Reading Will Make Most of Your Teeth Fall Out, and the Ones That Are Left Will Just be Brown, Smelly Stumps

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Reading Is A Home Wrecker

(preston falls)/david gates



so, preston falls. or is it the much ballyhooed (?) jernigan? wait, no, it's preston falls. i think.

one of the very wonderful things about checking stuff out of public libraries, as opposed to buying them in new or near new condition is that you come across all sorts of dubious, mangled, generally confounding copies of otherwise legitimate books. like the time i found a piece of over-charred bacon in sinclair's the jungle, probably used as a book mark by some irony-blind buffoon.

or the curious copy of harold jaffe's sex for the millennium i checked out of san diego central, for (a more actual) example. while it was a legitimate, non-bootlegged print, complete with red, black and white cover illustration (quintessential jaffe), half the damn pages in the thing had been replaced by photocopies. and not good quality ones either. these were no-foolin' sheets of typing paper, with washed-out, raspy text inserted (not stapled, or glued, or taped or in any other way affixed, mind you) where the originals had been inexplicably removed. why did fifty percent of this book up and die, leaving behind a crudely photocopied ghost of itself? why remove and then keep these pages long enough to copy and loosely replace them, as opposed to, say, doing nothing and just leaving the originals to dangle as they may? a mystery indeed.



as is the san diego library's copy of david gates's preston falls. i'm pretty sure this book is a not-meant-for-distribution, promotional copy, which, while a little ghetto, is understandable, considering the increasingly abysmal state of library funding, here in sd and abroad. what's confusing is that, aside from the title, not a single thing written anywhere on the book's jacket (and there's a hell of a lot of laudatory verbage to be had) even glancingly refers to preston falls. instead, the front and back covers are crowded with praise for jernigan, a different david gates book. different as in not the book i'm holding in my hand, staring at in a confused stupor, but a whole other literary, physical entity, somewhere else, far, far away, that has next to nothing to do with preston falls. and i can understand why the publishers would want to hype the almost-pulitzer-winning jernigan. it's a better book. but why didn't this version of preston falls have even the slightest thing to say about preston falls, if only as an indication that it is indeed not jernigan, and, if not gate's finest, at least something more than a billboard for what i should implicitly be reading instead.?



anyway.

preston falls chronicles the tail end of the collapse of a white, semi-upper middle class family, wiling away their lives in the (sub)urban ecosystem and upstate savage lands of ny state. all of gates' trademark themes are present: a distant, self absorbed father figure; eccentric, largely ineffectual grandparents whose own parental incompetence is the reason for dad's piss-poorness; inaccessible, already hardened kids; self destruction; a grossly heightened sense of class and self consciousness; the intellectual guilt of someone too well read, and the absurdity of romanticizing the everyday struggle of america's contemporary poor; substance abuse + ROCK N' ROLL, and how that's played out; masculinity, and all that.

in a nutshell, willis, the father, under the pretense of renovating his country house in the sketchy podunk town of preston falls (possibly a real place?), escapes his family and ditches his cushy pr job, finds out he can't fix a house, gets into a smidgen of trouble, falls in with the bad kids, and then things finish falling to hell from there, even if hell is a bit excessive.

in a lot of ways, its a relatively ordinary story that i'm sure a fair share of people could relate to, but it's annoying in a way, because these people would all be spoiled new yorkers. but this is largely the point, and these same new yorkers are probably supposed to feel a little bad, or at least self reflective, but most likely won't.

admirably, gates' tries to prevent this book from being a whine about yuppie family dissolution, and the desiccated life that too much education and job security brings by making his central characters extremely self critical, and painfully aware of their stations in life. to an extent he's successful, illustrating the complex, unstable, often blurred relationship between the poor and the reasonably well off, as well as the questionable rationals and misunderstandings which inform this relationship. this is most evident and successful in willis' interactions with his filthy, criminal hick neighbor calvin, who turns out to be more street wise than doughy, book learned willis bargains for.



but mostly this hyper self awareness comes off as both irritating and baffling. the reader often has to observe willis reading his life away when he should be living out his myth of the man of concrete action, and then bemoaning the fact that there's nothing worse than being a word man, and snorting a bunch of coke over it. what it is is he's a moderately successful college boy, ruing his own accomplishment and suffering because of it, and you just want to shake him, but not really, because you don't really know why he's dissatisfied to begin with, and don't think a throttling will make much difference. and while the point seems to be that it's no longer possible to just appreciate what you have because it's never what you want, and you might not deserve it anyway, anymore than anyone else, this is exactly the point that would be reached by so many moderately successful college boy (and girl) readers.

ultimately, preston falls seems only to further fetishize and pay lip service to the class politics which, like patently atrocious mexican food, are all the rage over on the east coast, more of a long standing institution than a pressing socio-economic concern. and it's just so... caucasian, upper middle class. at the same time i get the sense that gates, who also works as a music critic, is acknowledging a chip that many writery folk have on their shoulders, over being writers, as opposed to something more useful or dynamic, like brick layers, or guitarists, or the blueman group. poppycock, i say.



but this is beginning to sound all negative. i liked preston falls, its well written, and the dialogue is both naturalistic and snappy, straddling the fence between flowing, everyday communication and charming, tv show banter. especially nice is the short conversation between willis and his pr boss. and while the aforementioned, mental self critique in which willis and co. constantly engage can be irritating, it also works nicely at the level of style and as a narrative device, adding a great deal of insight, dimension, and cleverness.

Further, while it's a serious book, about familial implosion, it's also pretty funny, and, in it's way, highly understated, in the sense that nothing too extraordinary or life shattering occurs. indeed, there are moments in the plot when you expect something tragic/catastrophic/highly legally and morally criminal to occur, but which, thankfully, doesn't, as gates opts for something more likely. this isn't a tour de force but a more introspective, measured portrait of a dissolution a lot of people are familiar with but can't quite explain. SPOILER ALERT: no one dies in this book. SPOILER ALERT: not much of anything actually happens. and that's alright.

in the end, preston falls is a very decent way to let time pass you by, and is a pretty good introduction to gates' writing.

inspired by the non-promotion for this book,i'm going to end off by saying that preston falls really isn't jernigan, and, in a lot of ways, the former seems like it was just a kind of practice for the latter. i don't know for sure, and i'm not about to spend the many multiple seconds required to confirm this via the internet, but i think jernigan was written and published subsequent to preston falls. this would make a lot of sense, anyway. relative to peter jernigan (titular character of jernigan, obviously), willis is rather opaque, unlikeable, and unsympathetic, not necessarily because theses are his inherent traits, but because his development is just more shallow. sure, they're both assholes who let their families grow to hate them, but jernigan just has more depth and facets so that you can kind of see where he's at least slightly a victim of circumstance, that he wants things to have turned out better. more importantly, you can have an opinion about jernigan, one way or the other, there's enough room and ambiguity there in his depiction. with willis, and everyone else in his family, its all programmed up front (or at least more so), and you get the sense that these people are caricatured types, a little like watching melrose place. willis is a selfish asshole, just because. ok, he had a crazy dad, but this is mentioned in passing, and so what? there's something more flat about the character of willis. maybe jernigan is just more of a charming drunk than willis is a charming, relapsed coke addict. this isn't to say that the impenetrability of willis is better or worse. in a lot of ways its appropriate. just different, is all.

so, read this book. or jernigan. or the wonders of the invisible world (not the cotton mather version). i know i did.

Reading Makes You Ugly

(sex for the millennium) harold jaffe



i never actually met harold jaffe, but have been in the same room as him a couple of times, listening to him discuss his own work with my freshman creative writing class. specifically, we gabbed about a short story titled "brother wolf". at the time i got the impression that he was a sort of academic and artistic con man. he strutted in like a black clad mountebank, trying to pawn off what seemed like emaciated, lazy prose as something other than anemic writing. something edgy, aware, and cutting in a large social, political sense. i wasn't buying. "brother wolf" just didn't have enough flourish. and jaffe, in his all black duds, seemed way more style than substance, without enough frumpiness and social unease to garner cred as a writer in my stupid, narrow book. and he classed himself with the likes of baudrillard. the nerve. and he wore sunglasses inside. who did he think he was? this guy? a less ponderous, slightly more trim jack gladney (de "white noise") is who. basically, as a scholastic greenhorn, i thought he was a hack.

after recently reading "sex for the millennium", turns out i was wrong. partially.

i know now that having to explain, let alone justify your artistic program to a bunch of undergrads is a pain in the ass, like having to get a root canal, or having some kind of pain directly in your ass, and he was gracious enough to come in and throw away an hour of his life with us. at the time i saw his largely deferential replies to students' questions as fumbled non-answers, mere proof of his tremendous hackery. but really the questions were mostly insipid (so...where's brother wolf's brother?), evidencing our own limited mental dimensions. and of course he wasn't going to respond to such slop with thoughtful, fully developed answers, so he just tossed off some shit (i don't know. maybe we're all his brother). i was also on my high-modernist high horse at the time, considering any work that was comprehensible and not freighted down with copious, classical allusions to be new-fangled gibberish. pure excrement. really, i just didn't like "brother wolf" because it wasn't "night wood".

basically, i didn't give this guy a fair turn. so now's my chance.



and onto "sex for the millennium":

pretty much a collection of short stories concerned with sex in the new millennium, or in the year 2000, at least, with its computers and gizmos and all. but also so much more. like former nba rebounding super all-star, dennis rodman.

it's well written. spare and without much verbal filigree, jaffe's prose is vivid and harsh, like neon light. illuminated is a bizarre, paradoxical environment of fetishized frustrations and grotesque, perpetual mutability. which is to say there's a fair share of stomach churning smut to be had. sensationalist, if you want to be glib and simplistic about it, but seemingly always the top layer of something more complex and sinister, never perversion as an indulgence for its own sake. golden showers, shape shifting transvestites, family group incest, snuff, amputees. the worm, dennis rodman himself. you name it.

an especially revolting but tantalizing example is the rabelaisian "house of pain". over the course of numerous proper orgies, the narrator goes from your average, cream-tipping fook to a gun-dicked, piss-fountain amputee, immersed in a constant state of carnivalesque flux.

yeah, fooks tipping cream.

and that's another thing. the dialogue. precise, baffling, arid. clever. conversations convey equal parts gravity and confusion, as well as phallic preoccupations and murderous intent. "circle jerk" presents the banter of a serial killer conversing casually with a professor with a triathlete with a business man with a plumber, and so forth, about sex and work, evidencing the absurdities and dangers of both.

jaffe, in this collection at least, is obviously drawing heavily from fabulist and absurdist traditions, while often structuring his prose around conventions of drama and script writing. extreme acts of sex and violence, as well as bizarre turns of event occur abruptly, instantaneously, often without much in the way of logical explanation, consequence, or regard for their extraordinary nature. this lack of contextualization is usually exciting, resulting in much more searing, much more deft and deeply unsettling indictments.



but these critiques of the internet age and its society can also get a little heavy handed, and, in turn, kind of simple. kind of too simple. for all of its intricacy, this collection seems, in a nutshell, to be about the corruption/perversion of society by a rampant consumerism, so instantaneous and pervasive that it's infiltrated our bodies, libidos, reproductive organs and acts, altering them all beyond recognition and for the worst. the icons of this age are the serial killer, the delusional vigilante, and the gimp, among others. the internet, technology, media. these are fun and everywhere. but these are bad, maybe totally devoid of redeeming qualities. and like any post structuralist worth his or her salt, jaffe seems to indicate that this system doesn't have a way out. there's nothing you can do to untangle yourself. unless you're dennis rodman. but not really.

finally, this collection, for being so in its moment, seems dated. this isn't necessarily a bad thing. writing about the immediate present provides one's work with a political relevance and importance. and there was a time when dennis rodman could be considered a subversive, transgressive figure, a prometheus of sorts, bringing us a new, burning sense of independence and freedom. but not so much now, when he's making his rounds on the reality tv circuit, having more or less completely disappeared from memory.

the constant critique/implication of starbucks is, by now, completely hackneyed, and probably was then, too.

and smut itself has become old hat, gonzo-ed out to the limit. in a way, jaffe's decision to deal with its more extravagent manifestations, like family incest and transsexual orgies, as indicative of a more entrenched, invisible consumerist decay seems like the wrong choice, almost too apparent, easy, juvenile... while there's something obviously amiss with a face-sitting, gas mask wearing dominatrix trying to pawn off abs roller plus machines on horny strangers, the potentially perverse influences of say, facebook, or twitter, or amazon.com are less apparent, but more terrible, more ubiquitous. but i guess that's another book, for another time.

anyway, at well under 200 pages, with large print, this book is pretty good. worth reading.