BOOK REVIEW: Cintra Wilson's novel napalm




Cintra Wilson is one of my favorite writers -- mean and funny and honest at all costs, with some hard-won perspectives on how impossibly f-ed up our obsession with celebrities has become. Mostly, I love her sentences, which spiral off into literary guitar solos of Nasty that make me giggle and feel shame. I've been trying to wangle an e-mail interview with her since February, when I first heard she was working on a novel.

Seven months is a long time to wangle. And despite her vamp-hellcat persona, Ms. Wilson has been really, really peachy and supportive during the whole e-mails-exchanged-questions-finessed-venues-secured siege.

And so The Time of Cintra has finally come. My book review of Colors Insulting to Nature ran in today's Sunday Oregonian. Soon, barring disaster, a very lengthy e-mail Q&A with Ms. Wilson will appear elsewhere online.




Colors Insulting is pretty awesome -- even if it wasn't quite what I'd expected. It's a barn-broad farce about a girl who wants to be famous, yes, and it's that rare book that makes you laugh out loud, and often. But it's also very much about how a young woman's character is shaped by television, a succession of subversive gay theater directors, and various 1980s northern-California shock-art subcultures. If you've read enough of Wilson's Salon columns, it reads like a thinly veiled autobiography filtered through, I don't know, Vonnegut, or something equally silly and deft. In a reader's landscape choked with "chick lit" and "quirky" Graduate Writing Program snoozers, it stands out like a raised digit. I'll leave you to guess which one.

At any rate, Ms. Wilson succeeded where other pundits-turned-novelists have failed (see: James Wolcott's The Catsitters, or don't).
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UPDATE: Here, more or less, is the actual text of the review, which has apparently been pay-archived at OregonLive.com. A couple of the below passages were deleted for the print version; they were salvaged in the above post. Hence the repetition.
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Almost famous

Cintra Wilson -- the playwright, pop-culture critic and occasional actress -- specializes in screeds against celebrity culture. She's earned a cult following for her Salon.com columns -- particularly her annual dressings-down of Oscar Night, which veer into Lester Bangs-like arias of laff-out-loud vitriol. (She summed up this year's ceremony as "easy-to-chew television for the elderly and prim that looked and sounded like a slowed-down version of the Lawrence Welk show without all the stimulating colors.")

In 2000, she vacuum-packed prose from several Salon essays into "A Massive Swelling" -- a scorched-earth collection that branded America's obsession with celebrities as "a Grotesque Crippling Disease." The book was so relentlessly, gut-bustingly nasty that it became sort of wearying -- stiff medicine dipped in too much descriptive icing. It also left open the question of whether the author could stretch beyond her "literary airstrike" technique (as Mark Costello describes it) and shape a narrative -- a task that's daunted such pundits-turned-novelists as James Wolcott (see: "The Catsitters").

Well, Ms. Wilson just napalmed her way into the world of fiction with her first novel, "Colors Insulting to Nature," and there's good news. She can, in fact, shoehorn her essay voice into a narrative structure -- and the results are riotous and harrowing.

"Colors Insulting" is a farce about a girl who desperately wants to be famous -- so yes, it treads thematic ground familiar to anyone who's read Wilson's columns. But it's also a debut with smart dialogue, jokes to burn and bricks to throw. In a reader's landscape choked with "chick lit" and "quirky" Graduate Writing Program snoozers, the book stands out like a raised digit. (I'll leave you to guess which one.)

The novel, set in the 1980s, chronicles the adventures of the Normal family -- a clan of "performers" that includes debauched lounge singer Peppy and her mixed-up spawn, Liza. Poor Liza's been shaped by Peppy (and television, and a succession of subversive gay theater directors) into a barely pubescent torch singer -- an ungainly lass who dreams of being loved by millions, thanks to a steady diet of Hollywood myths in movies like "Breakin'" and "Ice Castles." The myths tell her if she simply wants fame (ital) bad enough (ital) , it's hers for the taking. Unfortunately, she lacks the genetic kiss of God (and the luck) that catalyze stardom.

The delusion that celebrity solves all your problems is a major leitmotif in Wilson's nonfiction. But "Colors Insulting" does more than kick Liza around while shattering those delusions. Her quixotic quest for success sends her tumbling through various Californian subcultures -- '80s punks, New Agers, music-industry cokeheads, drag queens and "slash fiction" publishers -- which Wilson satirizes with an eye that suggests first-person research. (The woman writes about scary coke parties with the sort of authority Fitzgerald used to apply to the gin-tub.) And there's a first-act set piece where Peppy's "Normal Family Dinner Theatre" puts on a camp production of "The Sound of Music" that's one of the funniest things you'll read in fiction this year.

The book has a few rough edges. Liza learns to follow her true, offbeat muse -- in part by embracing the power of a pseudonym -- but the quest puts her through so many social molts that her character can get lost in the shuffle. (We're asked to believe, at one point, that Liza, in the depths of her punk phase, still reveres Neil Sedaka.) Wilson also peppers the book with footnote-like "asides" that are ultimately more distracting than useful; it's as if she can't quite let go of her inner pomo pop-pundit.

But these are split hairs in light of "Colors Insulting"'s thoughtful mockery. The book balances comedy with horror without devolving into a sad-clown painting -- no easy feat. This is particularly impressive during one merciless chapter late in the book, when Liza, in her thirst for attention, throws her boyfriend (a former boy-band star and drug addict) to the wolves at a music-industry party. Wilson's knack for summing up characters in withering sentence clusters ensures a laugh on nearly every page -- as when she describes a Brazilian musician as a lout "whose sole function, it seemed, was to keep all women within a 50-mile radius lactating with a romantic need to save him from himself."

Structurally, the book utilizes some of the conventions of "inspirational" films about aspiring starlets, even as it twists and mocks those same conventions. In broad strokes -- with the notable exception of a bittersweet three-page epilogue -- the novel is formulaic in structure: After much struggling, Liza's idealism is crushed by experience and replaced with a hard-earned wisdom -- with our heroine enjoying a sort of "fame" that emerges honestly from skills she barely knew she had. But working within that template, Ms. Wilson has written a funny, grotty pub crawl through California's aspirant underbelly -- and an impressive, maybe even great, comic novel.

Almost Famous (The Sunday Oregonian's BooksWeek)


Posted: Sun - August 8, 2004 at 12:02 PM        

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