Sun - January 8, 2006
BOOK REVIEW: 'Consider the Lobster'
Slightly longer version of a review in today's
Oregonian:
I'd wager that in book-loving circles, anyone who admits they prefer David Foster Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction -- who admits, essentially, that they prefer Wallace's essay collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" to that genius doorstopper "Infinite Jest" -- is considered something of a lit-plebe.
Well, consider me out and proud.
Wallace -- award-winning experimental-fiction writer; Roy E. Disney '51 Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient -- has carved out a lucrative side-career applying his humming brain to mundane subjects in popular magazines. And for my money, his New New Journalism is the most exciting thing to happen to magazine prose since Tom Wolfe picked up an exclamation point.
Wallace is a hilariously eccentric writer. He mixes a terrifying, academic vocabulary with conversational words like "stuff" and "totally," tucks his funniest bits into footnotes that can go on for pages, and uses what's been described as "guitar-solo" sentence structure to take urgent, unironic looks at the concerns of modern Americans -- at language, at politics, at sports, at the strange ennui that afflicts people surrounded by too much food and entertainment. Send Wallace to a gathering, no matter how ordinary, and he'll usually return with what "these magazine people" (Wallace's term) describe as a "really big experiential postcard" -- one that surprises and disturbs.
"A Supposedly Fun Thing," published in 1997, collected and expanded his over-footnoted dispatches from a David Lynch film set, a tennis tourney, the Illinois State Fair and a Celebrity cruise. His conclusions and theses are often surprisingly simple: "David Lynch likes messing with our heads for the sake of messing with our heads." "Luxury cruises wrap you in so much artificial comfort that it's actually kind of depressing." "Maybe we should turn off our TVs and be more sincere." (I'm paraphrasing.) But he's examined his subjects in such obsessive (and funny) detail that these observations feel fully proven, like a math proof definitively telling us "1+1=2."
Anyway. Little, Brown just released Wallace's second major collection of essays and journalism, "Consider the Lobster." It doesn't (and couldn't) have "A Supposedly Fun Thing"'s seismic impact. It's missing such overlooked, uncollected gems as "F/X Porn," and "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." And it's padded with a couple of riotously mean but ultimately minor book reviews that take John Updike and Tracy Austin (!) and tear them to ribbons. But "Lobster" is nevertheless anchored by five pretty wonderful bits of critical reportage:
(1) "Big Red Son" expands on a truncated, "bipseudonymously" written Premiere magazine piece in which Wallace attends the porn industry's equivalent of the Oscars. (The original Premiere article isn't online, but here's an unhappy response to it by several Adult Video News editors.) There's nothing particularly new in Wallace's observations that porn stars are shallow and artificial, but the essay contains some of his best-ever desciptive arias.
(2) "Authority and American Usage," is arguably the best piece in the book -- a review of a new usage dictionary that quickly blows up into a profound discussion of the ethical and philosophical wars that rage behind the creation of every "authoriative" reference text. The subject sounds dull and granular, but this is a surprisingly personal piece: Wallace includes several autiobiographical asides about his own elitist grammar-snob upbringing -- and his later struggles with students and faculty who considered his insistence on Standard Written English to be "racially insensitive."
(Wallace is perhaps the only living American writer who'd respond to a passage in the introduction to "The American College Dictionary" with his own sophisticated, multi-paragraph attack on the hazards of Descriptivist principles -- but kick the whole retort off with the sentence, "This is so stupid it practically drools." Throughout his non-fiction, Wallace acts as a sort of comic ambassador between mainstream magazine readers and the academy.)
(3) "Up, Simba!" finds Wallace spending a week with John McCain's 2000 campaign -- where he gets more straightforward and prophetic analyses from the guys who hold the cameras and boom mikes than he ever could from the thoroughly swaddled candidate, his advisors, and the "tighter than a duck's butt" print journalists that surround them.
(4) "Consider the Lobster" expands a controversial and sneaky Gourmet magazine piece from 2004. Wallace attends the Maine Lobster Festival, initially writing what feels like a slightly tepid riff on his usual observational schtick -- until he very suddenly turns the piece on its ear, diving into an excruciating (and ultimately unanswerable) examination of whether lobsters feel pain when they're boiled alive.
(5) And then there's "Host," in which Wallace spends several weeks immersed in the "particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio" -- specifically with Los Angeles AM-radio pundit (and jingoistic O.J. Simpson obsessive) John Ziegler. (Here, if you're curious, is Ziegler's official response to the piece.) Sadly, the book version omits the original Atlantic Monthly article's graphically innovative, color-coded side-notes; they appear here as black-and-white flowcharts that earn some complaints for choppy readability. (One blogger put it nicely: "I mean, what, the guy writes this stuff in Quark?")
Personally, I found the extra navigational work rewarding -- not so much a gimmick as an accurate, conceptually funny graphic representation of Wallace's digressive thought process. I quote Wallace's own defense (in another of the book's essays) of the occasional impenetrability of Dostoevsky: "Some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation."
Indiscreet inquiries of a subversive mind
(The Oregonian, Jan. 8, 2006)
Permalink
I'd wager that in book-loving circles, anyone who admits they prefer David Foster Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction -- who admits, essentially, that they prefer Wallace's essay collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" to that genius doorstopper "Infinite Jest" -- is considered something of a lit-plebe.
Well, consider me out and proud.
Wallace -- award-winning experimental-fiction writer; Roy E. Disney '51 Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient -- has carved out a lucrative side-career applying his humming brain to mundane subjects in popular magazines. And for my money, his New New Journalism is the most exciting thing to happen to magazine prose since Tom Wolfe picked up an exclamation point.
Wallace is a hilariously eccentric writer. He mixes a terrifying, academic vocabulary with conversational words like "stuff" and "totally," tucks his funniest bits into footnotes that can go on for pages, and uses what's been described as "guitar-solo" sentence structure to take urgent, unironic looks at the concerns of modern Americans -- at language, at politics, at sports, at the strange ennui that afflicts people surrounded by too much food and entertainment. Send Wallace to a gathering, no matter how ordinary, and he'll usually return with what "these magazine people" (Wallace's term) describe as a "really big experiential postcard" -- one that surprises and disturbs.
"A Supposedly Fun Thing," published in 1997, collected and expanded his over-footnoted dispatches from a David Lynch film set, a tennis tourney, the Illinois State Fair and a Celebrity cruise. His conclusions and theses are often surprisingly simple: "David Lynch likes messing with our heads for the sake of messing with our heads." "Luxury cruises wrap you in so much artificial comfort that it's actually kind of depressing." "Maybe we should turn off our TVs and be more sincere." (I'm paraphrasing.) But he's examined his subjects in such obsessive (and funny) detail that these observations feel fully proven, like a math proof definitively telling us "1+1=2."
Anyway. Little, Brown just released Wallace's second major collection of essays and journalism, "Consider the Lobster." It doesn't (and couldn't) have "A Supposedly Fun Thing"'s seismic impact. It's missing such overlooked, uncollected gems as "F/X Porn," and "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." And it's padded with a couple of riotously mean but ultimately minor book reviews that take John Updike and Tracy Austin (!) and tear them to ribbons. But "Lobster" is nevertheless anchored by five pretty wonderful bits of critical reportage:
(1) "Big Red Son" expands on a truncated, "bipseudonymously" written Premiere magazine piece in which Wallace attends the porn industry's equivalent of the Oscars. (The original Premiere article isn't online, but here's an unhappy response to it by several Adult Video News editors.) There's nothing particularly new in Wallace's observations that porn stars are shallow and artificial, but the essay contains some of his best-ever desciptive arias.
(2) "Authority and American Usage," is arguably the best piece in the book -- a review of a new usage dictionary that quickly blows up into a profound discussion of the ethical and philosophical wars that rage behind the creation of every "authoriative" reference text. The subject sounds dull and granular, but this is a surprisingly personal piece: Wallace includes several autiobiographical asides about his own elitist grammar-snob upbringing -- and his later struggles with students and faculty who considered his insistence on Standard Written English to be "racially insensitive."
(Wallace is perhaps the only living American writer who'd respond to a passage in the introduction to "The American College Dictionary" with his own sophisticated, multi-paragraph attack on the hazards of Descriptivist principles -- but kick the whole retort off with the sentence, "This is so stupid it practically drools." Throughout his non-fiction, Wallace acts as a sort of comic ambassador between mainstream magazine readers and the academy.)
(3) "Up, Simba!" finds Wallace spending a week with John McCain's 2000 campaign -- where he gets more straightforward and prophetic analyses from the guys who hold the cameras and boom mikes than he ever could from the thoroughly swaddled candidate, his advisors, and the "tighter than a duck's butt" print journalists that surround them.
(4) "Consider the Lobster" expands a controversial and sneaky Gourmet magazine piece from 2004. Wallace attends the Maine Lobster Festival, initially writing what feels like a slightly tepid riff on his usual observational schtick -- until he very suddenly turns the piece on its ear, diving into an excruciating (and ultimately unanswerable) examination of whether lobsters feel pain when they're boiled alive.
(5) And then there's "Host," in which Wallace spends several weeks immersed in the "particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio" -- specifically with Los Angeles AM-radio pundit (and jingoistic O.J. Simpson obsessive) John Ziegler. (Here, if you're curious, is Ziegler's official response to the piece.) Sadly, the book version omits the original Atlantic Monthly article's graphically innovative, color-coded side-notes; they appear here as black-and-white flowcharts that earn some complaints for choppy readability. (One blogger put it nicely: "I mean, what, the guy writes this stuff in Quark?")
Personally, I found the extra navigational work rewarding -- not so much a gimmick as an accurate, conceptually funny graphic representation of Wallace's digressive thought process. I quote Wallace's own defense (in another of the book's essays) of the occasional impenetrability of Dostoevsky: "Some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation."
Indiscreet inquiries of a subversive mind
(The Oregonian, Jan. 8, 2006)
Permalink
Posted at 03:15 PM
|
Sun - June 19, 2005
'Batman Begins' Again (and Again, and Again…)
Slightly longer "Director's Cut" of a
story in today's Oregonian
BooksWeek:
One of the fascinating things about comic-book superheroes is that generations of editors and writers have tailored them to the decades -- to changing tastes, to the political climate, even to personal whims.
Take, for example, "Batman Begins."
It's billed as a "reboot" of the Caped Crusader's film franchise -- a franchise that lay dormant for eight years after "Batman & Robin" stank up cineplexes with a nipple-suited lurch into low camp.
As he told the story of how Bruce Wayne becomes the Dark Knight, "Begins" co-writer/director Christopher Nolan enjoyed that rarest of filmmaker luxuries: He got to start over. Cherry-picking from the entire 66-year history of "Batman" comics, Nolan and co-scenarist David Goyer selectively tweaked the "continuity" of the books and films -- grounding the World's Greatest Detective in a more realistic Gotham City than the previous films.
Of course, there's nothing new about monkeying with Batman's vibe.
The basic origin story of "The Bat-Man" -- as he was dubbed when writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane introduced him in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics -- is essentially unchanged over nearly seven decades. During a holdup, wealthy Thomas Wayne and his wife are gunned down in front of their son Bruce. Vowing to "avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals," Finger writes that Wayne "trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats," adopting a bat disguise to "strike terror into [criminal] hearts."
Beyond that? You'd be surprised how many bets are off.
Here are a few of the characters and elements from "Batman Begins" -- along with a partial cataloguing of their original (and evolving) histories in print:
________
Bruce Wayne/Batman
In "Batman Begins": Wayne is a driven, intelligent vigilante who pretends to be a vapid playboy to throw police off his scent.
In the original comics: Nolan's Batman is, in many ways, a return to the spirit of The Bat-Man's '39 debut. Both versions take on mobsters instead of superpowered foes; both are cool-headed; and both have skillsets more or less within the realm of human possibility.
However, there's one crucial difference: Kane and Finger's original Batman was a stone killer -- dropping his foes off rooftops and into acid baths and even brandishing a pistol on occasion.
(Well, there are two crucial differences: the '30s Wayne also has quite possibly the most clueless fiancé in comic-book history.)
Frederic Wertham's 1950s crusade to censor comics shaved off most of these rougher edges -- leading in part to the campy Adam West "Batman" of '60s TV fame.
And then, in 1987, Frank Miller brought Batman back down to earth as part of a larger effort by DC Comics to consolidate and re-launch its superhero franchises.
Miller and artist David Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One" is one of the finest mainstream cape-and-cowl comics ever written -- an attempt to place Batman in a gritty, '70s cop-film milieu as Bruce Wayne first ventures out to fight crime.
"Year One" is also the most blatant influence on Nolan's movie -- right down to the film's images of bats flying against a blood-red sky, plus one directly-lifted scene where Wayne uses a swarm of bats to distract a SWAT team.
Relevant reading: "The Batman Chronicles: Volume 1"; "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told"; and especially "Batman: Year One."
____________________
Ra's al Ghul
In "Batman Begins": He's the leader of the "League of Shadows" -- a group of ninjas who've secretly influenced history for centuries. He also mentors Wayne in the arts of fighting, deception and survivor-guilt management.
In the original comics: On the page, Ra's is even more outlandish -- a centuries-old eco-terrorist obsessed with thinning out the human race. (He's blessed with eternal life thanks to regular dips in something called a "Lazarus Pool.")
In the graphic novel "Son of the Demon," Batman marries al Ghul's daughter (and, it should be noted, never takes his mask off, which looks incredibly silly when he's shirtless).
UPDATE: Reader T Campbell offers the following corrective: "Almost perfect -- but one detail's off: it's Batman's first encounter with Ra's that ends with the mask and no shirt. 'Son of the Demon' contains a memorable disrobing that begins with the mask." Russell to Campbell: See, now, I vividly recall a panel in "Son of the Demon" where Batman is shirtless on a bed with Ra's's daughter -- the caption saying something about him "learning to be a husband." Is this a total false memory or just a too-glib joke?
Relevant reading: "Batman: Son of the Demon" and "The Saga of Ra's Al Ghul"
____________________
The Scarecrow
In "Batman Begins": He's Dr. Jonathan Crane, a corrupt, quietly insane psychologist who wears a burlap mask while testing psychedelic "fear gas" on his Arkham Asylum patients.
In the original comics: Crane, who first appeared in World's Finest Comics #3 in 1941, is a considerably gawkier character on the page -- nicknamed "Scarecrow" for his gangly frame, he's driven to terrify and kill after years of childhood bullying.
Relevant reading: "Batman: Scarecrow Tales," collecting eight stories starring Crane.
____________________
James Gordon
In "Batman Begins": He's a geeky cop who attends to young Bruce after his parents are killed; later, he's the only uncorrupted Gotham lieutenant Batman can trust.
In the original comics: Before "Batman: Year One," Gordon was a peevish bureaucrat who officially deputized Batman. Miller re-invented him as a flawed, adulterous but striving-to-be-honorable detective in a graft-riddled cop shop. (He's also the adoptive father to Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl.)
Relevant reading: "Batman: Year One"
__________________
Joe Chill
In "Batman Begins": He's the mugger who kills Bruce's parents. Later, he scores an early release for informing on mobster Carmine Falcone.
In the original comics: Chill -- first identified by name in Batman #47 in 1948 -- has been killed in print a few times. He was murdered by his own men in '48. He fell to his death in Batman Adventures #17. And he even teamed up with Batman to fight a scythe-wielding killer named "The Reaper" in "Batman: Year Two."
Relevant reading: Batman #47 (1948); "Batman: Year Two -- Fear the Reaper"; Batman Adventures #17
____________________
The Batmobile
In "Batman Begins": It's a rocket-powered military prototype borrowed from the Wayne Enterprises lab.
In the original comics: The Batmobile's look has changed as many times as the ear lengths on Batman's cowl. In fact, the Caped Crusader drove a plain, bright-red sedan in the original '39 comics.
The new movie's Batmobile is clearly inspired by the crowd-control tank Batman drives in Frank Miller's landmark tale of the hero's final years, "The Dark Knight Returns."
Relevant reading: "The Dark Knight Returns"
Batman's twisted past (The Oregonian BooksWeek, June 19, 2005)
One of the fascinating things about comic-book superheroes is that generations of editors and writers have tailored them to the decades -- to changing tastes, to the political climate, even to personal whims.
Take, for example, "Batman Begins."
It's billed as a "reboot" of the Caped Crusader's film franchise -- a franchise that lay dormant for eight years after "Batman & Robin" stank up cineplexes with a nipple-suited lurch into low camp.
As he told the story of how Bruce Wayne becomes the Dark Knight, "Begins" co-writer/director Christopher Nolan enjoyed that rarest of filmmaker luxuries: He got to start over. Cherry-picking from the entire 66-year history of "Batman" comics, Nolan and co-scenarist David Goyer selectively tweaked the "continuity" of the books and films -- grounding the World's Greatest Detective in a more realistic Gotham City than the previous films.
Of course, there's nothing new about monkeying with Batman's vibe.
The basic origin story of "The Bat-Man" -- as he was dubbed when writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane introduced him in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics -- is essentially unchanged over nearly seven decades. During a holdup, wealthy Thomas Wayne and his wife are gunned down in front of their son Bruce. Vowing to "avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals," Finger writes that Wayne "trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats," adopting a bat disguise to "strike terror into [criminal] hearts."
Beyond that? You'd be surprised how many bets are off.
Here are a few of the characters and elements from "Batman Begins" -- along with a partial cataloguing of their original (and evolving) histories in print:
________
Bruce Wayne/Batman
In "Batman Begins": Wayne is a driven, intelligent vigilante who pretends to be a vapid playboy to throw police off his scent.
In the original comics: Nolan's Batman is, in many ways, a return to the spirit of The Bat-Man's '39 debut. Both versions take on mobsters instead of superpowered foes; both are cool-headed; and both have skillsets more or less within the realm of human possibility.
However, there's one crucial difference: Kane and Finger's original Batman was a stone killer -- dropping his foes off rooftops and into acid baths and even brandishing a pistol on occasion.
(Well, there are two crucial differences: the '30s Wayne also has quite possibly the most clueless fiancé in comic-book history.)
Frederic Wertham's 1950s crusade to censor comics shaved off most of these rougher edges -- leading in part to the campy Adam West "Batman" of '60s TV fame.
And then, in 1987, Frank Miller brought Batman back down to earth as part of a larger effort by DC Comics to consolidate and re-launch its superhero franchises.
Miller and artist David Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One" is one of the finest mainstream cape-and-cowl comics ever written -- an attempt to place Batman in a gritty, '70s cop-film milieu as Bruce Wayne first ventures out to fight crime.
"Year One" is also the most blatant influence on Nolan's movie -- right down to the film's images of bats flying against a blood-red sky, plus one directly-lifted scene where Wayne uses a swarm of bats to distract a SWAT team.
Relevant reading: "The Batman Chronicles: Volume 1"; "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told"; and especially "Batman: Year One."
____________________
Ra's al Ghul
In "Batman Begins": He's the leader of the "League of Shadows" -- a group of ninjas who've secretly influenced history for centuries. He also mentors Wayne in the arts of fighting, deception and survivor-guilt management.
In the original comics: On the page, Ra's is even more outlandish -- a centuries-old eco-terrorist obsessed with thinning out the human race. (He's blessed with eternal life thanks to regular dips in something called a "Lazarus Pool.")
In the graphic novel "Son of the Demon," Batman marries al Ghul's daughter (and, it should be noted, never takes his mask off, which looks incredibly silly when he's shirtless).
UPDATE: Reader T Campbell offers the following corrective: "Almost perfect -- but one detail's off: it's Batman's first encounter with Ra's that ends with the mask and no shirt. 'Son of the Demon' contains a memorable disrobing that begins with the mask." Russell to Campbell: See, now, I vividly recall a panel in "Son of the Demon" where Batman is shirtless on a bed with Ra's's daughter -- the caption saying something about him "learning to be a husband." Is this a total false memory or just a too-glib joke?
Relevant reading: "Batman: Son of the Demon" and "The Saga of Ra's Al Ghul"
____________________
The Scarecrow
In "Batman Begins": He's Dr. Jonathan Crane, a corrupt, quietly insane psychologist who wears a burlap mask while testing psychedelic "fear gas" on his Arkham Asylum patients.
In the original comics: Crane, who first appeared in World's Finest Comics #3 in 1941, is a considerably gawkier character on the page -- nicknamed "Scarecrow" for his gangly frame, he's driven to terrify and kill after years of childhood bullying.
Relevant reading: "Batman: Scarecrow Tales," collecting eight stories starring Crane.
____________________
James Gordon
In "Batman Begins": He's a geeky cop who attends to young Bruce after his parents are killed; later, he's the only uncorrupted Gotham lieutenant Batman can trust.
In the original comics: Before "Batman: Year One," Gordon was a peevish bureaucrat who officially deputized Batman. Miller re-invented him as a flawed, adulterous but striving-to-be-honorable detective in a graft-riddled cop shop. (He's also the adoptive father to Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl.)
Relevant reading: "Batman: Year One"
__________________
Joe Chill
In "Batman Begins": He's the mugger who kills Bruce's parents. Later, he scores an early release for informing on mobster Carmine Falcone.
In the original comics: Chill -- first identified by name in Batman #47 in 1948 -- has been killed in print a few times. He was murdered by his own men in '48. He fell to his death in Batman Adventures #17. And he even teamed up with Batman to fight a scythe-wielding killer named "The Reaper" in "Batman: Year Two."
Relevant reading: Batman #47 (1948); "Batman: Year Two -- Fear the Reaper"; Batman Adventures #17
____________________
The Batmobile
In "Batman Begins": It's a rocket-powered military prototype borrowed from the Wayne Enterprises lab.
In the original comics: The Batmobile's look has changed as many times as the ear lengths on Batman's cowl. In fact, the Caped Crusader drove a plain, bright-red sedan in the original '39 comics.
The new movie's Batmobile is clearly inspired by the crowd-control tank Batman drives in Frank Miller's landmark tale of the hero's final years, "The Dark Knight Returns."
Relevant reading: "The Dark Knight Returns"
Batman's twisted past (The Oregonian BooksWeek, June 19, 2005)
Posted at 12:50 PM
|
Mon - May 2, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: 'Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams'
"Director's Cut" of a review in Sunday's
Oregonian:
Not only is [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better-selling than Fifty-Three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person, Anyway?
-- From the prologue by Douglas Adams
____________________
"Wish You Were Here" proffers a bit more substance than you'd expect from an "authorized," "official" biography of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" author Douglas Adams.
It's not dishy mind you, but Nick Webb's bio actually (mostly) skips the hagiography to capture Adams in all his brilliant, self-absorbed glory. Writing with the cooperation of Adams' family, friends and occasional enemies, Webb spends a surprising amount of time on the author's legendary procrastination. Previous Adams profiles have tended to depict this as a charming quirk, quoting his famous remark about deadlines: "I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." But Webb toiled for years on the publishing end of the business, and he lists the contractual and emotional headaches Adams gave editors, family and friends.
The book also digs deep enough to suggest that when Adams wrote his "Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" -- five (yes, five) comic novels about hapless Arthur Dent's travels across the galaxy -- he was, to a degree, writing what he knew.
Webb is also writing what he knew, inasmuch as he was a friend of Adams who enjoyed arguing with the author about scientific theory in fancy restaurants -- the fancy restaurants being an addiction that probably hastened Adams' fatal heart attack at age 49.
Ridiculously tall (6-foot-5) and, as Webb recounts it, blessed with the coordination of a drunk manatee, Adams never quite gelled onstage. A few rough years after graduation, he found himself making inroads as a writer in London -- story-editing episodes of "Doctor Who" and getting knackered with Monty Python's Graham Chapman under the guise of "collaboration." (Adams actually contributed to a late-run episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," earning one of its few outside writing credits.)
In 1978, Adams sold the BBC on his six-episode radio series, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Legend has it the idea came to Adams as he lay in a field in Austria, drunk, looking at the stars and thinking the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe" lacked scope.
The show began with bathrobe-wearing Arthur and his pal Ford hitching a ride in a flying saucer to escape the Earth, which has been demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. Soon, the nervous Earthman finds himself traveling with the President of the Galaxy, the president's Earthling girlfriend and a clinically depressed robot; tangling with superintelligent mice seeking "The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, The Universe and Everything"; and popping into a time-traveling restaurant where yuppies watch the universe end over cocktails.
All of this was interspersed with entries from the Guide -- a spacefarer's travel reference that riffs on everything from alien cultural mores to the importance of a good towel.
For the initiated, it goes without saying that the show was a massive hit -- and sparked a global phenomenon. Over the past two decades, variations on Adams' basic story have been re-told as a stage play, TV miniseries, video game, comic book and the movie that opened Friday. But it's one of the few creative works that's proved most popular in book form -- with over 15 million copies of Adams' five "Hitchhiker" novels sold.
The precise appeal of those novels is tough to sum up in pithy sentences. On one level, they're gut-bustingly funny and inventive. But they're also weirdly perfect mixes of comedy and cosmology -- purees of "Doctor Who" and "Python" written in a wholly original voice.
"Douglas heard the music," writes Webb. "[His] books are witty about big questions." Adams rarely told a well-structured story; at worst, his writing can feel like strung-together collections of clever gags. But at his best, he found new ways to collide the cosmic and the mundane. To wit:
The Guide riffs on the biggest problem created by time travel -- several annoying new grammar tenses.
The English sport of cricket turns out to be an unwitting homage to a bloody intergalactic war.
The search for God leads to a senile old man living in a shack with his cat, unsure if anything exists outside his door.
An alien cursed with eternal life uses his immortality to insult every living being in the universe -- in alphabetical order.
The discipline of sketch-writing left Adams with a knack for strangely perfect turns of phrase. Alien vessels hang improbably in the air "in much the same way bricks don't." In book three, Arthur teaches himself to fly -- by "learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." The books are relentlessly quotable, and it was hard-won: Webb notes that Adams was famous for coming to work with a dozen pages of script, writing furiously all day, and leaving with eight.
Webb also charts how Adams' personal life -- his love of restaurants, environmentalism, science, philosophy, and love itself -- played out in his ridiculous book scenarios. In "Life, the Universe and Everything," a spaceship is powered by the uncertainties of restaurant-check mathematics. And the author's obsession with guitar rock led to his creation of the supergroup Disaster Area -- a band so loud, "the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage." In the fourth book, mankind is saved from extinction thanks to a "Save the Humans" effort mounted by Earth's second-most-intelligent species, the dolphins. (Humans, in Adams' cosmology, ran a distant third.)
Given his profound lack of discipline, it's a wonder any of this got written at all.
"Douglas was romantic, warm, funny, exuberantly enthusiastic and possessed of a quite exceptional brain," writes Webb. "He also had his demons, and could be depressed, self-absorbed, sulky and difficult."
And late. Very, very late. Webb has the author literally writing and revising radio-show dialogue in the next room during the recording of the final radio-show installments. There's also a first-person account in Webb's book from editor Sonny Mehta, in which he describes literally moving into a hotel room with Adams for three weeks to get him to finish "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."
A decade-long bout of writer's block followed "Mostly Harmless." Travel was Adams' chief avoidance mechanism; however, it also produced what is arguably his best work -- a non-fiction travelogue titled "Last Chance to See." Published in 1990, it found Adams and co-author Mark Carwardine tracking down obscure endangered species. Adams also helped launch a failed multimedia venture, The Digital Village, which produced the "Starship Titanic" book and video game as well as h2g2.com, an attempt to create a real "Hitchhiker's Guide" in the form of an online encyclopedia.
Just before he died, his writer's drought had apparently ended. He'd started work on a new book, "The Salmon of Doubt," that was evolving into either a somewhat-cheerier sixth "Hitchhiker" novel or an installment in his other series, which starred "existential detective" Dirk Gently. (A reconstruction of "Salmon" was published posthumously in 2003.)
And just before Adams died, the film version of "Hitchhiker" was moving forward after a decade in development hell -- a process Adams likened to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it." He did, however, live to see his work intrude on the culture in some perversely funny ways: The computer that bested Kasparov at chess in 1989 was named "Deep Thought," for example, after the computer pondering Adams' Ultimate Question. And Adams' "Babel fish" -- a living universal translator that swam in your ear in "Hitchhiker's Guide" -- is now the name of the Internet's most popular free translation program. As Webb puts it: "Douglas has left a huge and benign footprint on the world."
__________________
The Hitchhiker's Guide to 'Hitchhiker's Guide'
The lowdown on the five books (and one short story) in the 'trilogy'
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -- Bathrobe-wearing Arthur Dent hitches a ride off the Earth before it's destroyed. Then things get strange. Featuring bad alien poetry, a man named Slartibartfast who manufactures planets, and The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Hint: The answer's pretty useless if you don't know the question.)
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" -- In many ways the strongest, funniest book in the series. Dent and the rest of our heroes run afoul of a planet-destroying rock band, diners at the end of time, a spaceship filled with second-class citizens and a man in a shack who just might be God.
"Life, the Universe and Everything" -- Adams turned a discarded "Doctor Who" storyline into his third novel: Arthur returns to space (in a ship powered by the bizarre mathematics of restaurant checks) to fight evil robots playing a deadly game of cricket.
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" -- Arthur lands on a miraculously restored Earth -- and falls in madly in love with a very strange girl. Adams' planet-bound romance left many fans cold, but there are some intriguing bits involving dolphins.
"Mostly Harmless" -- A dark year in which Adams' stepfather died and his accountant embezzled a third of his money informed this nihilistic final entry in the series. A new, nasty version of the Guide carries out a mysterious plan to re-destroy the Earth (in all its pesky multidimensional manifestations). Can a grieving, sandwich-making Arthur Dent foil its plans? Probably not.
"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" -- A one-joke short story found in omnibus collections: The future President of the Galaxy, working on a salvage ship, stumbles onto the universe's most dangerous weapon -- Ronald Reagan.
____________________
Douglas Adams: mercurial mind
Sidebar: Interstellar guide to, well, everything
(The Oregonian, May 1, 2005)
Not only is [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better-selling than Fifty-Three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person, Anyway?
-- From the prologue by Douglas Adams
____________________
"Wish You Were Here" proffers a bit more substance than you'd expect from an "authorized," "official" biography of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" author Douglas Adams.
It's not dishy mind you, but Nick Webb's bio actually (mostly) skips the hagiography to capture Adams in all his brilliant, self-absorbed glory. Writing with the cooperation of Adams' family, friends and occasional enemies, Webb spends a surprising amount of time on the author's legendary procrastination. Previous Adams profiles have tended to depict this as a charming quirk, quoting his famous remark about deadlines: "I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." But Webb toiled for years on the publishing end of the business, and he lists the contractual and emotional headaches Adams gave editors, family and friends.
The book also digs deep enough to suggest that when Adams wrote his "Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" -- five (yes, five) comic novels about hapless Arthur Dent's travels across the galaxy -- he was, to a degree, writing what he knew.
Webb is also writing what he knew, inasmuch as he was a friend of Adams who enjoyed arguing with the author about scientific theory in fancy restaurants -- the fancy restaurants being an addiction that probably hastened Adams' fatal heart attack at age 49.
Ridiculously tall (6-foot-5) and, as Webb recounts it, blessed with the coordination of a drunk manatee, Adams never quite gelled onstage. A few rough years after graduation, he found himself making inroads as a writer in London -- story-editing episodes of "Doctor Who" and getting knackered with Monty Python's Graham Chapman under the guise of "collaboration." (Adams actually contributed to a late-run episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," earning one of its few outside writing credits.)
In 1978, Adams sold the BBC on his six-episode radio series, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Legend has it the idea came to Adams as he lay in a field in Austria, drunk, looking at the stars and thinking the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe" lacked scope.
The show began with bathrobe-wearing Arthur and his pal Ford hitching a ride in a flying saucer to escape the Earth, which has been demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. Soon, the nervous Earthman finds himself traveling with the President of the Galaxy, the president's Earthling girlfriend and a clinically depressed robot; tangling with superintelligent mice seeking "The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, The Universe and Everything"; and popping into a time-traveling restaurant where yuppies watch the universe end over cocktails.
All of this was interspersed with entries from the Guide -- a spacefarer's travel reference that riffs on everything from alien cultural mores to the importance of a good towel.
For the initiated, it goes without saying that the show was a massive hit -- and sparked a global phenomenon. Over the past two decades, variations on Adams' basic story have been re-told as a stage play, TV miniseries, video game, comic book and the movie that opened Friday. But it's one of the few creative works that's proved most popular in book form -- with over 15 million copies of Adams' five "Hitchhiker" novels sold.
The precise appeal of those novels is tough to sum up in pithy sentences. On one level, they're gut-bustingly funny and inventive. But they're also weirdly perfect mixes of comedy and cosmology -- purees of "Doctor Who" and "Python" written in a wholly original voice.
"Douglas heard the music," writes Webb. "[His] books are witty about big questions." Adams rarely told a well-structured story; at worst, his writing can feel like strung-together collections of clever gags. But at his best, he found new ways to collide the cosmic and the mundane. To wit:
The Guide riffs on the biggest problem created by time travel -- several annoying new grammar tenses.
The English sport of cricket turns out to be an unwitting homage to a bloody intergalactic war.
The search for God leads to a senile old man living in a shack with his cat, unsure if anything exists outside his door.
An alien cursed with eternal life uses his immortality to insult every living being in the universe -- in alphabetical order.
The discipline of sketch-writing left Adams with a knack for strangely perfect turns of phrase. Alien vessels hang improbably in the air "in much the same way bricks don't." In book three, Arthur teaches himself to fly -- by "learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." The books are relentlessly quotable, and it was hard-won: Webb notes that Adams was famous for coming to work with a dozen pages of script, writing furiously all day, and leaving with eight.
Webb also charts how Adams' personal life -- his love of restaurants, environmentalism, science, philosophy, and love itself -- played out in his ridiculous book scenarios. In "Life, the Universe and Everything," a spaceship is powered by the uncertainties of restaurant-check mathematics. And the author's obsession with guitar rock led to his creation of the supergroup Disaster Area -- a band so loud, "the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage." In the fourth book, mankind is saved from extinction thanks to a "Save the Humans" effort mounted by Earth's second-most-intelligent species, the dolphins. (Humans, in Adams' cosmology, ran a distant third.)
Given his profound lack of discipline, it's a wonder any of this got written at all.
"Douglas was romantic, warm, funny, exuberantly enthusiastic and possessed of a quite exceptional brain," writes Webb. "He also had his demons, and could be depressed, self-absorbed, sulky and difficult."
And late. Very, very late. Webb has the author literally writing and revising radio-show dialogue in the next room during the recording of the final radio-show installments. There's also a first-person account in Webb's book from editor Sonny Mehta, in which he describes literally moving into a hotel room with Adams for three weeks to get him to finish "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."
A decade-long bout of writer's block followed "Mostly Harmless." Travel was Adams' chief avoidance mechanism; however, it also produced what is arguably his best work -- a non-fiction travelogue titled "Last Chance to See." Published in 1990, it found Adams and co-author Mark Carwardine tracking down obscure endangered species. Adams also helped launch a failed multimedia venture, The Digital Village, which produced the "Starship Titanic" book and video game as well as h2g2.com, an attempt to create a real "Hitchhiker's Guide" in the form of an online encyclopedia.
Just before he died, his writer's drought had apparently ended. He'd started work on a new book, "The Salmon of Doubt," that was evolving into either a somewhat-cheerier sixth "Hitchhiker" novel or an installment in his other series, which starred "existential detective" Dirk Gently. (A reconstruction of "Salmon" was published posthumously in 2003.)
And just before Adams died, the film version of "Hitchhiker" was moving forward after a decade in development hell -- a process Adams likened to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it." He did, however, live to see his work intrude on the culture in some perversely funny ways: The computer that bested Kasparov at chess in 1989 was named "Deep Thought," for example, after the computer pondering Adams' Ultimate Question. And Adams' "Babel fish" -- a living universal translator that swam in your ear in "Hitchhiker's Guide" -- is now the name of the Internet's most popular free translation program. As Webb puts it: "Douglas has left a huge and benign footprint on the world."
__________________
The Hitchhiker's Guide to 'Hitchhiker's Guide'
The lowdown on the five books (and one short story) in the 'trilogy'
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -- Bathrobe-wearing Arthur Dent hitches a ride off the Earth before it's destroyed. Then things get strange. Featuring bad alien poetry, a man named Slartibartfast who manufactures planets, and The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Hint: The answer's pretty useless if you don't know the question.)
"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" -- In many ways the strongest, funniest book in the series. Dent and the rest of our heroes run afoul of a planet-destroying rock band, diners at the end of time, a spaceship filled with second-class citizens and a man in a shack who just might be God.
"Life, the Universe and Everything" -- Adams turned a discarded "Doctor Who" storyline into his third novel: Arthur returns to space (in a ship powered by the bizarre mathematics of restaurant checks) to fight evil robots playing a deadly game of cricket.
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" -- Arthur lands on a miraculously restored Earth -- and falls in madly in love with a very strange girl. Adams' planet-bound romance left many fans cold, but there are some intriguing bits involving dolphins.
"Mostly Harmless" -- A dark year in which Adams' stepfather died and his accountant embezzled a third of his money informed this nihilistic final entry in the series. A new, nasty version of the Guide carries out a mysterious plan to re-destroy the Earth (in all its pesky multidimensional manifestations). Can a grieving, sandwich-making Arthur Dent foil its plans? Probably not.
"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" -- A one-joke short story found in omnibus collections: The future President of the Galaxy, working on a salvage ship, stumbles onto the universe's most dangerous weapon -- Ronald Reagan.
____________________
Douglas Adams: mercurial mind
Sidebar: Interstellar guide to, well, everything
(The Oregonian, May 1, 2005)
Posted at 01:00 PM
|
Sun - March 27, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: The 'Sin City' comic-book series
The Oregonian just gave me a happy
task: trying to explain the pleasures of the original "Sin City" comics to the
uninitiated. My attempt
follows.
The "Sin City" movie is already out -- in your local bookstore.
The film -- adapted nearly panel-for-panel from Frank Miller's series of crime comics -- is a bloody celebration of pulp thrills, directed by Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Miller himself. (Here's a gesture of respect: Rodriguez quit the Director's Guild of America so Miller could share credit.)
But the really good news is this:
Prodded by the movie's April 1 release, Dark Horse is re-issuing all seven volumes of the original "Sin City" comics -- a couple of which were out of print -- in an all-new format. (Vols. 1-5 are out now, with Vols. 6 and 7 scheduled to hit stores April 8.)
Designed, as Miller has said, so "you can put them in your purse," the new editions are gorgeous and compact -- with numbered spines and all-new cover designs by Chip Kidd. According to Bookscan, thanks to interest in the movie, the new editions are already finding an audience.
But what's the audience finding?
Only some of the most outrageously hard-boiled comic books ever-- blood-soaked fever dreams of cars, women, guns and mayhem -- written and drawn by a restless artist at his peak.
From Batman to 'Sin'
Until now, Frank Miller has enjoyed only modest success in Hollywood, and "modest" might be putting it nicely. He wrote the screenplays for the two "Robocop" sequels, and had one of his comics, "Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot," adapted into an animated series that got limited airtime.
But in the world of comics, Miller's a god -- the most important funnybook creator of the late 20th century, alongside "Watchmen"'s Alan Moore.
Miller started making crime comics as a teenager, but was forced to draw superheroes for his bread and butter after he started working for Marvel in the late '70s. Soon, he was smuggling his love of urban noir into his superhero work. His run on "Daredevil" is legendary: Partly inspired by Will Eisner, who worked to push genre boundaries in "The Spirit," Miller wove more character development and gangland machinations into the capes-and-tights genre than any previous comic-book writer had dared.
He followed this in 1986 with his masterpiece, "The Dark Knight Returns" -- the story of a fiftysomething Batman who comes out of retirement in a corrupt future. That book earned critical praise and spawned a thousand trend pieces crowing that "comics aren't for kids any more" (a mixed blessing, as it turned out).
In 1991, Miller -- flush off this string of hits -- returned to his first love, crime fiction. The first "Sin City" story, serialized in the "Dark Horse Presents" anthology, was brutally simple, a pure distillation of pulp: A thug named Marv kills his way up a ladder of corruption as he tries to find out who murdered a hooker named Goldie.
But the style? That was a jaw-dropper.
Historically, comic books and pulp fiction are crazy traveling companions: Sci-fi pulp deity Alfred Bester cut his teeth writing "Green Lantern," for example. But "Sin City" mashed crime and comics together in ways no one had quite seen before. Miller was tapping into some long-repressed id, and he wasn't censoring a single word or image that spilled from his brain to the page. "Sin City" was pure bloodlust, albeit smartly rendered bloodlust -- mixing the larger-than-life iconography of his superhero work with film-noir dialogue and a brutality straight out of a men's-adventure magazine from the '50s.
Marv ran afoul of cannibal priests and a well-armed band of gorgeous prostitutes, all while narrating his story with a ferocity that verged on parody:
"When I find out who did it, it won't be quick or quiet like it was with you," he promises the dead Goldie. "No, it'll be loud and nasty, my kind of kill. I'll stare the bastard in the face and laugh as he screams to God and I'll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby. And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like Heaven after what I've done to him. I love you, Goldie."
Incredibly, Miller's black-and-white artwork complimented this sort of ranting: He dug a cool new look and vibe out of raw material that could have stunk worse than a hard-boiled egg.
One of the great pleasures of reading this first story -- now collected as "The Hard Goodbye" -- is watching Miller literally invent a new way to draw comics as he goes along. Marv's world is rendered in pure light and shadow; Miller has obviously penciled each picture in detail, then inked only what he felt was absolutely necessary to convey shapes and motion. The result is a moving chiaroscuro, a comic that looks stamped in wood, with panel and lettering layouts that are far more sophisticated than they look at first glance.
An evolving style
The six collected volumes that follow "The Hard Goodbye" -- "A Dame to Kill For," "The Big Fat Kill," "That Yellow Bastard," "Family Values," the short-story collection "Booze, Broads and Bullets" and "Hell and Back: A Sin City Love Story" -- are every bit as overcooked as their titles suggest. Consider two of the books being woven into the film: In "Big Fat Kill," our hero, Dwight, slogs through sewers and tar pits chasing after a cop's severed head. In "Yellow Bastard," a 68-year-old ex-cop protects a stripper from a bulbous freak whose jaundiced skin is the only color element in an otherwise black-and-white book.
But these aren't satirical stories; they create an exaggerated reality that allows you to feel for the quip-barking characters. And even as the trysts and beheadings pile up on the page, there's a growing complexity to the storytelling.
It's worth reading the books in order, if only to see how Miller skips around in time, overlapping his stories with the assurance of a "Pulp Fiction"-era Tarantino. (Reading them now, it's not hard to see why Tarantino lobbied to guest-direct a scene or two of the movie.)
By the final book in the series, which saw print in 2000, Miller had introduced a femme fatale who looked like a young Bette Davis; a squad of sword- and gun-wielding assassin prostitutes who act as a sort of antihero Justice League; a detailed hierarchy of mob bosses, mercenaries, flunkies and corrupt political families; and at least four leading men -- all stereotypically pushed to the edge of reason -- who all narrate their stories in the same hard-boiled patter.
Meanwhile, Miller had restlessly evolved his art, fiddling with the visual language he pioneered. He introduced splashes of color, loosened his lines, and increased the complexity of his layouts between stunning "splash pages" of black-and-white art. Vol. 7, "Hell and Back," is easily the weakest story of the bunch -- a fairly pat damsel-in-distress story, with a lonesome hero and a dopey conspiracy -- but it's also the most visually unhinged: The characters are drawn with oversized eyes, hands and feet (a sort of pulp "Precious Moments"), and there's a wild full-color section that tells 26 pages of story through the hero's drug-induced hallucination.
Miller says he has a few more "Sin City" stories up his sleeve. And while there's a guarantee of certain pulp thrills in whatever narrative he dishes out, if these seven gorgeous books are any indication, how he'll dish them out should come as a complete surprise.
Bloody Pulp (The Oregonian's ArtsWeek, March 27, 2005)
The "Sin City" movie is already out -- in your local bookstore.
The film -- adapted nearly panel-for-panel from Frank Miller's series of crime comics -- is a bloody celebration of pulp thrills, directed by Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Miller himself. (Here's a gesture of respect: Rodriguez quit the Director's Guild of America so Miller could share credit.)
But the really good news is this:
Prodded by the movie's April 1 release, Dark Horse is re-issuing all seven volumes of the original "Sin City" comics -- a couple of which were out of print -- in an all-new format. (Vols. 1-5 are out now, with Vols. 6 and 7 scheduled to hit stores April 8.)
Designed, as Miller has said, so "you can put them in your purse," the new editions are gorgeous and compact -- with numbered spines and all-new cover designs by Chip Kidd. According to Bookscan, thanks to interest in the movie, the new editions are already finding an audience.
But what's the audience finding?
Only some of the most outrageously hard-boiled comic books ever-- blood-soaked fever dreams of cars, women, guns and mayhem -- written and drawn by a restless artist at his peak.
From Batman to 'Sin'
Until now, Frank Miller has enjoyed only modest success in Hollywood, and "modest" might be putting it nicely. He wrote the screenplays for the two "Robocop" sequels, and had one of his comics, "Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot," adapted into an animated series that got limited airtime.
But in the world of comics, Miller's a god -- the most important funnybook creator of the late 20th century, alongside "Watchmen"'s Alan Moore.
Miller started making crime comics as a teenager, but was forced to draw superheroes for his bread and butter after he started working for Marvel in the late '70s. Soon, he was smuggling his love of urban noir into his superhero work. His run on "Daredevil" is legendary: Partly inspired by Will Eisner, who worked to push genre boundaries in "The Spirit," Miller wove more character development and gangland machinations into the capes-and-tights genre than any previous comic-book writer had dared.
He followed this in 1986 with his masterpiece, "The Dark Knight Returns" -- the story of a fiftysomething Batman who comes out of retirement in a corrupt future. That book earned critical praise and spawned a thousand trend pieces crowing that "comics aren't for kids any more" (a mixed blessing, as it turned out).
In 1991, Miller -- flush off this string of hits -- returned to his first love, crime fiction. The first "Sin City" story, serialized in the "Dark Horse Presents" anthology, was brutally simple, a pure distillation of pulp: A thug named Marv kills his way up a ladder of corruption as he tries to find out who murdered a hooker named Goldie.
But the style? That was a jaw-dropper.
Historically, comic books and pulp fiction are crazy traveling companions: Sci-fi pulp deity Alfred Bester cut his teeth writing "Green Lantern," for example. But "Sin City" mashed crime and comics together in ways no one had quite seen before. Miller was tapping into some long-repressed id, and he wasn't censoring a single word or image that spilled from his brain to the page. "Sin City" was pure bloodlust, albeit smartly rendered bloodlust -- mixing the larger-than-life iconography of his superhero work with film-noir dialogue and a brutality straight out of a men's-adventure magazine from the '50s.
Marv ran afoul of cannibal priests and a well-armed band of gorgeous prostitutes, all while narrating his story with a ferocity that verged on parody:
"When I find out who did it, it won't be quick or quiet like it was with you," he promises the dead Goldie. "No, it'll be loud and nasty, my kind of kill. I'll stare the bastard in the face and laugh as he screams to God and I'll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby. And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like Heaven after what I've done to him. I love you, Goldie."
Incredibly, Miller's black-and-white artwork complimented this sort of ranting: He dug a cool new look and vibe out of raw material that could have stunk worse than a hard-boiled egg.
One of the great pleasures of reading this first story -- now collected as "The Hard Goodbye" -- is watching Miller literally invent a new way to draw comics as he goes along. Marv's world is rendered in pure light and shadow; Miller has obviously penciled each picture in detail, then inked only what he felt was absolutely necessary to convey shapes and motion. The result is a moving chiaroscuro, a comic that looks stamped in wood, with panel and lettering layouts that are far more sophisticated than they look at first glance.
An evolving style
The six collected volumes that follow "The Hard Goodbye" -- "A Dame to Kill For," "The Big Fat Kill," "That Yellow Bastard," "Family Values," the short-story collection "Booze, Broads and Bullets" and "Hell and Back: A Sin City Love Story" -- are every bit as overcooked as their titles suggest. Consider two of the books being woven into the film: In "Big Fat Kill," our hero, Dwight, slogs through sewers and tar pits chasing after a cop's severed head. In "Yellow Bastard," a 68-year-old ex-cop protects a stripper from a bulbous freak whose jaundiced skin is the only color element in an otherwise black-and-white book.
But these aren't satirical stories; they create an exaggerated reality that allows you to feel for the quip-barking characters. And even as the trysts and beheadings pile up on the page, there's a growing complexity to the storytelling.
It's worth reading the books in order, if only to see how Miller skips around in time, overlapping his stories with the assurance of a "Pulp Fiction"-era Tarantino. (Reading them now, it's not hard to see why Tarantino lobbied to guest-direct a scene or two of the movie.)
By the final book in the series, which saw print in 2000, Miller had introduced a femme fatale who looked like a young Bette Davis; a squad of sword- and gun-wielding assassin prostitutes who act as a sort of antihero Justice League; a detailed hierarchy of mob bosses, mercenaries, flunkies and corrupt political families; and at least four leading men -- all stereotypically pushed to the edge of reason -- who all narrate their stories in the same hard-boiled patter.
Meanwhile, Miller had restlessly evolved his art, fiddling with the visual language he pioneered. He introduced splashes of color, loosened his lines, and increased the complexity of his layouts between stunning "splash pages" of black-and-white art. Vol. 7, "Hell and Back," is easily the weakest story of the bunch -- a fairly pat damsel-in-distress story, with a lonesome hero and a dopey conspiracy -- but it's also the most visually unhinged: The characters are drawn with oversized eyes, hands and feet (a sort of pulp "Precious Moments"), and there's a wild full-color section that tells 26 pages of story through the hero's drug-induced hallucination.
Miller says he has a few more "Sin City" stories up his sleeve. And while there's a guarantee of certain pulp thrills in whatever narrative he dishes out, if these seven gorgeous books are any indication, how he'll dish them out should come as a complete surprise.
Bloody Pulp (The Oregonian's ArtsWeek, March 27, 2005)
Posted at 12:19 PM
|
Sun - February 27, 2005
BOOK REVIEWS: 'Gemma Bovery' and 'Epileptic'
From today's
Oregonian:
People who make comics learn to deal with the art form's biggest bummer: The world's fastest form of reading is also its slowest form of writing.
It's brutal. A comic book you can read in 10 minutes requires weeks of obsessive work by a writer, artist, editor, colorist and letterer (or one person tacking all their duties) -- and they're all grappling with comics' bastard visual grammar, which demands tough and constant decision-making: How many panels per page? How should the words and pictures dance? Should the drawings veer toward realism or impressionism? Where should I place my artists' "camera"?
It's an insane-making amount of stuff to think about -- and one of the pleasures of reading really good comics is seeing how different artists answer the same formal questions.
Take, for example, two European graphic novels just published in the U.S. by Pantheon: Posy Simmonds' "Gemma Bovery" and David B.'s "Epileptic."
"Gemma," first published in the UK in 1999, is one of those wonderful reads where the words and pictures mesh so smoothly that the craftsmanship disappears. Simmonds is a British cartoonist and illustrator with a soft, charcoal-hued style that makes her work feel like slightly more refined New Yorker cartoons. But in "Gemma," that softness only serves to underscore Simmonds' writing, which is etched in a special acid that aims to dissolve middle-class pretensions. Her book is sort of an anti-"Under the Tuscan Sun," telling the story of a woman who loses everything -- morally, spiritually and financially -- as she seeks a more "authentic" life in the French countryside.
Gemma, our titular heroine, is one of those tiresome people who confuses "passion" with emotion, who believes that handmade bread, distressed antiques and old houses fill voids in souls. When the book begins, she's died under mysterious circumstances, and her story unfolds in flashbacks -- as the French baker who's obsessed with her steals her diaries, filling us in on her loveless marriage, her affairs and the death-emptiness of her yuppified heart.
It's smart satire verging on cruelty, but what's extraordinary is the way it unfolds -- like a set of illustrated footnotes. Simmonds' layouts are wildly complex, but incredibly easy to read; she juggles typeset blocks of narration with handwritten diary entries, comic-strip dialogue scenes, maps and stand-alone illustrations to create a seductive narrative weave.
More difficult -- but also more rewarding -- is French cartoonist David B.'s approach to "Epileptic."
This 361-page tome, first published in France from 1996-2004, is a blunt, hallucinatory cartoon autobiography about the author's struggles with his epileptic brother. It starts out telling its story in a primitive way, much like Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis": Snippets of terse narration are illustrated with simple, woodcut-like artwork.
But David B. builds on this simplicity in ways that outstrip even Satrapi's considerable achievements. As David B. watches his brother (and family) devoured by epilepsy -- wasting years on quack therapies, macrobiotic cults, psychoanalysis and mysticism in a futile search for a cure -- the artwork provides increasingly complex adjectives that flesh out the unadorned prose.
At first, David B. draws epilepsy as a literal dragon stalking his brother. But as the disease eats away at his brother's mind, dragon and victim merge into a single, malevolent entity. And each fruitless occult experience adds another symbol to the author's visual vocabulary -- until, by book's end, the drawings have become dense, disturbing tableaux that reflect the author's own complex feelings toward his brother, which vacillate wildly between pity, jealousy and resentment. "I feel like I've been chased off by his illness," he says late in the story.
"Gemma Bovery" and "Epileptic" use the comics language in vastly different ways, to vastly different ends. "Gemma" is a mystery and social satire, while "Epileptic" looks at the toll disease takes on the afflicted and those trying to help them. But the artists behind both books share a common ideal: They believe the grammar of comics can depict more than two-dimensional superhero battles. And they follow through on those beliefs with books that are nothing short of triumphant.
GEMMA BOVERY, Posy Simmonds, Pantheon, $19.95, 112 pages
EPILEPTIC, David B., Pantheon, $25, 368 pages
Comic artistry: Two new graphic novels illustrate original and creative ways to tell a story (The Oregonian, Feb. 27, 2005)
People who make comics learn to deal with the art form's biggest bummer: The world's fastest form of reading is also its slowest form of writing.
It's brutal. A comic book you can read in 10 minutes requires weeks of obsessive work by a writer, artist, editor, colorist and letterer (or one person tacking all their duties) -- and they're all grappling with comics' bastard visual grammar, which demands tough and constant decision-making: How many panels per page? How should the words and pictures dance? Should the drawings veer toward realism or impressionism? Where should I place my artists' "camera"?
It's an insane-making amount of stuff to think about -- and one of the pleasures of reading really good comics is seeing how different artists answer the same formal questions.
Take, for example, two European graphic novels just published in the U.S. by Pantheon: Posy Simmonds' "Gemma Bovery" and David B.'s "Epileptic."
"Gemma," first published in the UK in 1999, is one of those wonderful reads where the words and pictures mesh so smoothly that the craftsmanship disappears. Simmonds is a British cartoonist and illustrator with a soft, charcoal-hued style that makes her work feel like slightly more refined New Yorker cartoons. But in "Gemma," that softness only serves to underscore Simmonds' writing, which is etched in a special acid that aims to dissolve middle-class pretensions. Her book is sort of an anti-"Under the Tuscan Sun," telling the story of a woman who loses everything -- morally, spiritually and financially -- as she seeks a more "authentic" life in the French countryside.
Gemma, our titular heroine, is one of those tiresome people who confuses "passion" with emotion, who believes that handmade bread, distressed antiques and old houses fill voids in souls. When the book begins, she's died under mysterious circumstances, and her story unfolds in flashbacks -- as the French baker who's obsessed with her steals her diaries, filling us in on her loveless marriage, her affairs and the death-emptiness of her yuppified heart.
It's smart satire verging on cruelty, but what's extraordinary is the way it unfolds -- like a set of illustrated footnotes. Simmonds' layouts are wildly complex, but incredibly easy to read; she juggles typeset blocks of narration with handwritten diary entries, comic-strip dialogue scenes, maps and stand-alone illustrations to create a seductive narrative weave.
More difficult -- but also more rewarding -- is French cartoonist David B.'s approach to "Epileptic."
This 361-page tome, first published in France from 1996-2004, is a blunt, hallucinatory cartoon autobiography about the author's struggles with his epileptic brother. It starts out telling its story in a primitive way, much like Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis": Snippets of terse narration are illustrated with simple, woodcut-like artwork.
But David B. builds on this simplicity in ways that outstrip even Satrapi's considerable achievements. As David B. watches his brother (and family) devoured by epilepsy -- wasting years on quack therapies, macrobiotic cults, psychoanalysis and mysticism in a futile search for a cure -- the artwork provides increasingly complex adjectives that flesh out the unadorned prose.
At first, David B. draws epilepsy as a literal dragon stalking his brother. But as the disease eats away at his brother's mind, dragon and victim merge into a single, malevolent entity. And each fruitless occult experience adds another symbol to the author's visual vocabulary -- until, by book's end, the drawings have become dense, disturbing tableaux that reflect the author's own complex feelings toward his brother, which vacillate wildly between pity, jealousy and resentment. "I feel like I've been chased off by his illness," he says late in the story.
"Gemma Bovery" and "Epileptic" use the comics language in vastly different ways, to vastly different ends. "Gemma" is a mystery and social satire, while "Epileptic" looks at the toll disease takes on the afflicted and those trying to help them. But the artists behind both books share a common ideal: They believe the grammar of comics can depict more than two-dimensional superhero battles. And they follow through on those beliefs with books that are nothing short of triumphant.
GEMMA BOVERY, Posy Simmonds, Pantheon, $19.95, 112 pages
EPILEPTIC, David B., Pantheon, $25, 368 pages
Comic artistry: Two new graphic novels illustrate original and creative ways to tell a story (The Oregonian, Feb. 27, 2005)
Posted at 09:25 AM
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Sun - January 9, 2005
BOOK REVIEW: 'Eyeing the Flash: The Education of a Carnival Con Artist'
____________________
I didn't believe a word of Peter Fenton's memoir,
"Eyeing the Flash."
That's not meant as an insult.
This hugely entertaining book is, after all, subtitled "The Education of a Carnival Con Artist." It opens in medias res, in 1967, with 17-year-old Fenton about to come to blows with Jackie Barron -- his best friend, employer and all-around bad influence on the Midwest carnival circuit.
Jackie, you see, just got an inkling that Fenton's been stealing cash scored off the marks roving his attractions.
But then, as Fenton writes, "I'd been skimming money because I'd discovered he was paying me far less than my fair share." Which leaves these complicated friends with their fingers wrapped around the loose parts of a carnival attraction called "The Swinger" -- ready to do some swinging of their own if that roll of cash that just fell out of Fenton's pant leg is what Jackie thinks it is.
It's a brisk start, and emblematic of the rest of the book -- fast-moving, fast-talking, kind of overcooked in the dialogue department. It's also, as befits the subject, grimy and tantalizing.
Mr. Fenton is a published humorist who spent a decade-and-a-half in the employ of The National Enquirer. That, combined with his fast rise as a carnival agent, has polished his prose to a zirconium sheen. There's nary a wasted word in "Eyeing the Flash"; every chapter crackles with structure and punchlines. It's a great read, the sort of book where everyone -- be they teenager or Flat Store-man -- talks in a fast-paced patter that makes them sound, in your mind's ear, like 45-year-old character actors from the Bronx.
To wit: "In life, there are two kinds of people -- ulcer-givers and ulcer-getters," Jackie (a Vitalis-drenched high-school sophomore) tells Pete shortly before handing him a copy of "John Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling." For Fenton, it's a revelatory moment. The product of a miserable family life -- with a drunk father "who'd tragically tripped and fallen into a vat thick with hops and barley, never to be seen again" -- the author finds he has a misanthropic streak well-suited to the grift.
(Which is, of course, that's why I don't believe a sentence of his book. I should stress here that I'm not calling Fenton a liar: I'm sure all of "Eyeing the Flash" actually happened -- just maybe not with everyone speaking in dialogue so relentlessly sharp. But then, given the subject matter, a little larger-than-life patter is thematically apt, isn't it?)
What follows is a sort of evil Horatio Alger story -- with Pete applying his genius for number-crunching to basement casinos, then to working over saps as a "carnival agent." Throw in on-the-fly elephant-wrangling, scumbags with nicknames like "The Ghost" and "The Flopper," acres of mud and a growing hostility between the two friends, and you have an action-packed read that revels in Fenton's obvious enthusiasm for the con.
Best of all, "Eyeing the Flash" rewards your double-saw with more than a stuffed toy. Fenton excels, really excels, at scene-setting. He's a master of detail. In a few short pages, he gives you a working taxonomy of carny life that lends it a real humanity -- even as he opens the con man's bag of tricks to confirm your worst fears.
This isn't a book with a "redemption arc" for its protagonist. Fenton seems to have genuinely delighted in being, as he puts it, "constitutionally suited to becoming part of an us-versus-them world -- 'us' being the smart folks, cons and carnies; 'them' being the fools, suckers and marks, also known as everyone else on the face of the earth." In fact, the book's final pages are devoted to Jackie and Pete's day-long battle to see who can squeeze the most marks in "a junked-up, neon-lit planet, a tawdry, traveling Times Square where no one cared about who I was or where I came from because they assumed any story I, a fellow carny, told was a lie."
That Pete's "relatively honest" in this world makes him worth Jackie's time. And yours.
The Confidence Man (Oregonian BooksWeek, Jan. 9, 2004)
That's not meant as an insult.
This hugely entertaining book is, after all, subtitled "The Education of a Carnival Con Artist." It opens in medias res, in 1967, with 17-year-old Fenton about to come to blows with Jackie Barron -- his best friend, employer and all-around bad influence on the Midwest carnival circuit.
Jackie, you see, just got an inkling that Fenton's been stealing cash scored off the marks roving his attractions.
But then, as Fenton writes, "I'd been skimming money because I'd discovered he was paying me far less than my fair share." Which leaves these complicated friends with their fingers wrapped around the loose parts of a carnival attraction called "The Swinger" -- ready to do some swinging of their own if that roll of cash that just fell out of Fenton's pant leg is what Jackie thinks it is.
It's a brisk start, and emblematic of the rest of the book -- fast-moving, fast-talking, kind of overcooked in the dialogue department. It's also, as befits the subject, grimy and tantalizing.
Mr. Fenton is a published humorist who spent a decade-and-a-half in the employ of The National Enquirer. That, combined with his fast rise as a carnival agent, has polished his prose to a zirconium sheen. There's nary a wasted word in "Eyeing the Flash"; every chapter crackles with structure and punchlines. It's a great read, the sort of book where everyone -- be they teenager or Flat Store-man -- talks in a fast-paced patter that makes them sound, in your mind's ear, like 45-year-old character actors from the Bronx.
To wit: "In life, there are two kinds of people -- ulcer-givers and ulcer-getters," Jackie (a Vitalis-drenched high-school sophomore) tells Pete shortly before handing him a copy of "John Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling." For Fenton, it's a revelatory moment. The product of a miserable family life -- with a drunk father "who'd tragically tripped and fallen into a vat thick with hops and barley, never to be seen again" -- the author finds he has a misanthropic streak well-suited to the grift.
(Which is, of course, that's why I don't believe a sentence of his book. I should stress here that I'm not calling Fenton a liar: I'm sure all of "Eyeing the Flash" actually happened -- just maybe not with everyone speaking in dialogue so relentlessly sharp. But then, given the subject matter, a little larger-than-life patter is thematically apt, isn't it?)
What follows is a sort of evil Horatio Alger story -- with Pete applying his genius for number-crunching to basement casinos, then to working over saps as a "carnival agent." Throw in on-the-fly elephant-wrangling, scumbags with nicknames like "The Ghost" and "The Flopper," acres of mud and a growing hostility between the two friends, and you have an action-packed read that revels in Fenton's obvious enthusiasm for the con.
Best of all, "Eyeing the Flash" rewards your double-saw with more than a stuffed toy. Fenton excels, really excels, at scene-setting. He's a master of detail. In a few short pages, he gives you a working taxonomy of carny life that lends it a real humanity -- even as he opens the con man's bag of tricks to confirm your worst fears.
This isn't a book with a "redemption arc" for its protagonist. Fenton seems to have genuinely delighted in being, as he puts it, "constitutionally suited to becoming part of an us-versus-them world -- 'us' being the smart folks, cons and carnies; 'them' being the fools, suckers and marks, also known as everyone else on the face of the earth." In fact, the book's final pages are devoted to Jackie and Pete's day-long battle to see who can squeeze the most marks in "a junked-up, neon-lit planet, a tawdry, traveling Times Square where no one cared about who I was or where I came from because they assumed any story I, a fellow carny, told was a lie."
That Pete's "relatively honest" in this world makes him worth Jackie's time. And yours.
The Confidence Man (Oregonian BooksWeek, Jan. 9, 2004)
Posted at 10:48 AM
|
Sun - December 5, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place'
Apparently it's Buddhism Week here at CulturePulp.com: From the Sunday Oregonian's BooksWeek, here my review of explorer and Tantric scholar Ian Baker's "The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place":
_________________
"Over the past fifty years, Everest and K-2 and most of the world's highest mountains had been climbed, men had walked on the moon and explored the ocean's trenches," writes Ian Baker in "The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place," "but the final five miles of the Tsangpo Gorge remained a complete mystery."
After you read Baker's book, the reasons for that enduring mystery become obvious. The gorge -- located in the Pemako region of Tibet -- is forbidding in ways that would seem unsubtle in an Indiana Jones film. It's rife with snakes, tigers, leeches, landslides, raging rapids, insane weather, competing explorers, petty Chinese officials and cultists who believe they can steal your karma by poisoning you.
But, as in any good Indiana Jones film, hidden treasures lay beyond the pitfalls. In the 19th and 20th centuries, British explorers such as Frank Kingdon-Ward were obsessed by Pemako's uncataloged geography and plant life. And Buddhist legend tells of a sacred land, or beyul, hidden in the heart of Pemako -- complete with one or more magic waterfalls, rainbow-choked valleys and sacred plants that confer enlightenment if "auspicious circumstances" converge. (The beyul legend informs the Shangri-La of "Lost Horizon.")
"The Heart of the World" is Baker's memoir of his obsessive, decade-spanning quest to explore the gorge's spiritual and geographic enigmas. He's a mountaineer and a Buddhist scholar, which put a double prong on his mission -- he wanted to chart the five miles of the Tsangpo Gorge that Kingdon-Ward couldn't penetrate and discover if enlightenment could truly be found beyond the torrent of leeches.
The result is a book that's exhaustively researched, wildly ambitious and occasionally impenetrable.
Baker wants to merge the styles of the two previous forms of Pemako-exploration accounts -- the literalist writings of British adventurers and the cryptic riddles of sacred scrolls -- in a single book. This makes "The Heart of the World" as much a primer in Buddhist doctrine as it is a travelogue. Tales of Baker's three major excursions into Pemako (in 1993, '95 and '98) are liberally intertwined with long digressions on esoteric Tantric doctrine and 19th-century expeditions.
It's hard to imagine a more thorough document -- the book explores Pemako's culture, geography and spirituality, often rendering the landscape in terms of local deities -- and Baker is probably the only man alive who could have written it with this much authority. "The Heart of the World" embraces the tension between spirit and flesh, and on that level, it's extraordinary.
Which is why it's sort of painful to report that Baker's prose style will lose a few readers en route to revealing Pemako's mysteries. There are straightforward passages of exploration that are cool and brutal -- but the author's devout spirituality also leads him to mythologize the world in sentences that can feel, on occasion, as if they had fallen out of a Buddhist version of the J. Peterman catalog. This is particularly true of the first third of the book, which chokes on such semiprecious introductions as, "I found Chatral Rinpoche sitting on the grass outside his hermitage feeding a consecrated tantric elixir to a flock of crows." (It doesn't sound bad taken on its own, but it's part of a cumulative annoyance.) And Baker's habit of thinking of elaborate, illustrative quotes at key dramatic moments feels a bit contrived by book's end.
Even worse are the thickets of doctrine so dense that you feel like a bit of an explorer yourself, passages such as: "According to the Guide of the Heart Center of the Great Sacred Land of Pemako: The All-Gathering Vajasattva Palace, a secret, black-bodied form of the wisdom goddess emanates from the center of the Kundu Lhatso with a retinue of dakinis while surrounding rock formations represent Padmasambhava in eight varying manifestations."
With all due respect to the Buddhist faith, Baker's eight-page glossary in the back of the book can barely extract the lay reader from that sort of quicksand.
Of course, that's unduly harsh. Baker fully intends to challenge your perceptions with that sort of prose, provided you're willing to take the journey. "The Heart of the World" is a book of faith and a book of exploration -- and a major departure from the traditional wilderness-adventure text.
Exploring the geography and spirituality of Tsangpo Gorge (The Oregonian's BooksWeek, Dec. 5, 2004)
Posted at 11:14 AM
|
Mon - September 13, 2004
BOOK REVIEWS: Graphical tragedy
From the Sunday Oregonian's BooksWeek section: My reviews of Art Spiegelman's 9/11 comic book In the Shadow of No Towers and the second volume of Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi's cartoon memoirs, Persepolis 2 .
Posted at 01:09 PM
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Sun - August 8, 2004
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).
______
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.
______
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 at 12:02 PM
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