Anyone who has been following me on Twitter or Facebook is already well aware of my relationship with John Marks' novel Fangland. They already know about how I picked it up and put it back down four or more times, moving on to read something more my style before dutifully returning and slogging through another fifty pages only to put it back down and repeat the entire process.
In the time it took me to read Fangland I also read Liquor, The Gum Thief, In Search of a Distant Voice and I LOVE LORD BUDDHA.
This isn’t to say that Fangland is without merit. It just means that it continuously failed to capture my attention long enough to complete it, and at just under four hundred pages that’s a bit strange.
But first, a run down of the plot. Fangland is a Dracula analog, a modern day retelling of the classic story in which England has been replaced by paranoid, skittish post -9/11 New York City and where the heroes are no longer solicitors and other members of British high society but the cast and crew of The Hour, yet another analog, this time of the news program 60 Minutes. Many of these characters are based in part or wholly off of Stoker’s characters, though their ages, genders and origins are different.
Evangeline Harker (a more heavy-handed nod to the original) is an associate producer for The Hour, and is charged with traveling the world to scout out locations and subjects well-suited for the show. If she decides, while on location, that what she has seen will make a nice segment for the show, her green-lighting brings crews, equipment and newscaster to the scene for filming. If not, the segment is squashed and forgotten.
On one such occasion, Harker is sent to Romania to interview Ion Torgu, an old-world mob boss whose name has been whispered throughout eastern Europe but whose face has never been seen. While there, she runs into a young, blond woman named Clementine Spence, a religious missionary under a cloud of mystery, who, like Harker, was born in Texas. The women build a fragile travelling relationship, higher-rent versions of European backpackers, until Harker has found Torgu.
Something goes very, very wrong during the interview with her subject. Torgu, who appears well-mannered and civil, at least in the face of his reputation, is not what he appears to be. Harker goes missing after this exchange and is not seen from again for months, when she is found hiding amongst nuns in a country monastery, her personality very obviously changed.
In her absence, someone has been writing convincing emails from her accounts and has shipped back several tapes of nothing but an empty chair, the audio track garbled with what sounds like the whisperings of city names, some of which, like Nanking, are immediately recognizable due to the human atrocity they will forever be linked with.
There are several reasons, I believe, that I took so long to finish this novel. First, let me point out that this is, indeed, a vampire novel, though in comparison to many other works of this genre its emphasis is rather subdued. Most horror novels are printed by horror-friendly publishers, like Tor, DAW, Del Rey, etc. This is published by Penguin.
If you are not familiar with Penguin, let me explain briefly. This is a publisher that began in Europe in the 1930s with a vision of bringing quality writing to the masses for a low cost, to actually furnish literature at the price of a pack of cigarettes. It has come a long way in the ensuing decades, and now publishes mostly literary fiction. People whose works are put out by Penguin are generally already well-known and have been the recipients of critical or institutional acclaim.
In short, Penguin is known for being mostly high (read: literary) fiction. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for a work of horror to emerge with their orange and white logo on the spine it has to be something completely different than the glut of vampire-related works of other imprints sitting on bookstore shelves.
Different it is, in spades. Between the pacing and choice of vocabulary the book struck me as quite pretentious, and being the kind of person I am it, honestly, put me off a bit. Often I will use a blank, ruled notecard as a bookmark so I can take notes while I am reading. Some of the notes I jotted for Fangland include “This book screams ‘Not genre fiction - REAL LITERATURE!’ so loudly and so often it ends up becoming rather distracting,” “Lay off the five-dollar words, already,” and “I wish the plot would pick up a bit!”
Perhaps it’s me, but after seeing the word “paternoster” in reference to an old-style elevator (accurate as it may have been) and “gabardines” for trousers (still accurate), I rolled my eyes a bit. It’s not that these words, or any other, were inappropriately used. It just dawned on me, more and more, as I read that most, if not all, of the characters in Fangland live in a world of wealth and privilege and education that I do not share.
I am squarely middle-class, and these people absolutely are not. It’s a bit hard for me to get in their heads and see the world as they do, and if my past book reviews are to be believed (hint: they are), I have a very hard time visualizing as I read to begin with. Throw in a bunch of high-earning New Yorkers and my brain hits the brakes hard enough to leave skids.
Another problem I have with Fangland is its format. It is, like Dracula before it, an epistolary work, my third for the summer. This time, the narrative is woven by Evangeline Harker’s personal notes, Austen Trotta’s (a Mike Wallace/Abraham Van Helsing analog) journal, as pressed upon him to write by his therapist, emails between Stimson Beevers, production assistant (and handy Renfield clone) first to someone he believes to be Harker and later to Torgu, and the very opening and ending of the novel are penned by James O’Malley, senior VP for Business Affairs for Omni News and Entertainment, The Hour’s parent company. All of these are written in separate fonts for easy recognition.
However, there is another narrative in the novel that I do not understand. Julia Barnes, former Weather Underground explosives agent turned video editor and Sally Benchborn, producer and Civil War re-enactor, are the focal point of several chapters that are written in the third-person by author unknown. I suppose we can attribute it to James O’Malley, though how he manages to get into Julia’s head and describe her thoughts is impossible and both confused and irritated me throughout her chapters. Marks makes no effort to explain how James O’Malley, if Julia and Sally’s chapters truly are from his detached point of view, could come to know Julia’s past history or the goings on of her mind.
Fangland is a slow burn of a book, the first third of the work being the setup and initial horror of Harker’s Romanian excursion and transformation. It’s not easy to read if you’re used to the racing-out-of-the-gates feel of most horror genre works. That is the main problem with Fangland. It’s not a horror novel but a piece of literary fiction, aiming to work on multiple levels, that has shrouded itself in a vampire’s high-collared cloak. Vying with the horror of the supernatural are multiple references to September 11, terrorism, the nature of human atrocities and the cut-throat (sometimes literally) business of working in television news.
I found myself picking up this book and marveling at its amazing paperback cover (a New York skyline underneath an enormous full moon, accented with bats in flight and one drop of spattered blood), only to find myself slightly disappointed that the vampire element, when touched upon, was strange and distorted. Somewhere in this narrative of backbiting and paranoia is a most unusual vampire, with a set of bizarre physical circumstances, that fails to bring much fear once on American soil.
2/5
Monday, July 6, 2009
#14 of 2009: I LOVE LORD BUDDHA by Hilllary Raphael
What do you get when you combine sex, drugs, techno, bar hostessing, manga and a warped, perverted revisioning of Buddhism?
Apparently you get I LOVE LORD BUDDHA, Hillary Raphael’s avant-garde, postmodernist first novel.
Heather Peterson, a native of New York, using her adopted name HIYOKO, leads a group of foreign-born bar hostesses in Tokyo to murder their clients and commit suicide en masse, all in the name of enlightenment. But how did she get to that point, and how did she amass so many followers?
Short answer, by being a whore. Long answer? It takes nearly 200 pages to get there, but all signs point to being a charismatic whore. There’s a difference, you see.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, though.
Heather Peterson, A.K.A. Tiffany (her hostess name), Spiky (due to her short, theatrical blonde hair) and HIYOKO (her Neo-Geisha name), starts off as a somewhat subpar hostess. She doesn’t empty ashtrays, take drink orders or wear a skirt. But she’s an excellent conversationalist, very seductive and gorgeous in a plastic-and-comic-book way. Because of this, she never loses her job, and winds up one of Tokyo’s best foreign-born hostesses, with lovers and admirers in all facets of Japanese society.
“Tiffany” changes her name, at least outside of the bar in Neo-Geisha capacity, to HIYOKO, and begins reworking Buddhist philosophy into what she deems a “new-new religion,” one of vehement anti-consumerism, the use of sex and narcotics a straight path to what are called “Limit” experiences. The Neo-Geisha are all beautiful women, courtesans of foreign birth, who entertain and arouse the gentlemen that come to their bars. And now they will save the world through their manga, proselytizing, homicidal actions and deaths.
I LOVE LORD BUDDHA is the second epistolary novel I have read this summer. The events depicted take place in late 1996 and early 1997, though the narrative does not begin until after the mass murder and suicide have been in the news and the bodies buried. Because of this, news articles, eye witness accounts, personal letters and haiku are used to shed light on the Organization, as well as the main narrative thread created by one of HIYOKO’s cousins, gathering information in order to publish an academic paper on the massacre.
Stylistically, the novel is very strange. There are few, if any, capitalizations in the narrative. All sentences begin with the lowercase, though punctuation is used. Because of this, I sometimes had difficulty differentiating between a long sentence and a new sentence while reading at a fast clip. Dialogue is also atypical, with several different styles being utilized. In places, dialogue will be denoted with quotations for one character and greater-than and less-than symbols for another, usually HIYOKO. In other instances, dialogue will be listed with a name or alphabetic character followed by a colon in a list style not unlike interrogation records.
I’ll come out and admit it. I love bizarre fiction, either in subject matter or format. I LOVE LORD BUDDHA was both, a strange tale part AUM, part techno, part comic book, all pornographic, with the look and feel of something I’d never seen before. It was an interesting read, for sure, and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in Japan, if only for the bizarro characters living and dying within its pages.
4/5
Apparently you get I LOVE LORD BUDDHA, Hillary Raphael’s avant-garde, postmodernist first novel.
Heather Peterson, a native of New York, using her adopted name HIYOKO, leads a group of foreign-born bar hostesses in Tokyo to murder their clients and commit suicide en masse, all in the name of enlightenment. But how did she get to that point, and how did she amass so many followers?
Short answer, by being a whore. Long answer? It takes nearly 200 pages to get there, but all signs point to being a charismatic whore. There’s a difference, you see.
I’m getting ahead of myself here, though.
Heather Peterson, A.K.A. Tiffany (her hostess name), Spiky (due to her short, theatrical blonde hair) and HIYOKO (her Neo-Geisha name), starts off as a somewhat subpar hostess. She doesn’t empty ashtrays, take drink orders or wear a skirt. But she’s an excellent conversationalist, very seductive and gorgeous in a plastic-and-comic-book way. Because of this, she never loses her job, and winds up one of Tokyo’s best foreign-born hostesses, with lovers and admirers in all facets of Japanese society.
“Tiffany” changes her name, at least outside of the bar in Neo-Geisha capacity, to HIYOKO, and begins reworking Buddhist philosophy into what she deems a “new-new religion,” one of vehement anti-consumerism, the use of sex and narcotics a straight path to what are called “Limit” experiences. The Neo-Geisha are all beautiful women, courtesans of foreign birth, who entertain and arouse the gentlemen that come to their bars. And now they will save the world through their manga, proselytizing, homicidal actions and deaths.
I LOVE LORD BUDDHA is the second epistolary novel I have read this summer. The events depicted take place in late 1996 and early 1997, though the narrative does not begin until after the mass murder and suicide have been in the news and the bodies buried. Because of this, news articles, eye witness accounts, personal letters and haiku are used to shed light on the Organization, as well as the main narrative thread created by one of HIYOKO’s cousins, gathering information in order to publish an academic paper on the massacre.
Stylistically, the novel is very strange. There are few, if any, capitalizations in the narrative. All sentences begin with the lowercase, though punctuation is used. Because of this, I sometimes had difficulty differentiating between a long sentence and a new sentence while reading at a fast clip. Dialogue is also atypical, with several different styles being utilized. In places, dialogue will be denoted with quotations for one character and greater-than and less-than symbols for another, usually HIYOKO. In other instances, dialogue will be listed with a name or alphabetic character followed by a colon in a list style not unlike interrogation records.
I’ll come out and admit it. I love bizarre fiction, either in subject matter or format. I LOVE LORD BUDDHA was both, a strange tale part AUM, part techno, part comic book, all pornographic, with the look and feel of something I’d never seen before. It was an interesting read, for sure, and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in Japan, if only for the bizarro characters living and dying within its pages.
4/5
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
#13 of 2009: In Search of a Distant Voice by Yamada Taichi
Nobody does crushing loneliness and uncertainty like the Japanese, and of those novelists one of the very best is Yamada Taichi. It’s a real shame his body of work has gone largely untranslated, and an even bigger shame that only one of his three novels in English has received a wide release.
Like his previous works, In Search of a Distant voice is about the loneliness that inhabits even the busiest city-dweller, the emptiness at the bottom of the soul that exists possibly in greater quantities when the bearer is entrenched firmly in city life. There’s a combination of hopelessness and nonchalance about the whole thing that is decidedly Japanese. This mix of emotions and reactions could quite possibly exist nowhere else on the planet.
Kasama Tsuneo is twenty-nine and about to get married to a woman he met through his boss. It’s an arranged marriage, loveless and sexless and as formal as formality gets. As an immigrations officer, Tsuneo spends most of his time at work and doesn’t have much opportunity to meet women, so having his boss set him up seems a stroke of luck.
In the predawn hours of what would normally be an average morning, Tsuneo participates in a raid on a residence full of illegal Indonesian residents. One man slips out a window and into a neighboring graveyard. Tsuneo corners the man and is about to arrest him when he is suddenly struck by a wave of emotion that culminates in a body-shaking orgasm. Humiliated and terrified, Tsuneo lets the man escape.
In the days that follow Tsuneo is haunted by a feminine voice asking who and where he is. He responds, sometimes audibly, sometimes internally, until the stress of it all threatens a complete nervous breakdown. Finally, in exchange for an arrangement to meet face-to-face, Tsuneo tells the woman about his time in America in his early twenties, and about a man he once knew named Eric.
Anyone who’s read either of Yamada’s previous works, Strangers and I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying For a While, will know what they’re getting into. I won’t spoil the plot any further, but if you’ve read one Yamada ending you will definitely have a heads up on what’s coming. For anyone else, rid yourself of expectations and you may enjoy it. Perhaps even reading Strangers first would be advisable, as it’s his strongest English work to date.
Yamada’s not for everyone, but his books are incredibly quick, accessible reads. A few hours spent with his characters are easily worth the less than two hundred pages that encompass In Search of a Distant Voice.
3/5
Like his previous works, In Search of a Distant voice is about the loneliness that inhabits even the busiest city-dweller, the emptiness at the bottom of the soul that exists possibly in greater quantities when the bearer is entrenched firmly in city life. There’s a combination of hopelessness and nonchalance about the whole thing that is decidedly Japanese. This mix of emotions and reactions could quite possibly exist nowhere else on the planet.
Kasama Tsuneo is twenty-nine and about to get married to a woman he met through his boss. It’s an arranged marriage, loveless and sexless and as formal as formality gets. As an immigrations officer, Tsuneo spends most of his time at work and doesn’t have much opportunity to meet women, so having his boss set him up seems a stroke of luck.
In the predawn hours of what would normally be an average morning, Tsuneo participates in a raid on a residence full of illegal Indonesian residents. One man slips out a window and into a neighboring graveyard. Tsuneo corners the man and is about to arrest him when he is suddenly struck by a wave of emotion that culminates in a body-shaking orgasm. Humiliated and terrified, Tsuneo lets the man escape.
In the days that follow Tsuneo is haunted by a feminine voice asking who and where he is. He responds, sometimes audibly, sometimes internally, until the stress of it all threatens a complete nervous breakdown. Finally, in exchange for an arrangement to meet face-to-face, Tsuneo tells the woman about his time in America in his early twenties, and about a man he once knew named Eric.
Anyone who’s read either of Yamada’s previous works, Strangers and I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying For a While, will know what they’re getting into. I won’t spoil the plot any further, but if you’ve read one Yamada ending you will definitely have a heads up on what’s coming. For anyone else, rid yourself of expectations and you may enjoy it. Perhaps even reading Strangers first would be advisable, as it’s his strongest English work to date.
Yamada’s not for everyone, but his books are incredibly quick, accessible reads. A few hours spent with his characters are easily worth the less than two hundred pages that encompass In Search of a Distant Voice.
3/5
#12 of 2009: The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
I never thought I’d appreciate so much a novel that reminds me of the hellish year I spent working at Staples. I’d just dropped out of college, I had a somewhat older and incredibly controlling loser boyfriend and most of my ambitions around this time seem to have dropped off like the acquaintances of someone bound for the Witness Relocation Program. It wasn’t the best of times for me.
Having read The Gum Thief, I’m only now starting to suspect that it’s never the best of times for anybody, so long as they’re clothed in that red button-down, slaving away at a Staples somewhere.
Roger is a loser. He’s blown it big time, even before coming to work at Staples. While on his lunch breaks, he writes in a notebook, alternating between his own thoughts and pretending to be Bethany, his younger, Goth-obsessed coworker. What Roger really wants is to write Glove Pond, the novel that’s been circulating inside his mind for years, but he satiates his need to write by pretending to be a girl he sees daily but has never spoken to.
The Gum Thief is an epistolary novel, a narrative written completely in the style of personal or interpersonal communications. It joins the ranks of such books as Dracula, Fangland, The Feverhead and The Color Purple.
What starts out as just Roger’s eccentricity becomes more complex as Bethany finds the notebook and writes her own entries. From there, Roger is given the push he needs to begin putting his novel on paper, and Bethany’s mother Dee Dee, a high school classmate of Roger’s, begins writing letters as well. What started as the releasing of one strange man’s pressure valve takes on a life and gravity of its own as other Staples employees and even Roger’s ex wife begin to communicate, though not always in the notebook. There are letters, FedExes and notes slipped through mail slots galore, not to mention communications in the form of emails and manuscript critiques.
Quirky, interesting and definitely worth a read for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty job.
4/5
Having read The Gum Thief, I’m only now starting to suspect that it’s never the best of times for anybody, so long as they’re clothed in that red button-down, slaving away at a Staples somewhere.
Roger is a loser. He’s blown it big time, even before coming to work at Staples. While on his lunch breaks, he writes in a notebook, alternating between his own thoughts and pretending to be Bethany, his younger, Goth-obsessed coworker. What Roger really wants is to write Glove Pond, the novel that’s been circulating inside his mind for years, but he satiates his need to write by pretending to be a girl he sees daily but has never spoken to.
The Gum Thief is an epistolary novel, a narrative written completely in the style of personal or interpersonal communications. It joins the ranks of such books as Dracula, Fangland, The Feverhead and The Color Purple.
What starts out as just Roger’s eccentricity becomes more complex as Bethany finds the notebook and writes her own entries. From there, Roger is given the push he needs to begin putting his novel on paper, and Bethany’s mother Dee Dee, a high school classmate of Roger’s, begins writing letters as well. What started as the releasing of one strange man’s pressure valve takes on a life and gravity of its own as other Staples employees and even Roger’s ex wife begin to communicate, though not always in the notebook. There are letters, FedExes and notes slipped through mail slots galore, not to mention communications in the form of emails and manuscript critiques.
Quirky, interesting and definitely worth a read for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty job.
4/5
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
#11 of 2009: Liquor by Poppy Z. Brite
I read a lot of Poppy growing up. Back then, it was all extremely visceral horror that was sometimes referred to as “splatterpunk.” Vampires, ghosts, cannibals and serial killers with HIV, it was all rather grotesque and very, very dark.
I loved it. It influenced me quite a bit, and what pieces remain from my early writing portfolio show this rather shamelessly and explicitly. During my teenage years and through my vampire fiction phase, nobody influenced me more than she did, including Anne Rice and all the bizarre, fucked up authors who penned books in the Dell Abyss line. Nobody.
Somewhere along the line, young, cult horror phenom Poppy Z. Brite grew up. And, eventually, so did I. As I grew older, I became a bit of a gourmand, and I also lost some of my interest in horror. Not all of it, mind you. I’d like to think my horizons just broadened a bit, allowing me to include all manner of fiction (even “serious literature,” to my initial chagrin) on my reading lists.
It was with a bit of surprise that I found out a few years ago that Poppy Z. Brite had been writing books about New Orleans chefs. The New Orleans part didn’t shock me, nor did the sexual orientation of her characters, but leaving horror behind? I didn’t really want to believe it at first, and for several years I put off her Liquor novels, reading her older works or books by other authors. I wanted to go back and see if I was affected by the earlier horror novels as much as I was the first time I read them.
One thing I’ve found out over the past year is that nostalgia is an exceptionally powerful emotion, and that most things are stronger when viewed through the smoky looking-glass of time. Nothing I’ve gone back and reread has been as joyous a read for me as the first time I picked it up as a teen. Nothing. Some have come close and still stand up as powerful stories, but as I’ve aged the things that grip my heart and move me have changed a bit. I’ve come to accept this as a hard fact, and despite knowing that the magic won’t be as powerful or may not even be there at all, I’m still going to go back and reread some of the things I loved that influenced me. I’m just not going to have lofty ideas about reconnecting with the books in the way I had before.
Sometimes, though, you just need to move forward. Pick up new books you haven’t read, give new authors a chance. In this case, give an old friend a shot at something new. And I did.
Liquor is a tribute to food that borders on sexual fetishism. I love it. I read most of it in one day, unwilling to put it down before I got to the last page.
Rickey and G-man are lovers, have been best friends since they were in the fourth grade and have been working in the kitchens of New Orleans restaurants since they were fifteen. Bouncing around from employer to employer (not always due to their own planning), they grow tired of working for other people. They want freedom, control over their own culinary creations and a bit of money. Being poor and working sixteen hours a day six days a week for some rich asshole is no fun indeed.
Rickey is struck with an idea while drinking in the park. Dishes made with alcohol. A whole restaurant based on the concept of alcohol in food. In a city like New Orleans, where natives and tourists alike cruise the margarita stands, where people are encouraged to drink all they can, an idea like this could be their golden ticket.
But first, Rickey and G-man have to straighten out their own issues, shake off the people dragging them down and find the capital to make their dream come true, and it won’t be easy.
I will be tracking down the two sequels, Prime and Soul Kitchen, this summer. A previously published prequel of sorts, The Value of X, is a bit pricier and harder to obtain, but I will be tracking that down at some point as well.
5/5
I loved it. It influenced me quite a bit, and what pieces remain from my early writing portfolio show this rather shamelessly and explicitly. During my teenage years and through my vampire fiction phase, nobody influenced me more than she did, including Anne Rice and all the bizarre, fucked up authors who penned books in the Dell Abyss line. Nobody.
Somewhere along the line, young, cult horror phenom Poppy Z. Brite grew up. And, eventually, so did I. As I grew older, I became a bit of a gourmand, and I also lost some of my interest in horror. Not all of it, mind you. I’d like to think my horizons just broadened a bit, allowing me to include all manner of fiction (even “serious literature,” to my initial chagrin) on my reading lists.
It was with a bit of surprise that I found out a few years ago that Poppy Z. Brite had been writing books about New Orleans chefs. The New Orleans part didn’t shock me, nor did the sexual orientation of her characters, but leaving horror behind? I didn’t really want to believe it at first, and for several years I put off her Liquor novels, reading her older works or books by other authors. I wanted to go back and see if I was affected by the earlier horror novels as much as I was the first time I read them.
One thing I’ve found out over the past year is that nostalgia is an exceptionally powerful emotion, and that most things are stronger when viewed through the smoky looking-glass of time. Nothing I’ve gone back and reread has been as joyous a read for me as the first time I picked it up as a teen. Nothing. Some have come close and still stand up as powerful stories, but as I’ve aged the things that grip my heart and move me have changed a bit. I’ve come to accept this as a hard fact, and despite knowing that the magic won’t be as powerful or may not even be there at all, I’m still going to go back and reread some of the things I loved that influenced me. I’m just not going to have lofty ideas about reconnecting with the books in the way I had before.
Sometimes, though, you just need to move forward. Pick up new books you haven’t read, give new authors a chance. In this case, give an old friend a shot at something new. And I did.
Liquor is a tribute to food that borders on sexual fetishism. I love it. I read most of it in one day, unwilling to put it down before I got to the last page.
Rickey and G-man are lovers, have been best friends since they were in the fourth grade and have been working in the kitchens of New Orleans restaurants since they were fifteen. Bouncing around from employer to employer (not always due to their own planning), they grow tired of working for other people. They want freedom, control over their own culinary creations and a bit of money. Being poor and working sixteen hours a day six days a week for some rich asshole is no fun indeed.
Rickey is struck with an idea while drinking in the park. Dishes made with alcohol. A whole restaurant based on the concept of alcohol in food. In a city like New Orleans, where natives and tourists alike cruise the margarita stands, where people are encouraged to drink all they can, an idea like this could be their golden ticket.
But first, Rickey and G-man have to straighten out their own issues, shake off the people dragging them down and find the capital to make their dream come true, and it won’t be easy.
I will be tracking down the two sequels, Prime and Soul Kitchen, this summer. A previously published prequel of sorts, The Value of X, is a bit pricier and harder to obtain, but I will be tracking that down at some point as well.
5/5
Friday, June 12, 2009
#10 of 2009: Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland
The best thing about Douglas Coupland is his ability to bring the mundane facets of pop culture, the brand names and logos and catchy jingles, to the forefront of our consciousnesses. How many people actually think about hair care products, plastic toys, pet food or clothes? I mean, how many think about them in great detail, trying to figure out where these things fit into the great mosaic of North American life?
Not many, I would imagine. That’s part of advertising and pop culture’s success, the ability to worm their way into life and stand stock-still in the background like Scooby and Shaggy in rickety suits of armor. There, but not visible, at least not to the people with so much going on in their lives already.
Tyler is ambitious, the son of an aging hippy, a Regan youth with a bathroom full of incredibly specific hair-care products and a collection of globes in his bedroom. It is the early Nineties, and he and his girlfriend spend their days either at school or hanging out in a diner in their Pacific Northwest town, a semi-rural area known for its chemical-processing plants (contracted out to the government, no less) and half-dead shopping mall.
Lancaster, Tyler’s hometown, is where yuppies lay down to die.
Tyler wants to work for Bechtol. Tyler sells imitations of name brand items in order to save up enough money to buy a car and go backpacking across Europe. It is right after his return from his vacation that our story begins.
Watch Tyler interact with his Mother and siblings, deal with his drunken lout of an ex-stepfather, screw up his personal dealings, reconnect with his ambition, experience loneliness for the first time in his adult life and attempt to salvage his future, all against the backdrop of the hyper-comsumptive pre-Y2K years! It’s like gazing upon a psychedelic ant farm blown up into human-sized proportions.
I’ll be honest. To me, this was not as endearing as Microserfs, nor as slick and funny as JPod. I just didn’t find myself as emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. I didn’t have as clear a mental picture of them. They were interesting, but in the same way the characters from 1990s night-time television were interesting. Watching them flirt and stir up drama and grow older and wiser was entertaining, but after an hour, after the credits for the episode came up, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. At least, not until the next episode.
Not Coupland’s best work, but being Coupland still better than 90% of the books you’ll find in Barnes. A great way to spend a few days sprawled out on the couch, for sure, and the cover art is a minimalist feast for the eyes.
3/5
Not many, I would imagine. That’s part of advertising and pop culture’s success, the ability to worm their way into life and stand stock-still in the background like Scooby and Shaggy in rickety suits of armor. There, but not visible, at least not to the people with so much going on in their lives already.
Tyler is ambitious, the son of an aging hippy, a Regan youth with a bathroom full of incredibly specific hair-care products and a collection of globes in his bedroom. It is the early Nineties, and he and his girlfriend spend their days either at school or hanging out in a diner in their Pacific Northwest town, a semi-rural area known for its chemical-processing plants (contracted out to the government, no less) and half-dead shopping mall.
Lancaster, Tyler’s hometown, is where yuppies lay down to die.
Tyler wants to work for Bechtol. Tyler sells imitations of name brand items in order to save up enough money to buy a car and go backpacking across Europe. It is right after his return from his vacation that our story begins.
Watch Tyler interact with his Mother and siblings, deal with his drunken lout of an ex-stepfather, screw up his personal dealings, reconnect with his ambition, experience loneliness for the first time in his adult life and attempt to salvage his future, all against the backdrop of the hyper-comsumptive pre-Y2K years! It’s like gazing upon a psychedelic ant farm blown up into human-sized proportions.
I’ll be honest. To me, this was not as endearing as Microserfs, nor as slick and funny as JPod. I just didn’t find myself as emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. I didn’t have as clear a mental picture of them. They were interesting, but in the same way the characters from 1990s night-time television were interesting. Watching them flirt and stir up drama and grow older and wiser was entertaining, but after an hour, after the credits for the episode came up, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. At least, not until the next episode.
Not Coupland’s best work, but being Coupland still better than 90% of the books you’ll find in Barnes. A great way to spend a few days sprawled out on the couch, for sure, and the cover art is a minimalist feast for the eyes.
3/5
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Max Barry's Machine Man
I am a huge Max Barry fan. Completely unapologetic, too. The man’s got a wit so sharp it could slice diamonds, a knack for creating unique characters without crossing over to the side of ridiculous caricatures and nobody, seriously nobody, does love triangles and nerd romances quite like him.
I think it’s official now, after fifty-some installments, that we can now add “drives the experimental novel like he stole it” to a list of Barry’s accomplishments.
Barry’s no stranger to more typical means of literary promotion. He has a blog. He has a Twitter. Hell, he even links to NationStates, the international simulation game based off his novel Jennifer Government, on his website. Standard stuff, really, especially for an author in the twenty-first century with global appeal and readership.
What he’s gone and done now, though, is a bit different. Machine Man is a take on the Japanese cell phone novel, a work of (usually) short fiction published online in small bursts, generally written on and designed for the displays of handheld devices. They are immensely popular in the Land of the Rising Sun, and some have made the lucrative transition from digital copy to print edition.
Max Barry has done something similar, though not through cellular technology. He’s writing a page a day and publishing each one on his website. He writes the pages one at a time and they appear on the site and in subscribers’ email boxes in the early morning (at least where I am, in US Eastern). While the feed was still in its free beta stage you could also get your pages via Twitter, but after #43 (which is an amazing section of the novel, by the way) you have to be a paid subscriber in order to view the daily updates.
Machine Man is about one Dr. Charlie Neumann, research scientist for a shadowy company called Better Future. Charlie has an accident. Charlie loses a limb. Charlie becomes a prosthesis addict. That’s all I’m going to say, but rest assured the plot is standard Barry goodness. Don’t believe me? Scribe, Barry’s domestic publisher, bought print rights while the project was still in infancy.
Six ninety-five may seem like a steep price to pay for electronic media, especially of the non-music variety, but there’s no email I receive that’s as welcome as my morning Machine Man fix.
I think it’s official now, after fifty-some installments, that we can now add “drives the experimental novel like he stole it” to a list of Barry’s accomplishments.
Barry’s no stranger to more typical means of literary promotion. He has a blog. He has a Twitter. Hell, he even links to NationStates, the international simulation game based off his novel Jennifer Government, on his website. Standard stuff, really, especially for an author in the twenty-first century with global appeal and readership.
What he’s gone and done now, though, is a bit different. Machine Man is a take on the Japanese cell phone novel, a work of (usually) short fiction published online in small bursts, generally written on and designed for the displays of handheld devices. They are immensely popular in the Land of the Rising Sun, and some have made the lucrative transition from digital copy to print edition.
Max Barry has done something similar, though not through cellular technology. He’s writing a page a day and publishing each one on his website. He writes the pages one at a time and they appear on the site and in subscribers’ email boxes in the early morning (at least where I am, in US Eastern). While the feed was still in its free beta stage you could also get your pages via Twitter, but after #43 (which is an amazing section of the novel, by the way) you have to be a paid subscriber in order to view the daily updates.
Machine Man is about one Dr. Charlie Neumann, research scientist for a shadowy company called Better Future. Charlie has an accident. Charlie loses a limb. Charlie becomes a prosthesis addict. That’s all I’m going to say, but rest assured the plot is standard Barry goodness. Don’t believe me? Scribe, Barry’s domestic publisher, bought print rights while the project was still in infancy.
Six ninety-five may seem like a steep price to pay for electronic media, especially of the non-music variety, but there’s no email I receive that’s as welcome as my morning Machine Man fix.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
