Here at Flying Houses, we have a new mission: review all of the books by Chuck Palahniuk and provide a detailed critique of his entire oeuvre. Okay well I am not sure I will be so excited to read Fight Club again since it is oh-so-familiar a concept at this point, but regardless, we have knocked out Survivor, Rant, and Choke in...how long? 3 weeks? What! Coming up next on the table are Invisible Monsters, Snuff, Haunted, Lullaby, and Diary. And then maybe Stranger than Fiction. Difficult task, tedious description, but the books are always quite manageable.
I originally got onto this kick by wanting to read Choke since the movie had just been released. Well, now I can see the movie. There are many details of the film that seem to make it into the review. Main character who is a sex addict that works in a living museum of the colonial era who has a mother with Alzheimer's disease whose health care he pays for by choking at every restaurant in his area and being saved by a fellow patron so that they send him birthday cards with checks in them. The book does not stray very far from that description and I would guess the movie does not either. There is plenty of entertainment to be found and at least a few philosophical truths to be uncovered.
There are over forty chapters in the book and it does skip around in many little vignettes. The main characters are Victor Mancini, his mother Ida Mancini, his best friend Denny, and his mother's caretaker Dr. Paige Marshall. Every character goes through changes in the course of this novel. The opening of the novel shows Victor as a boy with a mother who is always breaking out of jail and sending out signals for him to find her so they can go on more adventures. She is an anarchist.
Some people comment that all of Chuck Palahniuk's books are variations on the same theme. That they're all basically the same book. Chapter 25 contains Ida Mancini's r'aison d'etre--one that does not seem all that far removed from Tyler Durden--but one which is a bit less violent:
"The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.
The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.
She used to say, 'The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.'
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.
Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only thing you'll have left.
At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, 'My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people's lives.'
She'd stared straight into the stupid little boy's eyes and said, 'My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.'
Before the guards took her into the back wearing handcuffs, she'd shouted, 'Convicting me would be redundant. Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp.'
She shouted, 'We are raising a generation of slaves.'
And it was back to prison for Ida Mancini.
'Incorrigible' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind." (159-160)
Longest citation ever? How's that for literary interpretation, eh? You'd never get away with writing a paper on Choke but who knows--in one hundred years perhaps Palahniuk will be studied the same way Hemingway is. That stark, cutting prose style! To be serious again, the last line, "______ isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind" is one of the repeated mantras of the novel, as is "What would Jesus NOT do?" as is "See also: _____. See also: _____." But that above quotation sums up the spirit of this work. Eventually the reader sees how his mother has affected Victor's worldview, how she teaches him to interpret the world differently from what logic shows to be the truth. And truthfully, it does end up being a rather catch-all novel, with several different areas of focus and no real big, serious "theme."
But on the inside cover it does state, for the purposes of the Library of Congress: 1. Alzheimer's Disease--Patients--Fiction, 2. Sex Addiction. But there are basically a few vignettes that are repeated until the novel reaches its tidy, satisfying, closure-providing end.
1) Stories of Victor as a boy and his mother in her prime anarchy mode. The greatest diversion comes in the chapter that describes his mother's means of employment--as a hypnotist that provides spiritual rejuvenation by inducing a wet dream for her clients with famous women in history.
2) Stories of Victor at the Colonial Dunsboro theme park/museum, where he works with his fellow addict friend Denny, and scenes with him and Denny outside the workplace, sometimes at a strip club, and a few other places. These scenes end up being the most effective in the novel. Their friendship is portrayed quite touchingly.
3) Stories of Victor visiting his mother's at St. Anthony's Nursing Home, and his steadily advancing relationship with Dr. Paige Marshall. This also introduces the most ridiculous and absurd plot element--perhaps the most fantastic notion the novel presents--but also concludes rather eloquently.
4) Stories of Victor having sex with other sex addicts. Notably women who are put on a 3 hour leave-of-absence from jail to attend sex addicts meetings while they are actually not working towards their recovery at all. Notably Gwen, a woman who wants Victor to "rape" her. And then, in the longest scene, Tracy who introduces Victor to the "mile-high club" and sex addiction at the same time. The most particularly painful scene involves what happens during one of these sexual bouts and its prolonged effects on Victor's digestive system.
While it may not strive for the absurd heights of Fight Club or Rant, Choke is a fully-satisfying novel. It could be a book-of-the-month club for Oprah if its story wasn't so concerned with naughty subjects. I have read that the movie is not as good as the book, but the book is highly entertaining, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing the movie, now that I know what the story is all about, now that I can compare what was left out versus what deserved to be included. There's very little to criticize in the text itself.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) - Dir. Julian Schnabel
I took The Diving Bell and the Butterfly out from my local library on Sunday, at the same time I finished reading Despair and at the same time I also checked out Choke. It was a DVD, and it was free, and I had heard very much about it at the end of last year, but still had no idea what it was about. I told my mom she was welcome to watch it if interested and she asked me what it was about and I said I didn't really know. I finally got around to watching it last night, and I think it might be most properly enjoyed if you go into it not knowing anything about it. That said, this review will contain "spoilers." Any discussion of this movie's plot is in fact, a spoiler. If you do not want to have the experience of seeing it altered by foreknowledge, please take my word for it and find a copy and two free hours and surrender yourself to it. I cannot imagine anybody would ever be disappointed by this film unless they are totally and avowedly against foreign films.
Let the spoilers begin. The opening minutes of the film are blurry. The sound is difficult to hear, the words are difficult to make out. Eventually the viewer realizes they are in a hospital. There is a first-person perspective, and for a while it appears that the entire film will continue on in this vein. There is clearly a voice speaking meant to be the main character but it becomes apparent after a few minutes that none of the people he sees are able to hear him. We realize it is only an interior monologue. In the first discernible moments of action, two doctors enter to tell this man that he has suffered a cerebrovascular accident, or a stroke that has left him paralyzed from head to toe. They call it, somewhat humorously, "locked-in syndrome." The only muscle over which he has control is his left eye. He can still see out of his right eye, however, and the doctors decide to sew it shut, which is the first of several painful moments in the film.
Eventually we learn that the main character's name is Jean-Dominique Bauby, and that he is the editor of Elle magazine. His wife, or rather, not his wife but the mother of his children, Celine, is the first to visit him. He has left her for a woman named Ines who will end up never visiting him in the hospital, and only calling him once in another one of the more particularly painful scenes in this film. He has two speech therapists, who see hope in his ability to move his tongue slightly.
The main point to the film, however, is the alphabet, which is painstaking for the viewer to watch as it must have been for Bauby to experience. One very patient therapist, Henriette, recites the letters, E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, and so on, which is the order of the most frequently used letters in the French language, until Bauby blinks his left eye to choose the letter to spell the word he wants to communicate. For some viewers that know "some French," such as myself, the translation of the letters Bauby chooses and the ones that appear on the subtitle will sometimes be maddening. When the therapist (or later, the transcriptionist) says "J" and the subtitles say, "I" of course it make sense, but will make anyone who has studied French feel a little bit stupider for reading the subtitles instead of listening. True, if all French people spoke this slowly, I might be able to understand them adequately myself. The appropriate word for these scenes, which then make up the majority of the film, is "painstaking."
Soon, Jean-Dominique, or Jean-Do as he is frequently called, decides to write a memoir, since he had a contract out with a publishing company to write a book before his accident. He writes the entire book by this method of blinking and the title of the book is the same as the movie. The movie is the adaptation of that book, and since it is something of a poetic title, deserves explanation: the "diving bell" is signified by several scenes in the film of himself in a scuba-diving suit, floating helplessly in the depths of the sea, and the "butterfly" is only signified in a shot or two; the diving bell is his body, which cannot move, which cannot speak, and the butterfly is his mind, which is fueled by his memories, and his imagination, which seems to have become more vivid since the rest of his body has suffered paralysis.
There are many excellent scenes in the film--practically every single one is, really--but amongst the ones that stand out more are the two scenes with Max von Sydow, who plays Jean-Do's father, the flashback scene to Lourdes which shows him with a religious ex-girlfriend on a mission to purchase an illuminating Virgin Mary statue, the scene where Celine takes him on a boat and gives him The Count of Monte Cristo, which he had hoped to write a modern update of through a female perspective, and reads to him from a particularly prescient scene, and finally, near the end, the memory of the stroke he suffered, while riding in his car with his son to the theater.
Julian Schnabel is a name that seems familiar because of his background in modern art, and he has only made a few films of note--Before Night Falls, Basquiat, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. To be honest, I saw Before Night Falls a few years ago and I fell asleep, but it was during a period when I fell asleep during many movies (note: I also fell asleep during No Country for Old Men, which did not affect me anywhere near as much as this film). Of course Basquiat was great, particularly for David Bowie playing Andy Warhol, but this film more than any other should establish Schnabel as one of the few true artists among film directors of the present moment, and one can only hope that his work will now appear more frequently due to the recognition this film has received.
Let the spoilers begin. The opening minutes of the film are blurry. The sound is difficult to hear, the words are difficult to make out. Eventually the viewer realizes they are in a hospital. There is a first-person perspective, and for a while it appears that the entire film will continue on in this vein. There is clearly a voice speaking meant to be the main character but it becomes apparent after a few minutes that none of the people he sees are able to hear him. We realize it is only an interior monologue. In the first discernible moments of action, two doctors enter to tell this man that he has suffered a cerebrovascular accident, or a stroke that has left him paralyzed from head to toe. They call it, somewhat humorously, "locked-in syndrome." The only muscle over which he has control is his left eye. He can still see out of his right eye, however, and the doctors decide to sew it shut, which is the first of several painful moments in the film.
Eventually we learn that the main character's name is Jean-Dominique Bauby, and that he is the editor of Elle magazine. His wife, or rather, not his wife but the mother of his children, Celine, is the first to visit him. He has left her for a woman named Ines who will end up never visiting him in the hospital, and only calling him once in another one of the more particularly painful scenes in this film. He has two speech therapists, who see hope in his ability to move his tongue slightly.
The main point to the film, however, is the alphabet, which is painstaking for the viewer to watch as it must have been for Bauby to experience. One very patient therapist, Henriette, recites the letters, E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, and so on, which is the order of the most frequently used letters in the French language, until Bauby blinks his left eye to choose the letter to spell the word he wants to communicate. For some viewers that know "some French," such as myself, the translation of the letters Bauby chooses and the ones that appear on the subtitle will sometimes be maddening. When the therapist (or later, the transcriptionist) says "J" and the subtitles say, "I" of course it make sense, but will make anyone who has studied French feel a little bit stupider for reading the subtitles instead of listening. True, if all French people spoke this slowly, I might be able to understand them adequately myself. The appropriate word for these scenes, which then make up the majority of the film, is "painstaking."
Soon, Jean-Dominique, or Jean-Do as he is frequently called, decides to write a memoir, since he had a contract out with a publishing company to write a book before his accident. He writes the entire book by this method of blinking and the title of the book is the same as the movie. The movie is the adaptation of that book, and since it is something of a poetic title, deserves explanation: the "diving bell" is signified by several scenes in the film of himself in a scuba-diving suit, floating helplessly in the depths of the sea, and the "butterfly" is only signified in a shot or two; the diving bell is his body, which cannot move, which cannot speak, and the butterfly is his mind, which is fueled by his memories, and his imagination, which seems to have become more vivid since the rest of his body has suffered paralysis.
There are many excellent scenes in the film--practically every single one is, really--but amongst the ones that stand out more are the two scenes with Max von Sydow, who plays Jean-Do's father, the flashback scene to Lourdes which shows him with a religious ex-girlfriend on a mission to purchase an illuminating Virgin Mary statue, the scene where Celine takes him on a boat and gives him The Count of Monte Cristo, which he had hoped to write a modern update of through a female perspective, and reads to him from a particularly prescient scene, and finally, near the end, the memory of the stroke he suffered, while riding in his car with his son to the theater.
Julian Schnabel is a name that seems familiar because of his background in modern art, and he has only made a few films of note--Before Night Falls, Basquiat, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. To be honest, I saw Before Night Falls a few years ago and I fell asleep, but it was during a period when I fell asleep during many movies (note: I also fell asleep during No Country for Old Men, which did not affect me anywhere near as much as this film). Of course Basquiat was great, particularly for David Bowie playing Andy Warhol, but this film more than any other should establish Schnabel as one of the few true artists among film directors of the present moment, and one can only hope that his work will now appear more frequently due to the recognition this film has received.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Testimonial
"Testimonial," a story 922 words in length, was started as another attempt at the Writer's Digest contest. I do not feel this is as strong as "Visitation," but it is my attempt at not sugarcoating reality. I have had a few more ideas for stories, but they always strike me as contrived. I don't feel this is contrived, but I really don't feel it would win any contests.
Testimonial
The game is a stupid one. Pretend, for a few minutes, that something manifest in your mind is real. A basketball. Imagine a basketball. Somebody is bouncing that basketball. Who is easier to picture: yourself or Michael Jordan? Fine, yourself. You are bouncing a basketball in your mind. But why are you playing basketball? Are you a basketball player? Do you hope to play in the NBA? Or only at the junior varsity level in your high school? There are many talented basketball players, but only the best will get paid to play the game. Nevertheless, let us remove all doubt. You are bouncing a basketball in your mind.
For the sake of atmosphere, let us place you in an empty outdoor basketball court. Let us pretend that you live in Los Angeles and that you are playing at the Silver Lake reservoir and there is no one else there except yourself. You are bouncing the ball, now dribbling as you begin to run, and you perform a lay up successfully. You shoot around for a while. What are you doing? Are you trying to get exercise or are you showing off or is it simply pleasurable to make the ball go in the hoop?
For the sake of drama, let us place a scout for the Los Angeles Lakers in his car, returning to his home in Glendale. He is driving around Silver Lake and he sees you, the lone basketball player, on the court there. He parks his car on the side of the road and walks up to the court. He grabs onto the chain-link fence surrounding the court. He watches silently. You are shooting from beyond the three-point arc now, and you are not missing. You have not missed a single shot. It is the kind of streak that only happens when no one else is watching.
The scout finally draws attention to himself. He starts clapping. He walks over to the court.
“Have you ever considered playing ball professionally?” he asks.
You do not say anything back because the scout is not real. He is just a manifestation in your mind.
The scout says, “I’m a scout for the Los Angeles Lakers, and with the way you shoot, you could make it professionally. You don’t miss a single shot.”
There are no other players on the court with you and so you have no idea how you would work within the context of a team. Neither does the scout, and he does not exist. The scout disappears because you no longer want to harbor false illusions about playing in the NBA. Now you are just on the court again by yourself, shooting more hoops.
In order to truly be recruited by an athletic scout, you must show that you can play with others, and that you are better than all the others. It’s all about context, you realize. An empty playing field does not provide context. It is only through dominance that talent is expressed.
Forget about basketball. You are not a basketball player. You wouldn’t be wasting your time with this silly mental exercise if you were a basketball player. You would be out in a gym, organizing an impromptu game, with other real people, not sitting or laying down, imagining fake ones.
Let’s start over, so the game isn’t quite as stupid this time. Imagine the roof of a house. Are you inside that house, underneath the roof, or on top of it? Are you a roofer yourself? Have you ever come into contact with someone in supply of roofies? That was a digression, sorry. You are not a roofer, and you are content with the present condition of your roof. If you are not content you cannot afford to fix your roof and so shabby it will stay until some miracle occurs. So, it turns out that you have a shabby roof, doesn’t it? You have a roof that you can’t afford to fix because you have more important things to spend your money on. Like gas. Food. Drink. It is possible to get by solely on water but variable drink flavors are quite a necessity of modern living. Water is plain and is predictable. It is the best thing in the world when you are finished with a long exercise, but you must be allowed more than one type of beverage. You are stuck paying a cell phone bill every month. It’s a necessity. You are also stuck with a cable and internet bill. One of them is a necessity and the other is a good deal bundled together, so why not? This does not even take into consideration whatever you must pay to live in the place you live and it is best if that is not explored at the moment.
So you need a miracle to fix your roof. You need money to fall out of the sky. You need to win the lottery, even though you don’t play the lottery because you don’t harbor false illusions about the nature of luck. What is going to happen? What is your job? If you had a higher-paying job, you wouldn’t have to worry about your shabby roof now would you? It would be fixed. You would be able to afford it.
Okay, that’s all. The stupid game is over. Stop imagining things now. No more basketballs or roofs. Go turn on the TV instead. Make sure you use a DVR so you can fast-forward through all those commercials. That’s much better.
Testimonial
The game is a stupid one. Pretend, for a few minutes, that something manifest in your mind is real. A basketball. Imagine a basketball. Somebody is bouncing that basketball. Who is easier to picture: yourself or Michael Jordan? Fine, yourself. You are bouncing a basketball in your mind. But why are you playing basketball? Are you a basketball player? Do you hope to play in the NBA? Or only at the junior varsity level in your high school? There are many talented basketball players, but only the best will get paid to play the game. Nevertheless, let us remove all doubt. You are bouncing a basketball in your mind.
For the sake of atmosphere, let us place you in an empty outdoor basketball court. Let us pretend that you live in Los Angeles and that you are playing at the Silver Lake reservoir and there is no one else there except yourself. You are bouncing the ball, now dribbling as you begin to run, and you perform a lay up successfully. You shoot around for a while. What are you doing? Are you trying to get exercise or are you showing off or is it simply pleasurable to make the ball go in the hoop?
For the sake of drama, let us place a scout for the Los Angeles Lakers in his car, returning to his home in Glendale. He is driving around Silver Lake and he sees you, the lone basketball player, on the court there. He parks his car on the side of the road and walks up to the court. He grabs onto the chain-link fence surrounding the court. He watches silently. You are shooting from beyond the three-point arc now, and you are not missing. You have not missed a single shot. It is the kind of streak that only happens when no one else is watching.
The scout finally draws attention to himself. He starts clapping. He walks over to the court.
“Have you ever considered playing ball professionally?” he asks.
You do not say anything back because the scout is not real. He is just a manifestation in your mind.
The scout says, “I’m a scout for the Los Angeles Lakers, and with the way you shoot, you could make it professionally. You don’t miss a single shot.”
There are no other players on the court with you and so you have no idea how you would work within the context of a team. Neither does the scout, and he does not exist. The scout disappears because you no longer want to harbor false illusions about playing in the NBA. Now you are just on the court again by yourself, shooting more hoops.
In order to truly be recruited by an athletic scout, you must show that you can play with others, and that you are better than all the others. It’s all about context, you realize. An empty playing field does not provide context. It is only through dominance that talent is expressed.
Forget about basketball. You are not a basketball player. You wouldn’t be wasting your time with this silly mental exercise if you were a basketball player. You would be out in a gym, organizing an impromptu game, with other real people, not sitting or laying down, imagining fake ones.
Let’s start over, so the game isn’t quite as stupid this time. Imagine the roof of a house. Are you inside that house, underneath the roof, or on top of it? Are you a roofer yourself? Have you ever come into contact with someone in supply of roofies? That was a digression, sorry. You are not a roofer, and you are content with the present condition of your roof. If you are not content you cannot afford to fix your roof and so shabby it will stay until some miracle occurs. So, it turns out that you have a shabby roof, doesn’t it? You have a roof that you can’t afford to fix because you have more important things to spend your money on. Like gas. Food. Drink. It is possible to get by solely on water but variable drink flavors are quite a necessity of modern living. Water is plain and is predictable. It is the best thing in the world when you are finished with a long exercise, but you must be allowed more than one type of beverage. You are stuck paying a cell phone bill every month. It’s a necessity. You are also stuck with a cable and internet bill. One of them is a necessity and the other is a good deal bundled together, so why not? This does not even take into consideration whatever you must pay to live in the place you live and it is best if that is not explored at the moment.
So you need a miracle to fix your roof. You need money to fall out of the sky. You need to win the lottery, even though you don’t play the lottery because you don’t harbor false illusions about the nature of luck. What is going to happen? What is your job? If you had a higher-paying job, you wouldn’t have to worry about your shabby roof now would you? It would be fixed. You would be able to afford it.
Okay, that’s all. The stupid game is over. Stop imagining things now. No more basketballs or roofs. Go turn on the TV instead. Make sure you use a DVR so you can fast-forward through all those commercials. That’s much better.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Despair - Vladimir Nabokov
Prepare yourself for another redundant review of praise for V. Nabokov. While it does not quite match the tirelessly beautiful prose of Lolita, or the ever-consuming intrigue and originality of Pale Fire, Despair at least eclipses the mostly straightforward Laughter in the Dark in its execution of Nabokov's version of "popular fiction." That is, the New York Times Bestseller fiction of the day (whether it be 1934, 1965, or 2008), which to be sure, will always be far inferior to practically every sentence this master has set down for print. I was not able to work Bend Sinister into that sentence of novel comparing (which would then include all the works of Nabokov I have read, save Speak, Memory which really should be separately categorized) because it is too clumsy a sentence as it is--though I would also put Despair above that work in its "page-turner" quality. Bend Sinister is a book that requires yet another reading by me someday, but not before Pnin, Ada, or Ardor, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or Look at the Harlequins! are tackled (at least those, not including Invitation to a Beheading).
But I had wanted to read Despair for roughly six years and finally got around to it over these past few days. And it was quite different from what I was expecting. I was expecting a story of suicide, with respect to the tagline the novel is marketed by: "Despair is the sardonic story of a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder." Perhaps that very accurate description of the novel would lead any reasonable reader to realize it was not going to be about suicide, but I suppose I associated too much feeling with the title of the work. Suicide is only briefly mentioned--as an excuse for the murder to take place, and as a dismissed means to an end--and anytime there is an opportunity to quote Nabokov, I must flower up the content of Flying Houses by giving into the temptation:
"'He can't be saved,' said I, with what is called, I believe, a bitter smile. 'He is determined to die on his birthday: the ninth of March--that is to say, the day after tomorrow; and the President of the State could not prevent it. Suicide is the worst form of self-indulgence. All one can do is to comply with the martyr's whim and brighten up things for him by granting him the knowledge that in dying he performs a good useful deed--of a crude material nature, perhaps, but anyhow, useful.'" (150-151)
And consequently:
"All is dark, all is dreadful, and I do not see any special reason for my lingering in the dark, vainly invented world. Not that I would contemplate killing myself: it would be uneconomical--as we find in almost every country a person paid by the state to help a man lethally. And then the hollow hum of blank eternity." (220)
The narrator, Hermann Karlovich, is a neurotic madman along the similar lines of H.H. or Charles Kinbote. His atheism is pronounced as the particularly memorable opening to chapter six professes, which would be too much to quote verbatim for an accurate depiction of his worldview. He is a German salesman in the chocolate business who only needs to describe his specific function once ("We were urging a foreign firm on the verge of bankruptcy to convert their manufacturing process to that of ours to supply Czechoslovakia, and so that was how I came to be in Prague." (15)) While in Prague, Hermann comes across a "marvel"--a tramp, lying in a forest just outside town, that appears exactly like himself, in his own estimation. He wakes the man up and the man wonders why he has been disturbed from his slumber and Hermann offers him a cigarette and then calls him a fool and holds up a mirror to the man's face and tells him that he is a double of him.
The man's name turns out to be Felix, and there are not many other characters in Despair. There is only Lydia, Hermann's rather dense, simple wife, Ardalion, her cousin who is a painter of questionable talent. There is also Orlovius, the only friend of Hermann's and Lydia's that is mentioned. Hermann plans several encounters with Felix, finally proposing one night that Felix stage a performance playing the part of Hermann for some definite gain of a thousand marks. After some persuasion, Felix agrees, and then Hermann's plan springs to action. What he intends to do is like a variation on James Cain's Double Indemnity--a mystery plot with a comparable degree of trickery, though also quite simple in its own way.
The circumstance under which Hermann writes this "memoir" is one of the masterstrokes of the novel--when it all appears that things have gone as planned, only for the author to continue on after the fake happy ending. The author's enduring repartee with the reader is reminiscent of certain parts of Mann's Doctor Faustus, except in this case, it is far more excessive and comic. One particular boast he continues to make is of his literary mastery ("And speaking of literature, there is not a thing about it that I do not know. It has always been quite a hobby of mine." (55)), which might be just be attractive to me for obviously personal reasons:
"All this is a digression and not an evasion--most emphatically not an evasion; for I fear nothing and will tell all. It should be admitted that I exercise an exquisite control not only over myself but over my style of writing. How many novels I wrote when young--just like that, casually, and without the least intention of publishing them. Here is another utterance: a published manuscript, says Swift, is comparable to a whore." (89-90)
Or for random bits of comedy:
"Enough--let us go on--roars of laughter are not in my line! Enough, it is not all so simple as you seem to think, you swine, you! Oh, yes, I am going to curse at you, none can forbid me to curse. And not to have a looking glass in my room--that is also my right!" (31)
There also appear to be self-references, when Hermann discusses that he will be passing off his manuscript to a Russian author whom he has met in the town that he presently inhabits, who is then described by Hermann employing rather clever details that abound in this story of "doubles." Despair is a mix of the more plot-oriented version of Nabokov and the literary experimentalist Nabokov and at 222 pages it may just be the short, ideal length of a novel. I would remark that it would provide the material for an excellent Hollywood adaptation, but I find it has already been done, in 1979 (by Rainer Werner Fassbinder). In short, another redundant review of a book by Nabokov on Flying Houses--"It's good. Duh."
But I had wanted to read Despair for roughly six years and finally got around to it over these past few days. And it was quite different from what I was expecting. I was expecting a story of suicide, with respect to the tagline the novel is marketed by: "Despair is the sardonic story of a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder." Perhaps that very accurate description of the novel would lead any reasonable reader to realize it was not going to be about suicide, but I suppose I associated too much feeling with the title of the work. Suicide is only briefly mentioned--as an excuse for the murder to take place, and as a dismissed means to an end--and anytime there is an opportunity to quote Nabokov, I must flower up the content of Flying Houses by giving into the temptation:
"'He can't be saved,' said I, with what is called, I believe, a bitter smile. 'He is determined to die on his birthday: the ninth of March--that is to say, the day after tomorrow; and the President of the State could not prevent it. Suicide is the worst form of self-indulgence. All one can do is to comply with the martyr's whim and brighten up things for him by granting him the knowledge that in dying he performs a good useful deed--of a crude material nature, perhaps, but anyhow, useful.'" (150-151)
And consequently:
"All is dark, all is dreadful, and I do not see any special reason for my lingering in the dark, vainly invented world. Not that I would contemplate killing myself: it would be uneconomical--as we find in almost every country a person paid by the state to help a man lethally. And then the hollow hum of blank eternity." (220)
The narrator, Hermann Karlovich, is a neurotic madman along the similar lines of H.H. or Charles Kinbote. His atheism is pronounced as the particularly memorable opening to chapter six professes, which would be too much to quote verbatim for an accurate depiction of his worldview. He is a German salesman in the chocolate business who only needs to describe his specific function once ("We were urging a foreign firm on the verge of bankruptcy to convert their manufacturing process to that of ours to supply Czechoslovakia, and so that was how I came to be in Prague." (15)) While in Prague, Hermann comes across a "marvel"--a tramp, lying in a forest just outside town, that appears exactly like himself, in his own estimation. He wakes the man up and the man wonders why he has been disturbed from his slumber and Hermann offers him a cigarette and then calls him a fool and holds up a mirror to the man's face and tells him that he is a double of him.
The man's name turns out to be Felix, and there are not many other characters in Despair. There is only Lydia, Hermann's rather dense, simple wife, Ardalion, her cousin who is a painter of questionable talent. There is also Orlovius, the only friend of Hermann's and Lydia's that is mentioned. Hermann plans several encounters with Felix, finally proposing one night that Felix stage a performance playing the part of Hermann for some definite gain of a thousand marks. After some persuasion, Felix agrees, and then Hermann's plan springs to action. What he intends to do is like a variation on James Cain's Double Indemnity--a mystery plot with a comparable degree of trickery, though also quite simple in its own way.
The circumstance under which Hermann writes this "memoir" is one of the masterstrokes of the novel--when it all appears that things have gone as planned, only for the author to continue on after the fake happy ending. The author's enduring repartee with the reader is reminiscent of certain parts of Mann's Doctor Faustus, except in this case, it is far more excessive and comic. One particular boast he continues to make is of his literary mastery ("And speaking of literature, there is not a thing about it that I do not know. It has always been quite a hobby of mine." (55)), which might be just be attractive to me for obviously personal reasons:
"All this is a digression and not an evasion--most emphatically not an evasion; for I fear nothing and will tell all. It should be admitted that I exercise an exquisite control not only over myself but over my style of writing. How many novels I wrote when young--just like that, casually, and without the least intention of publishing them. Here is another utterance: a published manuscript, says Swift, is comparable to a whore." (89-90)
Or for random bits of comedy:
"Enough--let us go on--roars of laughter are not in my line! Enough, it is not all so simple as you seem to think, you swine, you! Oh, yes, I am going to curse at you, none can forbid me to curse. And not to have a looking glass in my room--that is also my right!" (31)
There also appear to be self-references, when Hermann discusses that he will be passing off his manuscript to a Russian author whom he has met in the town that he presently inhabits, who is then described by Hermann employing rather clever details that abound in this story of "doubles." Despair is a mix of the more plot-oriented version of Nabokov and the literary experimentalist Nabokov and at 222 pages it may just be the short, ideal length of a novel. I would remark that it would provide the material for an excellent Hollywood adaptation, but I find it has already been done, in 1979 (by Rainer Werner Fassbinder). In short, another redundant review of a book by Nabokov on Flying Houses--"It's good. Duh."
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Rant - Chuck Palahniuk
After Survivor, and now Rant, I find myself on a quest to read all of Chuck Palahniuk's books from the library. Is Rant as good as Survivor or Fight Club? It definitely does not appear that way at first, but by its end it reveals itself to be the most inventive thing I have read by him yet. I would agree with a couple other reviews I have read of the book that refer to it as being more "sci-fi." It doesn't appear that way at first, with all of the countryish backwoods elementary-level grammar spoken by the characters at the beginning, but by its end, the story has completely mutated into something else that is at once far more compelling and equally absurd. But there are a few things you need to know about it before you go and check it out of your local library:
1) It is an oral history. The only other book I've read in this format is Please Kill Me, which was excellently done--but which I personally find to be something of a cop-out as a writer of fiction. That is, your "book" is really just a lot of different people's memories. That said, a wide divergence of remembrance is perhaps more authoritative than a single author's imagination. Also, a single author doesn't do the work of personally going out and interviewing every person connected to a certain subject. They just make it up as they go along. In the opening page, Palahniuk gives his own warning about the format of the book:
"Author's Note: This book is written in the style of an oral history, a form which requires interviewing a wide variety of witnesses and compiling their testimony. Anytime multiple sources are questioned about a shared experience, it's inevitable for them occasionally to contradict each other. For additional biographies written in this style, please see Capote by George Plimpton, Edie by Jean Stein, and Lexicon Devil by Brendan Mullen."
2) Boosted Peaks and Party Crashing are two of the most important aspects to understand. When one of the major contributors, Shot Dunyan, explains Boosted Peaks, Rant picks up a bit more speed and reveals the second of its several layers. Boosted Peaks are the form of entertainment for the future, rendering books and movies obsolete. Humans are implanted with a switch on the back of their neck that allows them to record their experiences, with all five senses included, and to later sell them to retail stores where they can be rented and experienced by other people. Instead of watching a movie, you live a movie, in essence. There are also other ways to manipulate the "neural transcripts," such as taking acid while experiencing one, and then re-wiring it through one's own experience.
Party Crashing is the practice of decorating a car (for either a "Wedding Night" with "just married" decorations dragging behind a car, a "Tree Night" with a Christmas tree tied to the top, a "Mattress Night" with a mattress tied to the top, or "Student Driver Night" with a student driver sign) with flags as the night calls for, recruiting a team to ride in the car, and roaming the freeways looking for other teams of players to bump against other cars, cause accidents, and stage disputes on the side of the road after a crash. One memorable paragraph about the seemingly cathartic effects of Party Crashing follows as thus:
"From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy." (130)
The main character in this book is Rant Casey, who has a strange experience involving his grandmother's death by a Black Widow spider, who is told by his "real father" where to find ancient coins worth untold millions of dollars, and who is eventually maltreated to the degree that he literally gets off on sticking his arms down burrowing animal holes for the animals to bite his arms, giving him rabies. Rabies become another major concern in this novel, as the great epidemic of the future.
The society depicted in this book is also notable, though it is not understood until other practices like Boosted Peaks and Party Crashing are. There are Daytimers and Nighttimers, with half of society spending the usual 8 AM to 8 PM, outside, at school, at their jobs, and the other half of society out between 8 PM and 8 AM. There is the I-SEE-U apparatus which has effectively taken over as the governing element of society, and it is not hard to consider Rant, published in 2007, a response to the changing shape of American operations post 9/11.
Eventually Rant Casey gets out of his high school with a $10,000 check and a diploma without graduating for reasons I can't entirely remember and then goes off to live in the City, where one night he meets Echo Lawrence, Green Taylor Simms, and Shot Dunyan on the side of the road after they throw out Tina Something. He joins their posse and the next large portion of the book is an extremely thorough examination of all aspects to Party Crashing. But eventually, one of the people they allow to "Mercy Crash" them, Neddy Nelson, eventually says in one of his testimonies that Party Crashing is not quite as dumb and simple as it seems, that people are doing it more than just for the fun of getting bumped around in cars.
There are a few dozen witnesses in Rant and each of them is given their own distinct personality and voice. While the book takes a while to get started, by its end there is no less compelling material than Survivor or Fight Club. Some might believe the ending goes a little too far off the cliff, but all of the testimony surrounding it combines to create a wholly believable reality. It may be a bit far-fetched, the way things end up getting explained, but it's nothing a reader will struggle against believing, or wanting to believe. Basically, if you pick up this book, and get through the first hundred pages, and start feeling like it's going nowhere, just give it a little more patience. It's far more intelligently designed than it seems.
1) It is an oral history. The only other book I've read in this format is Please Kill Me, which was excellently done--but which I personally find to be something of a cop-out as a writer of fiction. That is, your "book" is really just a lot of different people's memories. That said, a wide divergence of remembrance is perhaps more authoritative than a single author's imagination. Also, a single author doesn't do the work of personally going out and interviewing every person connected to a certain subject. They just make it up as they go along. In the opening page, Palahniuk gives his own warning about the format of the book:
"Author's Note: This book is written in the style of an oral history, a form which requires interviewing a wide variety of witnesses and compiling their testimony. Anytime multiple sources are questioned about a shared experience, it's inevitable for them occasionally to contradict each other. For additional biographies written in this style, please see Capote by George Plimpton, Edie by Jean Stein, and Lexicon Devil by Brendan Mullen."
2) Boosted Peaks and Party Crashing are two of the most important aspects to understand. When one of the major contributors, Shot Dunyan, explains Boosted Peaks, Rant picks up a bit more speed and reveals the second of its several layers. Boosted Peaks are the form of entertainment for the future, rendering books and movies obsolete. Humans are implanted with a switch on the back of their neck that allows them to record their experiences, with all five senses included, and to later sell them to retail stores where they can be rented and experienced by other people. Instead of watching a movie, you live a movie, in essence. There are also other ways to manipulate the "neural transcripts," such as taking acid while experiencing one, and then re-wiring it through one's own experience.
Party Crashing is the practice of decorating a car (for either a "Wedding Night" with "just married" decorations dragging behind a car, a "Tree Night" with a Christmas tree tied to the top, a "Mattress Night" with a mattress tied to the top, or "Student Driver Night" with a student driver sign) with flags as the night calls for, recruiting a team to ride in the car, and roaming the freeways looking for other teams of players to bump against other cars, cause accidents, and stage disputes on the side of the road after a crash. One memorable paragraph about the seemingly cathartic effects of Party Crashing follows as thus:
"From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy." (130)
The main character in this book is Rant Casey, who has a strange experience involving his grandmother's death by a Black Widow spider, who is told by his "real father" where to find ancient coins worth untold millions of dollars, and who is eventually maltreated to the degree that he literally gets off on sticking his arms down burrowing animal holes for the animals to bite his arms, giving him rabies. Rabies become another major concern in this novel, as the great epidemic of the future.
The society depicted in this book is also notable, though it is not understood until other practices like Boosted Peaks and Party Crashing are. There are Daytimers and Nighttimers, with half of society spending the usual 8 AM to 8 PM, outside, at school, at their jobs, and the other half of society out between 8 PM and 8 AM. There is the I-SEE-U apparatus which has effectively taken over as the governing element of society, and it is not hard to consider Rant, published in 2007, a response to the changing shape of American operations post 9/11.
Eventually Rant Casey gets out of his high school with a $10,000 check and a diploma without graduating for reasons I can't entirely remember and then goes off to live in the City, where one night he meets Echo Lawrence, Green Taylor Simms, and Shot Dunyan on the side of the road after they throw out Tina Something. He joins their posse and the next large portion of the book is an extremely thorough examination of all aspects to Party Crashing. But eventually, one of the people they allow to "Mercy Crash" them, Neddy Nelson, eventually says in one of his testimonies that Party Crashing is not quite as dumb and simple as it seems, that people are doing it more than just for the fun of getting bumped around in cars.
There are a few dozen witnesses in Rant and each of them is given their own distinct personality and voice. While the book takes a while to get started, by its end there is no less compelling material than Survivor or Fight Club. Some might believe the ending goes a little too far off the cliff, but all of the testimony surrounding it combines to create a wholly believable reality. It may be a bit far-fetched, the way things end up getting explained, but it's nothing a reader will struggle against believing, or wanting to believe. Basically, if you pick up this book, and get through the first hundred pages, and start feeling like it's going nowhere, just give it a little more patience. It's far more intelligently designed than it seems.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Cubs Lose
Please proceed to Mark DeRosa's blog on the "Cool Blogs and Things" sidebar. He accurately sums up the terrible feeling pervading so many people intimately connected to this team this year.
Having been an Angeleno for the majority of the 2008 Season, and having lived two miles down Sunset Blvd. from Dodger Stadium, and having seen the spiritual 180 that Manny Ramirez brought to that team on July 31, I am not all that surprised, but I do feel foolish for always wishing for a Cubs vs Dodgers playoff series. Last night after the final pitch was thrown to my personal savior, Alfonso Soriano, and the celebrations began, I made a mischievous remark that of all the teams I would like to see win in the National League besides the Cubs, it was the Dodgers, so a very small part of me was happy for them.
That does not change the absolute pain that so many are feeling now. The point in this case is, an excellent season, one of the best seasons they've ever played, period. The best season I've ever seen them play. The year they look better than every single other team. And they get swept, and in three games, after a long, long, extraordinarily well-played season, it's all over.
I would like to say that Alfonso Soriano seriously let me down. He is the only player I have a jersey for at the moment, and I am a bit ashamed of the way he played in the post-season. He did have an extremely encouraging leadoff single in game 2, but that is old news and doesn't matter now. I'm very upset by the way he played, particularly last night, when there were many, many opportunities to make up the small two-run deficit to force a game 4. But it's all over now, and it's not even worth talking about, much less worth blogging about. Consider this an elegy for the Cubs of 2008 the same way a fairly recent post was an elegy for David Foster Wallace mixed in with a sense of true optimism for this baseball team that will surely never fail to live up to its legend. If the Cubs win, it is almost a disappointment in a way that they won't have that special quality that has defined them for ages now. If the Cubs had won the World Series, we might truly feel that the apocalypse was upon us, particularly as things get tense politically and economically in this country. It's just a shame, though. I sent a message to Joe Biden right after he was named Obama's running mate. I told him to go see Rage Against the Machine and Jello Biafra at the festival going on at the DNC in Denver, CO this year, and I told him that the Cubs would win the World Series, then Barack would get elected President, and then Chicago would be named the host city for the 2016 Olympics. I'm always very disappointed when I make predictions and they don't come true. It makes me feel like even more of a failure. At least I am in good company back in Chicago. This is the best place in the world to be proud of being a loser.
Having been an Angeleno for the majority of the 2008 Season, and having lived two miles down Sunset Blvd. from Dodger Stadium, and having seen the spiritual 180 that Manny Ramirez brought to that team on July 31, I am not all that surprised, but I do feel foolish for always wishing for a Cubs vs Dodgers playoff series. Last night after the final pitch was thrown to my personal savior, Alfonso Soriano, and the celebrations began, I made a mischievous remark that of all the teams I would like to see win in the National League besides the Cubs, it was the Dodgers, so a very small part of me was happy for them.
That does not change the absolute pain that so many are feeling now. The point in this case is, an excellent season, one of the best seasons they've ever played, period. The best season I've ever seen them play. The year they look better than every single other team. And they get swept, and in three games, after a long, long, extraordinarily well-played season, it's all over.
I would like to say that Alfonso Soriano seriously let me down. He is the only player I have a jersey for at the moment, and I am a bit ashamed of the way he played in the post-season. He did have an extremely encouraging leadoff single in game 2, but that is old news and doesn't matter now. I'm very upset by the way he played, particularly last night, when there were many, many opportunities to make up the small two-run deficit to force a game 4. But it's all over now, and it's not even worth talking about, much less worth blogging about. Consider this an elegy for the Cubs of 2008 the same way a fairly recent post was an elegy for David Foster Wallace mixed in with a sense of true optimism for this baseball team that will surely never fail to live up to its legend. If the Cubs win, it is almost a disappointment in a way that they won't have that special quality that has defined them for ages now. If the Cubs had won the World Series, we might truly feel that the apocalypse was upon us, particularly as things get tense politically and economically in this country. It's just a shame, though. I sent a message to Joe Biden right after he was named Obama's running mate. I told him to go see Rage Against the Machine and Jello Biafra at the festival going on at the DNC in Denver, CO this year, and I told him that the Cubs would win the World Series, then Barack would get elected President, and then Chicago would be named the host city for the 2016 Olympics. I'm always very disappointed when I make predictions and they don't come true. It makes me feel like even more of a failure. At least I am in good company back in Chicago. This is the best place in the world to be proud of being a loser.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Dead Boys - Richard Lange
I only mention that because two of the blurbs for Dead Boys invoke Carver (but they also include Denis Johnson). Richard Lange's work does have a bit in common with both of them. The stark style, the "grittiness." But beyond marketing techniques, once you get down to the actual stories, it's clear that Lange has his own slightly skewed brand of originality that Carver and Johnson both employed and employ.
There are very few weak spots in the book. The only story that took me a while to get through was the opener, "Fuzzyland," which is probably the longest story in the book. Okay that's not true. "Bank of America" and "Long Lost" are just as if not slightly longer. But "Fuzzyland" is the most content to meander along harmlessly. It's about a salesman whose younger sister has just been raped and how he and his wife drive from L.A. down to her area of San Diego and stay with her for a weekend and go to Tijuana while a fire continues to bear down on the area near her condo. There are some good moments in it, and it is by no means a dull story, but it may be one of the weaker ones in the collection. But I feel really bad saying that.
"Bank of America" is the second story and it is about a painter who robs banks in his spare time while being a totally normal husband and father at the same time. All of the stories in this collection are first person. This is one of the more notable ones.
"The Bogo-Indian Defense" is about a group of older guys who hang out at a donut shop and play chess. Then one of them dies and one of them gives the narrator the task of returning the ashes to an estranged daughter in Downey. All of these stories take place in the Los Angeles region.
"Long Lost" is an especially bizarre piece about two brothers that meet for the first time over Christmas. I particularly liked this story because the main couple lives in Silverlake and invites the brother to stay with them there.
"Telephone Bird" is where the collection starts to pick up, in my opinion. From here to the end, the stories seem to get better and better. The main character here lives in a boarding house and works as a temp at a gas company while all the other workers are on strike. There is a bird that sounds like a telephone ringing that keeps him up at night. There are other residents of the boarding house that act as extras in a zombie movie. Another one of them is a law school dropout who is mentally unstable.
"Culver City" is about a troubled marriage between a man who takes dying pets away to be put to sleep and a coffee shop waitress who supposedly hangs out with Hollywood celebrities and finds a picture of gay sex that she hopes to use to blackmail the actors in question for $100,000. They also have a son. The husband is sure that the picture will only cause more trouble, and it does.
"Love Lifted Me" may be one of the best stories in the collection. It is about an alcoholic guy living in a motel in Van Nuys who hang outs with/protects a 16-year-old meth addict who is engaged to a guy named Eightball, whose father comes into town for their wedding. Also, the main character is haunted by the ghost of his wife, who jumped off the highway overpass where the Hollywood, Harbor and Pasadena freeways intersect. When they drive over to the county courthouse, the car breaks down, and they end up walking into Chinatown. And the main character thinks he meets a postal worker at a bar who likes him. It's a crazy story.
"Loss Prevention," like "Bank of America" is probably the most "blockbuster" story in this bunch. It is about a new security guard trainee at a Chinese-run grocery store and his friend who is a recovered drug addict and loves to listen to Neil Young. They half-confront a lady who is shoplifting and then are later faced with a harrowing situation.
"The Hero Shot" is about a guy who moved to L.A. when he was young to try to make it as an actor, got one speaking role, two lines, received a lot of encouragement, but eventually served out his time in the city with no more breaks. He goes home to live with his widowed mother. He sells his old comic books for $500. His brother lives down the street from his mom and never visits. This is another very-affecting piece.
"Blind-Made Products" is named for the factory where the narrator's blind ex-girlfriend used to work. The story is mainly about helping a friend named Dee Dee move to a new apartment where they then have a pretty cool party and then run out into the desert to set fire to her car. Another very energetic, memorable story.
"Everything Beautiful is Far Away" -- I don't remember what it is about off the top of my head. Let me check. Oh yeah, it's about the guy who is stalking his ex-girlfriend named Lana and works at a newsstand. This is another especially bizarre story that works to incredible dramatic effect. Also he lives in a bachelor unit and paints the brick wall that is his only view into a beach scene.
"Dead Boys," the title story, is also arguably the best story in the collection. It features the most writing about "the workplace" and slim, yet devastating details about the narrator's concern for a co-worker that he goes to a strip joint with. Thus, the last two paragraphs of the book are extremely powerful. It ends with a bang.
I read this book in two days and didn't really want to have to stop to pause in between. None of the short stories exasperated me. It's hard to review a book of short stories. You have to describe so many different little parts. At least in Jesus' Son the stories are all seemingly tied together by the same main character. Here, some of the main characters may be interchangeable, but they all have distinct little foibles that would be way too disorienting to ever make the case that they were the same person. They are lived in lives. Many of them are borderline alcoholics but few of them toy around with very hard drugs. They are fundamentally decent people. The setting that Lange places them in is the only recurring central character. Anybody who has lived in L.A. will enjoy this book for the all-too-familiar tone of desperation that permeates the city underneath, and anybody who has not lived there will probably enjoy this book and then want to move there to see if it is crazy as Lange makes it out to be. No matter what other weird opinions I have on this book, all of the prose is excellent, and Richard Lange definitely deserves to reach a wider audience. Apparently he is working on a novel now and it will soon be published. I'm definitely looking forward to it.
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