I recently finished two books trying to do difficult structural things, by authors I love, and they were sharp reminders of the dangers of difficult structure. Lol I\u2019m currently writing a novel that alternates between dream and reality so I\u2019m not trying to hear this\u2026.<\/p>\n
Lynda Barry, Cruddy<\/em><\/strong>. I\u2019ve loved Barry since I was a junior high school weirdo flipping to the back of the City Paper<\/em> for \u201cErnie Pook\u2019s Comeek.\u201d Cruddy<\/em> is an \u201cillustrated novel\u201d which, like Comeek<\/em>, reads like the diary of a misfit 1970s kid dealing with misfit 1970s problems: I\u2019m ugly, I don\u2019t know if I want to kiss boys, I\u2019m scared to go home. Cruddy<\/em>\u2018s Roberta is poorer and more isolated than the kids from Comeek<\/em>, and in more danger, but they might be her cousins.<\/p>\n Barry is so good at capturing the weird locutions of a kid trying out personae: Her authorial \u201cvoice\u201d is that of someone who hasn\u2019t found her voice yet, who is saying things in whatever way she thinks sounds the coolest, raw and a little bit akimbo. She\u2019s also great at depicting that experience a lot of young teens have, of starting to realize that the way their parents act isn\u2019t just \u201cthe way things are.\u201d Maybe there\u2019s something wrong with it. Maybe they\u2019ll be crushed if they stay. A lot of this book feels like a (more) horror-influenced cousin of John Darnielle\u2019s novels: \u201cThem!<\/em> is a great movie. They show it sometimes on Nightmare Theater<\/em>, Channel 7. If you see it in the TV Guide<\/em> you should really watch it because it has ideas in it that could come in handy someday if you are ever facing the authorities in the desert and you are covered with blood that is not actually yours.\u201d<\/p>\n The story alternates between Roberta\u2019s life in her junk-and-rot hometown, starting up one of those unprotecting adolescent friendships and taking drugs and trying to stay out of her mother\u2019s line of fire, and her bloody adventure on the road with her ex-butcher father. The road trip is gory, splashed with \u201cOld Skull Popper\u201d liquor, lit by burning cars, soaked in blood and littered with detached eyeballs. \u201cThe Helplessness of Adolescence: An Album by the Cramps.\u201d And this is what I liked in it\u2013it\u2019s a cartoon version of the violence and helplessness Roberta experiences in her hometown, it\u2019s a caricature of an adolescence without anyone to help or trust.<\/p>\n But at the same time, the caricature is never going to feel as real and assured as the lower-key hometown narrative. There were definitely times when the grotesque-for-its-own-sake approach got exhausting, and when Roberta\u2019s numbed narrative voice felt like an adult affecting a cornpone lyricism in order to tug the heartstrings. I loved Roberta dodging trains, her pastime that blurs the line between ecstasy and suicidality. I loved the depiction of parents as simply \u201cwhoever God tossed you to.\u201d Any book that can take you to a chapter ending, \u201cShe said, \u2018You want to help me scare the living hell out of a couple of people? They\u2019re people you know,'\u201d is a book I\u2019ll read. But the Grand Guignol which follows felt merely imagined, a bored daydream of ultraviolence, flimsy and cheap rather than wrenching. The danger of caricature is that it\u2019s easy to snap the reader\u2019s trust: You\u2019re nothing but a pack of cards!<\/em><\/p>\n The illustrations, at least in the paperback I have, don\u2019t add as much as I\u2019d hoped. Some are nicely horrifying and some have a real high-lonesome atmosphere, but most are muddy washes of gray.<\/p>\n Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble<\/em><\/strong>: This is a novel about Kate and Peter, married artists who have Fought The System by their artwork but never risked their personal safety, and Molly, Kate\u2019s new lover, a semi\u2013hard-bitten lesbian who\u2019s learned that if you\u2019re nice to people in need you never can get rid of them. It\u2019s also a novel about New York on the edge of the \u201990s. The characters can\u2019t walk down the street without five or six homeless people asking them for money. Their lives become caught up in the work of a radical AIDS activist group called Justice, which does direct action like using credit cards (some donated, some stolen) to help hungry people clean out a supermarket. Furs for the homeless; Dorothy Day, but for identity theft. And this book, published in 1990, is also about Donald Trump\u2013or \u201cRonald Horne,\u201d the politically-active celebrity real estate mogul whose opening of the \u201cTaj McHorne,\u201d on the site of a razed public library, becomes the setting for the book\u2019s fiery climax.<\/p>\n The book feels like an experiment in telling the story of people whose contexts are more important than their desires or actions. Kate and Peter and Molly play out their novelistic love affairs and personal decisions but these feel trivial in comparison to the funerals, protests, and desperate pleas which constantly interrupt them. \u201cWe can\u2019t be novel characters because hungry and dying people keep getting in the way\u201d is a weird, sharp thing to try, if that\u2019s what Schulman was trying. The problem is that it works too well: I cared exactly zero about the personal lives of the three main characters. All the satirical and anguished social observation of late \u201980s\/early \u201990s queer New York was richly-ornamented and vital, Schulman knowing exactly when to soar into caricature and when to thud back down into this-is-how-it-was realism. And all the love-triangle stuff was bland. All three characters, though especially Peter, felt like paper dolls constructed to make authorial points. Not great when these are the people we spend the most time with!<\/p>\n Car on fire via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently finished two books trying to do difficult structural things, by authors I love, and they were sharp reminders of the dangers of difficult structure. Lol I\u2019m currently writing a novel that alternates between dream and reality so I\u2019m not trying to hear this\u2026. Lynda Barry, Cruddy. I\u2019ve loved Barry since I was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":13279,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[32,31,1457,548,435],"class_list":["post-13274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-gayer-than-a-picnic-basket","tag-god-bless-the-1990s-because-no-one-else-will","tag-lynda-barry","tag-sarah-schulman","tag-teenage-dirtbag"],"yoast_head":"\n