Thanks for coming back. Wasn’t yesterday great? Yeah, it was. Here are the rest of the books!
Bright Shiny Morning
By James Frey
I read this early in the summer so the fact that I cannot remember much about it might not be a reflection of its quality. But it probably is. Flipping through it, I was disconcerted to find I could not remember characters that seemed important or subplots that dominated page after page.
And I say this as someone who really liked A Million Little Pieces. I defend that effort as being visceral, immediate, and whether or not it is literally true, it spoke honestly about the nature of addiction and how the experience of going clean can be. None of that seemed to make it into this always billed as fiction effort. If I were Frey’s agent, I’d recommend he get back to the “so close to real” genre that both elevated and burned him in the first place. It is a moral tightrope there, to be certain, but at least the readers are rewarded with strong writing
Chart Throb
By Ben Elton
What if the Prince of England (you know, Charles) went on Pop Idol (you know, the original/British version of American Idol)? That’s pretty much the premise here, with a look behind the scene of Chart Throb, the “Pop Idol, but More Popular” show and the machinations of producer Calvin “I’m Simon Cowell, but Coweller” Simms. The show is decidedly Pop Idol, but the judging panel with Simms is more X Factor (another Cowell show) with Simms as Cowell, judge transsexual Beryl Blenheim acting as both Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, and judge Rodney Root representing an Irish singer/producer Louis Walsh (who, I assume, would be recognizable to resident of the United Kingdom, but means nothing to this Yankee).
Despite the promise of “blistering comic satire” on the back cover, the whole affair is rather toothless. The plot more or less jettisons the one likeable character, a low level producer who is shaken by morals and her attraction to Simms, early on and we are left with little more than the shrill, the petty, and the thoroughly unlikeable that populate Chart Throb’s corridors. The result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to stay emotionally involved in the novel.
Elton’s prose seems to be marking time for most of the proceedings until it catches fire in the last few chapters only to blink and veer away from what appeared to be a shocking, and satisfying, plot twist. American Dreamz, a movie starring Hugh Grant as a Simon Cowell-esque judge and the Dennis Quad as a Bush-esque President of the United States, was released the same year as the novel and treads most of the same ground and does so in less time than it takes to read the book. Blind Faith at least feinted towards big questions in its satire. Throb just kind of lays there.
The Discomfort Zone
By Jonathan Franzen
Franzen goes non-fiction in this offering, using six essays about his life as a means of capturing his mother and, ultimately, coming to terms with her life and death. Each essay, with the possible exception of the bird watch centric final chapter, is easy enough to read on their own. Together, however, they do truly make for a rich narrative that offers some interests insights about growing up in the 60’s in a town largely shielded from all the social upheaval.
Franzen’s novel are wider in scope, but The Discomfort Zone is a tight, muscle-y piece of work that can hold its own against its fictional siblings.
Past Mortem
By Ben Elton
As a murder investigation crashes headlong into a high school reunion in London, Elton returns to questions about how the internet is bringing us closer together, how it taps into our humanity, and how it makes it all the easier for us to indulge our basest desires.
Detective Inspector Edward Newson is called to the scene of a murder that he quickly realizes is the work of serial killer who is seemingly knocking off bullies in ironic ways. The evidence suggests a website—think the purpose of Classmates.com merged with the ubiquity of Facebook—might be a connection between the victims and Newson cannot resist looking in on his own former classmates while investigating the crime. As the victims mount, Newson finds himself lost in the heady rush of being one of the most successful members of his class and beginning romances with his two high school crushes. Meanwhile, at the office, he is still crushing on his cute, younger partner who seems to be too high up on her volatile boyfriend to even notice Newson.
As the story unfolds, red herrings are tossed out, some convincingly so, others done away with a mere few pages later. The book boasts a goodly amount of characters including a possibly gay former classmate of Newson’s who went to the US, lost his accent, became a cop, lost his mind a bit, and has returned to Britain seeking forgiveness and a new start, a billionaire in the Richard Branson mold, employees at a local anti-bullying hotline called Kidcall, and several of Newson’s classmates, all tormentors and tormented in their teens in some way.
The key here is that Elton invests humanity in nearly all of them. Yes, the early bullies are pretty two dimensional, but from there on, everyone is given at least a little fleshing out. Unlike Elton’s efforts in Blind Faith, Chart Throb, and Dead Famous, there is a heart beating to this story. By grounding the story in people, not satire, the moments of dark humor where Elton offer commentary on our modern world land with more resonance. Plus, with characters to care about, Elton seems to resist most of the play-by-play storytelling the mid-chapters of Throb and Famous lapsed into to show the passage of change and the story moves along nicely under its own steam because of it.
It should be said that this novel is by far the most graphic of the bunch (and possibly any of his works). However, the violence is not the source of that graphicness, but rather Newson’s reawakened sex life. One scene in particular, involving cooking oil, lost prophylactics, and techniques far away from missionary on the sexual continuum, is stunning in its raw openness. I am of the school of thought that, to paraphrase a quote from the baseball mystery writing duo Crabbe Evers, literature is about life and things like sex, profanity, and violence are part of life so they should be part of literature. That said, I have not encountered any mass market fiction that has depicted, to this degree, sex without the gauzy romanticism attached. And I’ve read Vox. So, let the buyer beware on that.
Overall, it was the best of the latter day Elton books I consumed in this set. While the mystery might be as well laid out as avid mystery readers might like, it has some nice twists to it and the true heart of the story lies elsewhere anyway. It is a tale about the past, how it still shapes us today, and how looking back is a risk that may free you…or render you bitterer than ever.
Eating the Dinosaur
By Chuck Klosterman
From what I hear, some people do not enjoy Klosterman. They find his approach to pop culture to be “overly theoretical” or “pretentious.” And they sometimes describe him as a “self-pitying fool” for his ambivalence towards his own success. I think these people might be reading different books by Klosterman than I am because I love his stuff.
Here and, in its predecessor Sex, Lies, and Cocoa Puffs, there is no aspect of our entertainment culture too big or too small not to be taken seriously. Whether he’s talking about the difficulties implicit in time travel, the danger of being successful without working hard when the spotlight is on you, or how football is arguably the most liberal sport in America, he does it all with zeal. It is probably not for everyone, but for pop culture junkies like myself, a Klosterman collection of essays is near bliss.
Come back tomorrow when review week continues with my advanced review of the hotly anticipated film Social Network (or, as you may know it, that Facebook movie).
As always Tim can be reached at parallax2 [at] juno [dot] com, followed on Twitter at UnGajje, or friended on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=836564484. Please feel free to do so or comment below.