Canyons is more than an instructive exercise.  In it, Ellis is painted as a screenwriter who has seemingly abandoned the novel writing for which he is known and generally admired.  It is worth noting that Ellis is not known for having written the screenplay for anything yet—so a good deal of whether this latest entre into film remains to be seen.  But I will make a small prediction that The Canyons is going to be about as memorable as The Informers.  Which is to say, nothing compared to Less Than Zero or American Psycho.  The Rules of Attraction and Glamorama get mentioned as secondary works (though I personally believe there is a strong argument that Glamorama is Ellis’s best work—but see also this present review, regarding re-assessment of Ellis as one ages) and most people only know about Imperial Bedrooms or Lunar Park if they are devoted readers of Ellis.  Maybe Ellis has achieved his goals in literature and is now seeking success in film—but it is irresistible to question whether this is just another fact by which to compare him to Fitzgerald—that late Hollywood period, when he had to write for the movies to make a living, and where he burnt out too young.  Fitzgerald died at 44 and Ellis is currently 49 but there have been advances in longevity.  Rumors have flown about Ellis (hardly ignored by the author in his two most recent efforts) and whether he shares certain characteristics with his literary creations.  I will just say that personally, I have my views on this matter (okay I went to NYU and more than a couple people I met claimed personal connections to him—then again one kid in Los Angeles claimed that B.E.E. read his self-published first creative non-fiction book and as time as passed I have increasingly felt that the kid was a liar) and no review of The Rules of Attraction should fail to mention its obsession with “gossip,” but I will decline to offer any personal tidbits that might paint an unfortunate view: we will respect the separation between artist and art object in this review.

                To return to context, then: I liked The Rules of Attraction much better when I was 20 than I liked it when I was 29.75 years old.  Maybe it’s because of something that’s captured in one scene: dismay over the reality that you have reached a certain age, which Sean experiences when he finds out that a centerfold in the pages of Playboy is 19 years old—two years younger than him—when he has always seen centerfold models as being “older”:

“This girl is younger than me, and that does it—instant depression.  This woman, this flesh was always older and that was part of the turn-on, but now, coming across this, something I’d never noticed before upsets me more than thinking about the conversation that Lauren and Judy must have had.” (210)

And perhaps it summarizes my view when I say I don’t consider it a spoiler to tell the reader that Sean has had sex with Judy while Sean was going out with Lauren.  This is because I seriously doubt any reader gets into the nitty-gritty details of this text—draws a massive chart detailing every relationship and how they are part of a larger intelligent design—but also seemingly rough outlines of variations on the same theme: spoiled brats at a small liberal arts college, drinking and doing lots of drugs and having lots of sex. 

It is hard not to mention the context in which I viewed this book at age 20, too.  Briefly, from September through December of 2002, I was the editor of the film review section of the NYU student newspaper.  That context matters for two reasons.  First, the film version of The Rules of Attraction came out while I had the editorial reigns, and I published a vaguely positive review of the film while not feeling an especially strong urge to go out and see it (this in contradistinction to American Psycho).  Second, New York University is a college filled with the same types of characters as those that populate The Rules of Attraction.  So the book is successful on the second front.  If you have been to college—and more specifically, this “type” of college—then you will be able to identify with this book in at least some small way.  Even though the characters are ensconced in the mid-1980s, one may indeed be shocked by how little youth culture has changed—apart from “screen time” which is vaguely anticipated in certain scenes, such as when Sean thinks Lauren will think he is cooler if he says he is majoring in Computers….but I cannot find the page that this detail emerges in.

And that is one important thing to note about this book: it is either one long chapter, or about 80 mini-chapters (maybe I’m off on that number—it’s just off the top of my head—I don’t want to spend the time to count up every single number of times that each character speaks in an attempt to make some sort of numerological quotation, nor do I believe that Ellis wants us to do this)—and if that parenthetical is any sign, it’s harder to view it as the latter.  This plot evolves over the course of one fall semester—roughly the months of October and November.  This includes Halloween and it is worth noting here that it bears a similarity to Daylight Savings Time, in ways that I did not even think about.  Really, I must have considered this book to be of such an inspiring nature that I adopted one of its narrative techniques: present tense first-person shifting narration (except that I kept it in third-person).  Indeed some of the scenes we both include probably share some of the same “one-liners at party” dialogue.  I wrote Daylight Savings Time when I was twenty-three and twenty-four, and Ellis published The Rules of Attraction when he was twenty-four, and while I would not suggest that I was on the same level of Ellis at that age, I would suggest that our “mental age” was probably not far off.

                This can be interesting material—but generally it is not.  It suffers from the same problem as Palo Alto (recently reviewed here) by James Franco: we don’t know which character to root for because we’re not sure of what they care about, or how smart they really are.  It appears that Sean is smarter than he appears, but we never really get any satisfaction out of seeing that side of him, except maybe in the scene at Vittorio’s (a 70-year-old poetry professor relocating to Italy that makes passes at Lauren)—that is, we do not know whether the things he tends to remember have significance or not.  At one point Sean mentions how his "hippie" ex-girlfriend knows to talk about Ginsberg, but then does not realize he wrote “Howl.”  I suppose Sean is supposed to appreciate that he can see through her “feigned coolness,” but the reader is never exactly sure how much of the behavior of the three major characters is “feigned coolness.” 

                This is most apparent in Paul’s interactions with Sean, and perhaps less apparent in Sean’s interactions with Lauren.  Which leads me to recognize that I have not provided a plot-line for this novel yet.  It concerns Sean Bateman (younger brother to Patrick Bateman, who makes an appearance and even gets his own “monologue-mini-chapter”), who rides a motorcycle and says “rock and roll” and “deal with it” in response to other people’s random statements, Paul Denton, who is bisexual but seems more gay than straight, who is from Chicago and generally seems the most “stuck-up” of the characters, and Lauren  Hynde, who pines for her boyfriend Victor who is “spending some time in Europe,” who keeps  changing her major, who slept with Paul before the action of the novel “starts” and who sleeps with Sean in the course of it, and who may be the social conscience of the book itself.  These characters attend the same school as Clay from Less Than Zero (who also has his own “mini-chapter monologue”): Camden College.  Maybe it says something when I recall that Clay’s “excerpt” is one of the best parts of this novel, and apparently shows that Ellis has not “lost his gift” but has just shifted it in a less interesting direction.  This is not to say that the subject matter of this book is boring: it takes on a topic which is rarely examined in literature and provides a somewhat fascinating resolution of that issue.  The issue is sort of referenced in Less Than Zero but attacked head-on in this book—but maybe it’s the case that a good deal of the allure of Less Than Zero is its almost mystical, mysterious quality.  This is not as strongly the case here, and though Ellis begins and ends the novel mid-sentence and includes a “blank” Lauren mini-chapter, he generally is content keep his authorial gaze fixed upon “society” as the “topic” of the book. 

                Maybe I am putting words in his mouth or providing my own interpretive gloss but I swore I once read an article where B.E.E. claimed to be inspired by Balzac’s La Comedie Humane and that his work was his take on that sort of vision.  If this is the case, the problem mentioned above (i.e. the same problem with Palo Alto) makes this attempt a failure.  But, like Palo Alto, it is a book that I read very quickly the first time around, and that will certainly remind liberal arts B.A. holders of scenes from their own life and maybe cause them to write books vaguely imitating its literary style that lack sufficient quality for publication.  However I doubt that any of them had as much sex as occurs in this book.  Aside from the hypersexual element, the book is generally true to life, and thus good.  However, I would consider it to be a notch below even Imperial Bedrooms, which, while no masterpiece, at least involved a more mature narrator.  For the uninitiated to Ellis, reading about a Dressed to Get Screwed Party and then holding your own Dressed to Get Screwed Party is reason enough to experience this book once—just don’t expect to be as blown away your second time around.    

Palo Alto - James Franco

I sat on his couch and he went over to his writing desk.  He opened a drawer and pulled out a few pieces of paper. 

                “This is the first story I want to publish,” he said to me, “Think it will be easy?”

                “Because you’re already famous?”

                “Read it.  Give me your honest opinion.”

                I read it, and I liked it.  It reminded me of a few stories I had read by Richard Lange.  The protagonist was suicidal, so that was one point in its favor.  There were hints of aberrant sexuality, so that was two points.  There was a fair amount of drug use in it, so three points.  I finished it, and looked over at him, who was hunched over his coffee table, breaking up weed to put into a bong. 

                “What’s your diagnosis?”

                “I think you’ll be able to publish it.  Everyone is going to think you’re a doofus, but if they read the story it will shut them up.  I think you have the potential to be one of the most singular artists of our generation.”

                “I’m not trying to monopolize all of the entertainment mediums; I just want to improve my writing skills.  I also want more people to read literary fiction.  I think my fans already are readers—but if I can get just a few more people reading—maybe my books could snowball into others—and I could help to end this massive ignorance threatening to destroy our world.”   

                “I just want to write because it’s fun,” I said.  “I don’t expect to change the world.”

                “Bono wants to change the world,” he said.

                “Are you like Bono?”

                “I’m not bigger than Bono, but I do aspire to raise my cultural cache to his level.”

                “And that involves ending hunger, war, poverty, environmental destruction?”

                “If you have the ability to make good things like that happen, why wouldn’t you?”

                “He doesn’t have the ability,” I said, “And neither will you, and neither will I.  Obama doesn’t even have it.  Nobody can save the world now.  Apple owns the world.  Digital cable companies own the world.  Maybe Verizon owns part of the world.  The only way the world could be saved would be the disappearance of these products.”

                “I think you’re going a little overboard,” he said as he handed me the bong.  I hit it.  He did the same and then he asked me:

                “What was your favorite part of the story?”

                Random question.

                “When the guy says, ‘don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos in the middle of all those dicks?’  So hilarious.” 

                He laughed, and after a beat promulgated, “That was kind of when I realized how much more freedom there is in literature.  I mean, this could be adapted into a short film, it could, but most movies don’t have dialogue like that.  I don’t like how movies make everything seem cooler and easier—I want to represent reality in its fullness.”

                “You know, I have the exact same goal.”

                “Can we stop talking about work for a second?  It’s making me nervous.” 

-"Storyteller," Part II, Chapter 5 

This is an excerpt from my third novel, which I could not complete before starting law school.  I am looking forward to returning to it in about 9 months but I am afraid it will no longer be so topical.  I felt it was useful to include this in my review of Palo Alto because it pretty much sums up the way I felt about it--that is, the way I thought I would feel about it back in April of 2010, and it was published in October 2010.

The story referenced above is "Jack-O,'" which is the final story in the collection.  This was published in Esquire in March of 2010 and it was titled "Just Before the Black" back then.  It may serve as a barometer of the general quality of all of the stories in Palo Alto: it is "pretty good."  

I stop short of calling it "excellent" for several reasons.  My primary complaint with the collection is that the narrator in (almost) every single story is affirmatively dumb.  Or, if not dumb, at least stupid or irrational in some really obvious way.  Now this is to be expected, as Franco's subject matter is, generally, adolescence. Perhaps the narrator in "Lockheed," a girl who does not like math but who is very good at math because her father tells her to be, is the most intelligent.  She works at Lockheed Martin for a summer internship and her job sounds exactly like the type of thing that high school interns would do:

"My job was to watch old film reels of the moon.  There were hundreds.  I worked in a cold, windowless basement.  The reels would run from one spool to another on this old machine that looked like a tank.  I was supposed to record blemishes and splices in the film.  Sometimes the moon was full; sometimes it would get a little more full as I watched.  Sometimes the film was scratched so badly it skipped, or it broke.  I was in the basement forty hours a week.  I watched so many moons."  (15)

She starts to get bored and starts drawing while she does her moon studies at Lockheed.  She works for a man named Jan, and he notices that she has been making some drawings, but does not seem to care.  Later, he offers her an anecdote that is probably one of the better pieces of "advice" in the book:

"'I did these when I was at school,' he said.  'I wanted to be artist.  But it was no good.  It is no good to be artist.  I practiced every day, eight hours a day.  Then I could draw like Michelangelo.  Then what?  There is already Michelangelo.  I realized there was nothing more to do.  In science, there is always more to learn.  Always more.'

I didn't look at him; I looked at his pictures.  I felt very lonely.  I pictured him and his wife, alone at a long table, eating some bland Swedish food, not talking.  The only sounds were from the utensils hitting the plates, and the squish of their gentle chewing.

'So, he said, 'You see.'  He reached over and shut the portfolio to punctuate the 'You see,' but I didn't know what to see.  Then I looked at him.  He stood there and looked at me.  We were so awkward."  (16-17)

Later she witnesses some kind of fight at a party at a kid's house in Menlo Park.  The fight is the "climax" of the story, and is fairly well-done.  "Lockheed" is thus one of the better stories in the collection.

But if forced to pick the absolute best, I would have to say that "April" a 3-part story that is 33 pages long, is the best in the collection.  "I Could Kill Someone," while suffering from perhaps the worst title in the book, comes next in terms of quality (I know it can be hard to give good titles to things and so I am forgiving when it comes to that aspect of creative writing).  Finally, "Chinatown," another 3-part story, though only 16 pages long, fills out the top three in the collection (a mon avis, bien sur).

If you add up the content of those stories (and include "Lockheed") then it is about 85 pages and the book is 195 pages long.  So that is another reason I say the book is "pretty good" (if 170 pages were of this quality it would be "excellent").  But it is very important to point out that I read this entire book in one day.  And it is also striking that I took it out from the Brooklyn Public Library (the day I got my card) along with The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, another book I similarly read quickly on an airplane trip (that one from NYC to Paris; this one from NYC to Denver).  

There is a very strong connection between these two books, and it is almost as if Franco's characters are the same as in The Rules of Attraction--just a few years younger, a little bit dumber, and generally from poorer families (Palo Alto does not equal Beverly Hills, or the other rich suburban L.A. upbringings of Easton's characters).  

In fact, one of the "praise" quotes on the back spells this out further--Ben Marcus wrote, "Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker.  Or better yet, just think James Franco."

I will admit that I once purchased Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago at a discount) and would like to use a line that my younger brother suggested, but I cannot.  Without having read that book, though I would say Ethan Hawke is, myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy second favorite fiction writer-cum-actor.

A couple quotes before ending this review seem fitting, or else people may still continue to write off this "second career" as an exercise in pure dilettantism.  It is important to note at this time, when the debate on "school violence" is peaking, that Franco seems to hit at the very core of the problem in more than one story.  While I have previously suggested that the Internet is to blame for every ill that has felled our society over the past dozen or so years, Franco's story takes place in the pre-Internet era.  And while I certainly appreciate the references to Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "gangster rap," Menace 2 Society and Boys in the Hood, and other influential artifacts of the 80s-90s, Franco shows that my explanation is far too simple-minded to be taken seriously:

"This is Brent's joke: 'What's the difference between a faggot and shit?' I didn't know the answer.  'Nothing, you fucking faggot.'  He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn.  I didn't fall, but everyone thought it was funny.  

Brent says I'm a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year.  I asked him about it and that's when we had our first little scene.  

'You think I'm a fag because I quit the team?' I said.

He stopped.  He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward.  His long face looked suprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.

'You are a fucking fag,' he said.  He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it.  I could see it in his retarded eyes.

'Why do you think that?' I said, and my voice trembled.

'I don't think it, you are!'  Then he walked off.  It's weird, but I think it's because he was going to cry.  After that he always called me a faggot."

"After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die.  He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot.  And I couldn't stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.

I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked.  Some people called it the Bat Cave.  

'You really want one?' said Barry.  Barry was my friend.  He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.

'Yes,' I said.  'I want one.'

I wanted a gun.

Barry couldn't get me one, but he knew a guy who could." (170-171)

The story does not have a happy ending or a sad one, and fails to provide any easy answers.  But it is clear that the stupidity of teenagers--going both ways in terms of typical bigotry and the other in terms of intellectual snobbery--is a serious problem that is not easily solved, though the increased awareness of the devastating effects of bullying and the passage of criminal laws on the matter have been steps in the right direction.  

There is still, however, the problem of simply "giving up" and taking others down with you:

"'What do you think about that suicide?' I said.

'I think the parents made him do it,' said Teddy.

'He was Asian,' said Ivan.  He was on the other side of Teddy and I couldn't see him.

'What does that mean?' I said.

'That they worked his ass like crazy and pressured the shit out of him.'

'Do you think it hurt?' I said.

'For a second,' said Teddy.  'But if it's all going to be over anyway, then why does it matter?  Pain only matters if it's prolonged.'  Ivan was sucking long on the joint, then he said, 'If I was going to kill myself, I wouldn't waste it.  I would do a bunch of crazy shit first.  Maybe kill some people I didn't like and take 'em with me.' 

We all thought about that.  Then I said, 'Wouldn't it be better to do a bunch of crazy good things before you died instead of killing people?'

'Like what?' said Teddy.

'I don't know.  Give your life to save a bunch of kids or something.'

'But that's what you're supposed to do every day, not if you're suicidal,' he said.  'If you're suicidal you're probably only thinking of yourself.'

I drank the syrupy alcohol.  

'I try to be good,' I said.

'Me too,' said Teddy.

'Fuck good people,' said Ivan, and we laughed.  

We finished the joint and I gave them both cigarettes.  The stars were dots between the branches.  On the other side of Teddy, Ivan started carving in the tree with a knife.  He carved SUICIDE RULZ.  Teddy was next and wrote FUCK GUNN.  They told me I had to write something.  

'I feel bad, the tree is so old.'

'Fuck you, said Ivan. 'Do it.'

I drew a heart.  It was hard to make it round because of the bark, so it was jagged on one side." (137-138)

In summary, I have to say that this book is "pretty good"--but maybe even a little better than that.  Though it was not "excellent" and I am not going to run around telling everybody that Franco is the greatest living American artist in his prime, I do have to say that he is certainly one of the most interesting.  And I am very happy that our works seems to coalesce.  The quotation above from my incomplete third novel, and the tangent that the novel goes on, were not made without considered judgment.  Palo Alto is a collection of "linked" short stories that could be a novel if it wanted to be--not unlike my first novel.  It has taught me that my first novel is not a total failure, but could be much more "digestible" if converted into something of a similar product.  My second novel basically deals with the same themes as Palo Alto and attempts to portray the same "period" of psychological development.  Moreover this book is a paean to the community in which he was raised, as is S/M.  And the third novel posits the life I might have led if I had gotten into the MFA program at Columbia and entered in the Fall of 2007, when it was certainly possible that Franco could have been my classmate (or friend).  

I hope that he continues to write because it is important for people to realize that subjective human experiences are not always best told through the objective lens of a camera.  It is also clear that Franco has a  very good sense of humor about himself, which is important in an undertaking such as this:

"'Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso.  He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn't enough.  Technical skill is never enough.  He needed to find his voice.  We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it.  The technical stuff needs to become second nature.'  Everyone agreed with this part too.  Wilson said quietly to me, 'You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.'  I stopped drawing.  Wilson went on: 'I used to go to art classes with him.  He was always trying to break away from classical form.' 

One of the ladies spoke up.  'Sylvester Stallone, the actor?'

'That's right.  He's a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.'  Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit.  Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy.  'He did write Rocky, after all.'" (122-123)

Stallone did receive his BFA from the University of Miami in 1999, but this excerpt may be apocryphal.  Regardless, Franco's enthusiasm for literature is not likely to be questioned by anyone.  Though I would not be surprised if I am in the minority in my praise of this work.  I judge it according to the standards of my former classmates in creative writing classes.  If one of them had submitted such materials, I would have put them in the class of the top three or four (among the 70 or 80 total) that deserved to have their work published.  Unfortunately, not all of us have the advantage of taking classes taught by Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, or Dave Eggers.  Or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter....   

Imperial Bedrooms - Bret Easton Ellis

A genuine literary event.

That is what it says at the bottom of the front jacket cover for this book, underneath a general description of the plot, which is this: the sequel to Less Than Zero, twenty-five years later. Clay is a screenwriter, who is interested in a girl, and he tries to get this girl a part in the new movie he's producing. Plus Blair, Julian, and Rip are back from the original.

But calling it "a genuine literary event" seems, I don't know, desperate?

And all of the praise on the back seems nice, until you realize it is for Lunar Park. Then maybe you venture over to Amazon to check the reviews to see if it will be worth the investment in a hardcover edition--and you see the reviews are scathing. And you wonder, oh great, what did I get myself into.

But I am here to tell you that you do not need to be worried--those reviews are wrong. This book is good. It may not deliver on every single level that every reader could possibly desire, but it is not a bad book. It is not poorly written, as much as amateur critics may point towards nonexistent complexity of language, poor, vague description, and meaningless run-on sentencing. It is a different sort of book in the same way that Lunar Park was. Obviously, it's not the classic that Less Than Zero is, or even up to the level of The Rules of Attraction, and of course its scope pales in comparison to American Psycho (which I haven't even read to the end) or Glamorama (which I think is the real masterpiece in his oeuvre, thus far). It's better than The Informers, and I like it better than Lunar Park, I think, though that book had moments.

Why is it so similar to Lunar Park? Because the theme is the same: paranoia. In that novel, it may be imagined, and it is played for horror. In this novel, it is not imagined, and it is played for mystery. If Lunar Park is BEE doing Stephen King, then Imperial Bedrooms is BEE doing Raymond Chandler. Aside from paranoia, and genre-hopping, Ellis pokes more fun at himself in the opening segment of the novel. In Lunar Park, it is one of the most dazzling sequences of any of his books, re-telling the history of his literary career, and the various lies and half-truths that have been told about him over the years. In Imperial Bedrooms, it is a parallel segment relating the history of Less Than Zero--except Clay is claiming that it all really happened, and none of their names were changed, and the author was someone they knew. Ellis takes advantage of the opportunity to critique the adaptation of his debut:

"In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. ('I'll sell my car,' I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. 'Whatever it takes.') This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group--jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. 'Be good to her,' Julian tells Clay. 'She really deserves it.' The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. (7)

And then more obvious differences:

"The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material--surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality--had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir--the cinematography was breathtaking--and I sighed as it kept streaming forward, interested in only a few things: the new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me, as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared (Blair's father died of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair's mother). But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded." (8)

And here is a good opportunity to talk about spoilers: many of the reviews on Amazon say they are not spoiling anything by revealing two different plot points of this novel--but they are. In the same way they're idiots for calling the book a piece of crap, they're idiots for saying they're not spoiling anything (...because you wouldn't want to waste your time anyways, etc.)

Clay is in his mid-40's, splitting time between New York and L.A., and recently returned to L.A. for the casting of his new film The Listeners. It is perhaps worth noting that this is more L.A.-centric than anything Ellis has done since Less Than Zero. The city is used in almost every paragraph of the story. Angelenos will find Ellis's choice settings appropriate for the tone of the novel, and that they add another layer of enjoyment. By page 100, it seems clear that Ellis is writing a mystery novel in the tradition of Chandler or James Cain, and the L.A. setting circa 2008 or 2009 is a wonderful update on that sixty or seventy-year-old geographically-centered story.

Most of the plot hinges around one of the girls auditioning for a part in this movie--Rain Turner--and the mystery of her former employment, ex-boyfriends, and general lifestyle. It's a bit mundane--perhaps not all that imaginative--and there is a line near the end of the novel that seems to poke fun at how cookie-cutter/predictable the plot becomes--but even with that, it is surprising enough to keep reading.

Most importantly, Ellis delivers magic with this book: in a way that none of his other books have since, he captures the pace and intensity of the prose of Less Than Zero and puts it to use in a new narrative with old characters. Towards the end, again, there seem to be a few scenes that are reminiscent of the first novel, and this has something of a disquieting effect. The big relief though is that Ellis does not mess it up. Like the Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, there can be a lot of doubt about the point of bringing back once-popular characters. And maybe there's no point to Imperial Bedrooms, but I don't see it as an opportunity to cash in on Robert Downey Jr.'s reinvigoration, or to reflect upon the passing of Michael Jackson and John Hughes and 80's nostalgia. No, it writes a new chapter in the previous book, and while its story is nowhere near as fresh and original as the first, it's still a pretty good story: tell me that a film adaptation of Imperial Bedrooms with the original actors from Less Than Zero would not be one of the coolest things ever done.

But people in Hollywood are idiots, and one of the good things about this book is the way it casually acknowledges that. To sum things up, the best thing about Imperial Bedrooms is the way the pace matches Less Than Zero. This is a short book at around 170 pages, but for nearly half of it, let's say between pages 60 and 130, I didn't want to put it down.

And it should be clear at this point why most people like to trash Ellis--you either get it or you don't. You either love him or hate him. People that trash him don't get him. People that trash him might quote the passage I am about to quote and call it a perfect example of why his writing is terrible. Of course, I am quoting it to show the opposite, how a casual epiphany can come out of a commonplace situation:

"Dr. Woolf leaves a message on my landline canceling tomorrow's session and telling me that he can't see me as a patient anymore but that he'll refer me to someone else and the next morning I drive to the building on Sawtelle and park on the fourth floor of the garage and wait for his noon session to be over because that's when he takes his lunch break and I'm listening to a song with the lyric So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear...over and over again and I'm nodding to myself while smoking cigarettes and making a list of all the things I'm not going to ask Rain about and deciding I'll accept all the false explanations she's going to give me and how that's the only plan, and then I'm remembering the person who warned me about how the world has to be a place where no one is interested in your questions and that if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you." (107)

That is all one sentence but I happen to think it is a very good one. And while I totally acknowledge that this book is not a masterpiece, that Ellis has done better, there are totally memorable moments in this novel that will exist comfortably alongside previous ones. I'd rather read Less Than Zero again (especially since my copy was lost)--because that book, more than any other book, can be viewed as a guide to writing your very own breakout novel--but Imperial Bedrooms is a nice treat. You can read it even if you haven't read Less Than Zero, but it helps.

I'm just sad that I'll probably have to wait until I am 30 to read a new book by Bret Easton Ellis. He has continued with his relative consistency, and has not done anything to make me lose any interest in his work. If I were Ellis, I would want to write a Pulitzer-worthy, six-hundred page piece de resistance for publication around my fiftieth birthday, to silence all doubters and haters, but it seems too easy. Perhaps people want to criticize Ellis for not attempting to write a masterpiece here--but he has accomplished something that many in the "industry" often fail at: he's delivered a sequel that isn't disappointing. Who knows if he is going to go back to writing longer books, or books that get mentioned as the best of the year, and who cares. He's about as commercial as you can get, as far as fiction writers go, but I don't consider him a sell-out in the least, and maybe that is what continues to impress me about him.