Tweet
Fiction Chronicle
The New York Times
Sunday Book Review
July 5, 2009
Reviews by JOSEPH SALVATORE
PERFORATED HEART
By Eric Bogosian
Simon & Schuster
Bogosian, the manic monologist of New York's downtown in the 1970s and
'80s, may be even more manic today ' writing drama, screenplays and
fiction while continuing to act. However, there's no
jack-of-all-trades syndrome here: Bogosian takes his fiction
seriously, creating powerful and often disturbing characters and
rendering them in language as precise as it is authentic. This novel,
his third, is his most assured to date. Told entirely in diary
entries, the story shows us two different periods in the life of
Richard Morris, an American writer now in his 50s. When the book opens
in 2005, Morris's once luminous career has started to fade. He loses
literary prizes, long-time girlfriends, lovers and friends. His editor
starts ignoring him. Jaded by fame, he confuses decades of selfishness
and indulgence with the dedication great art requires. Then his life
takes a turn: open-heart surgery. During his convalescence, he
uncovers a box of diaries from 30 years earlier, when a young,
ambitious Morris moved to New York to pursue literary
stardom. Alternating between the past and the present, the entries
allow a rich portrait of Morris to emerge. Bogosian renders 1970s New
York City beautifully, describing the great blackout as well as
legendary clubs like Max's Kansas City. A few conveniently plotted
events permit reunions and resolutions, but the plot isn't the
point. Bogosian's novel explores what it's like to get what we thought
we wanted. Reading the words of young Richard, old Richard writes:
`This kid gives birth to the man I am now.' Would that someone had
warned him.
UGLY MAN
Stories
By Dennis Cooper.
Harper Perennial, paper
Many of the stories in Cooper's potent and humorous new collection are
short ' often a page or two ' and in them recurs all the notorious
subject matter of his oeuvre: pedophilia, necrophilia, torture,
kidnapping, murder, sexual mutilation, death-fetishization, drug
addiction, desire and love, homosexual relationships, teenage
ennui. There are recurrent images as well: among them, axes, hammers
and fists. Knives abound. In `Jerk': `Wayne's standing over Brad,
holding a knife.' In `The Hostage Drama': `So I got a knife out of the
kitchen.' In `Oliver Twink': `I went into the kitchen and got that big
knife.' And in more than one story, young men decide that being
tortured to death might be an experience worth investigating. In
`Jerk,' Buddy tells Dean: `I've been thinking about what you said,
man. About death and stuff. And . . . yeah, I'm sick of
life. Definitely. I want to go.' Dean replies: `All right. I'll take
you out, but first, as bizarre as this sounds, I want you to live here
with me for a few days, a week, and let me get to know you.' In
`Oliver Twink' Chris tells his lustful friend that he has considered
death as well: `I thought about what if . . .. I wanted to be with
God? Wouldn't that be like your big dream come true?' One of the
strongest stories is the clever and funny `Anal- - Retentive Line
Editor,' in which an obsessive editor far oversteps the boundaries of
his job. As always, the need for connection ' even if experienced at
the level of unspeakable yet intimate violence ' as well as the need
to expose what lies underneath are Cooper's main preoccupations.
THE HOSPITAL FOR BAD POETS
By J. C. Hallman
Milkweed Editions, paper
The figure uniting Hallman's fabu- - realist stories is the average
man, the common man. Yet as this first collection makes clear, `the
average man is not what he used to be.' Perceptive, curious, fallible,
Hallman's Everyman is self-aware enough to understand that personal
change is necessary, but not aware enough to know how to achieve it '
a condition, the book suggests, that may be our common lot. As the
narrator of `Autopoiesis for the Common Man' remarks: `Indeed, to err
is more than human, it is biological.' Hallman reconfigures our
everyday errors and flaws into deeply affecting fiction. In `Ethan: A
Love Story,' the narrator visits home over Christmas. Middle-aged and
never married, he feels alienated from his strident family, who, he
says, `had decided to respond to the world's basic intricacy so
differently from me that just recognizing myself in them, in their
mannerisms and bad habits, made me kind of lonely.'
However, there is one family member not of that ilk ' his 6-year-old
nephew, Ethan. Likewise alienated, Ethan gravitates to his outsider
uncle, introducing him to a world of video games and fantasy. What
could have been a sentimental story about lessons learned from a child
is subtly transformed by the author's fabulist brushstroke, which
paradoxically makes things not stranger but more familiar. Hallman is
wonderfully bright. Yet in a few stories, that brightness lights the
stage too well for his searching characters, who seem to find their
way better in the dark.
PYGMY
By Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday
Readers of Palahniuk's excellent early work (`Fight Club,' `Invisible
Mon - sters') will sense a shallow, phoned-in quality to his new
novel. Despite its transgressive trappings and cultural- - critique
posturing, `Pygmy' is as defanged as Marilyn Manson. The book renders
a tween world where antisocial behavior leads either to sex or to an
exasperated eye-roll. Adults are nonentities, often passed out from
the `roofies' slipped them by their own children. That's well and good
' but when your primary characters are as poorly developed as your
unconscious ones, it's a problem. Pygmy, the book's narrator, is
utterly unconvincing as a Hitler-quoting 13-year-old terrorist
operative. His antagonism toward America is his motivation, its
destruction his goal: fine. But where is he from? A `totalitarian
state,' is all we learn from the jacket copy. When the story opens,
Pygmy and other teenagers from his country arrive in America as
exchange students, but they are actually sleeper cells waiting to
unleash `Operation Havoc,' whatever that is. Pygmy narrates the book
in part broken English and part who-knows-what: `In Magda hands
already knotted finger ready Cobra One-Strike No-Blood, bam-slam,
inflict cat sister instant dead. More fast most eye able look.' The
entire book sounds like that. Add to this the de rigueur transgressive
stuff: explicit sodomy and rape, extreme cruelty to animals,
manga-like violence and kids buying their mothers vibrators for
Mother's Day, and you've got this year's Palahniuk. What will he think
of next?
Joseph Salvatore teaches writing and literature at the New School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/books/r eview/Salvatore-t.html
The New York Times
Sunday Book Review
July 5, 2009
Reviews by JOSEPH SALVATORE
PERFORATED HEART
By Eric Bogosian
Simon & Schuster
Bogosian, the manic monologist of New York's downtown in the 1970s and
'80s, may be even more manic today ' writing drama, screenplays and
fiction while continuing to act. However, there's no
jack-of-all-trades syndrome here: Bogosian takes his fiction
seriously, creating powerful and often disturbing characters and
rendering them in language as precise as it is authentic. This novel,
his third, is his most assured to date. Told entirely in diary
entries, the story shows us two different periods in the life of
Richard Morris, an American writer now in his 50s. When the book opens
in 2005, Morris's once luminous career has started to fade. He loses
literary prizes, long-time girlfriends, lovers and friends. His editor
starts ignoring him. Jaded by fame, he confuses decades of selfishness
and indulgence with the dedication great art requires. Then his life
takes a turn: open-heart surgery. During his convalescence, he
uncovers a box of diaries from 30 years earlier, when a young,
ambitious Morris moved to New York to pursue literary
stardom. Alternating between the past and the present, the entries
allow a rich portrait of Morris to emerge. Bogosian renders 1970s New
York City beautifully, describing the great blackout as well as
legendary clubs like Max's Kansas City. A few conveniently plotted
events permit reunions and resolutions, but the plot isn't the
point. Bogosian's novel explores what it's like to get what we thought
we wanted. Reading the words of young Richard, old Richard writes:
`This kid gives birth to the man I am now.' Would that someone had
warned him.
UGLY MAN
Stories
By Dennis Cooper.
Harper Perennial, paper
Many of the stories in Cooper's potent and humorous new collection are
short ' often a page or two ' and in them recurs all the notorious
subject matter of his oeuvre: pedophilia, necrophilia, torture,
kidnapping, murder, sexual mutilation, death-fetishization, drug
addiction, desire and love, homosexual relationships, teenage
ennui. There are recurrent images as well: among them, axes, hammers
and fists. Knives abound. In `Jerk': `Wayne's standing over Brad,
holding a knife.' In `The Hostage Drama': `So I got a knife out of the
kitchen.' In `Oliver Twink': `I went into the kitchen and got that big
knife.' And in more than one story, young men decide that being
tortured to death might be an experience worth investigating. In
`Jerk,' Buddy tells Dean: `I've been thinking about what you said,
man. About death and stuff. And . . . yeah, I'm sick of
life. Definitely. I want to go.' Dean replies: `All right. I'll take
you out, but first, as bizarre as this sounds, I want you to live here
with me for a few days, a week, and let me get to know you.' In
`Oliver Twink' Chris tells his lustful friend that he has considered
death as well: `I thought about what if . . .. I wanted to be with
God? Wouldn't that be like your big dream come true?' One of the
strongest stories is the clever and funny `Anal- - Retentive Line
Editor,' in which an obsessive editor far oversteps the boundaries of
his job. As always, the need for connection ' even if experienced at
the level of unspeakable yet intimate violence ' as well as the need
to expose what lies underneath are Cooper's main preoccupations.
THE HOSPITAL FOR BAD POETS
By J. C. Hallman
Milkweed Editions, paper
The figure uniting Hallman's fabu- - realist stories is the average
man, the common man. Yet as this first collection makes clear, `the
average man is not what he used to be.' Perceptive, curious, fallible,
Hallman's Everyman is self-aware enough to understand that personal
change is necessary, but not aware enough to know how to achieve it '
a condition, the book suggests, that may be our common lot. As the
narrator of `Autopoiesis for the Common Man' remarks: `Indeed, to err
is more than human, it is biological.' Hallman reconfigures our
everyday errors and flaws into deeply affecting fiction. In `Ethan: A
Love Story,' the narrator visits home over Christmas. Middle-aged and
never married, he feels alienated from his strident family, who, he
says, `had decided to respond to the world's basic intricacy so
differently from me that just recognizing myself in them, in their
mannerisms and bad habits, made me kind of lonely.'
However, there is one family member not of that ilk ' his 6-year-old
nephew, Ethan. Likewise alienated, Ethan gravitates to his outsider
uncle, introducing him to a world of video games and fantasy. What
could have been a sentimental story about lessons learned from a child
is subtly transformed by the author's fabulist brushstroke, which
paradoxically makes things not stranger but more familiar. Hallman is
wonderfully bright. Yet in a few stories, that brightness lights the
stage too well for his searching characters, who seem to find their
way better in the dark.
PYGMY
By Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday
Readers of Palahniuk's excellent early work (`Fight Club,' `Invisible
Mon - sters') will sense a shallow, phoned-in quality to his new
novel. Despite its transgressive trappings and cultural- - critique
posturing, `Pygmy' is as defanged as Marilyn Manson. The book renders
a tween world where antisocial behavior leads either to sex or to an
exasperated eye-roll. Adults are nonentities, often passed out from
the `roofies' slipped them by their own children. That's well and good
' but when your primary characters are as poorly developed as your
unconscious ones, it's a problem. Pygmy, the book's narrator, is
utterly unconvincing as a Hitler-quoting 13-year-old terrorist
operative. His antagonism toward America is his motivation, its
destruction his goal: fine. But where is he from? A `totalitarian
state,' is all we learn from the jacket copy. When the story opens,
Pygmy and other teenagers from his country arrive in America as
exchange students, but they are actually sleeper cells waiting to
unleash `Operation Havoc,' whatever that is. Pygmy narrates the book
in part broken English and part who-knows-what: `In Magda hands
already knotted finger ready Cobra One-Strike No-Blood, bam-slam,
inflict cat sister instant dead. More fast most eye able look.' The
entire book sounds like that. Add to this the de rigueur transgressive
stuff: explicit sodomy and rape, extreme cruelty to animals,
manga-like violence and kids buying their mothers vibrators for
Mother's Day, and you've got this year's Palahniuk. What will he think
of next?
Joseph Salvatore teaches writing and literature at the New School.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/books/r eview/Salvatore-t.html