Portrait of the Author as a Revolutionary
Matthew
Flaming reviews Ian Spiegelman's Everyone's
Burning
The marketing of a modern novel is a funny thing. The sheer number
of books released every year makes book marketing a vital component
of the publishing business; without publicity of some kind, a book
is virtually guaranteed to disappear without a ripple into the depths
of library stacks, single discounted copies on used-bookstore shelves
the only remaining monument to the fact that here toiled a writer
for years, alone in a room with all the words.
In the case of large presses, the most promising books receive
something like mass marketing: print ads in magazines and on subways,
prominent displays in bookstores and supermarkets. But despite the
importance of marketing, literary snobbishness suggests that there’s
something, well… inappropriate about trying to sell
books as if they were Kraft food products. So more subtle and imaginative
marketing tools are often used by highbrow presses and indy publishers
who can’t afford a spread in Harper’s. Dave
Eggers, for example, gave tours of his neighborhood to the public;
Neal Pollack gave readings in public bathrooms.
The marketing attached to Ian Spiegelman’s first novel, Everyone’s
Burning, is a masterpiece in this genre of the subtle sell.
A Google search returns almost as many results about the publication
party for the novel (held at a strip club) or the author as about
the book itself. In fact, although Everyone’s Burning
has received relatively little mass-marketing as such, world of
this slim volume spread through the alt.literary community like….
So that the sum total of all the attention paid to this book is
that: if you think Exquisite Corpse is cooler than the
Paris Review, you’ve heard (or will hear) that this
is the novel to be seen reading.
At the center of this propaganda is Mr. Spiegelman himself. A former
writer for New York magazine and a gossip columnist for
Page Six, it makes sense that Mr. Spiegelman is well acquainted
with the mechanisms of publicity. The recipe used by Mr. Spiegelman
is a time-tested and reliable one:
1. Decry the deplorable state of self-indulgent modern literature.
2. Condemn a number of well-known writers.
3. Demand that literature return to addressing issues of real emotional
and social importance.
4. Present self as answer to these demands.
Through a number of interviews to this effect (most notably the
one at MobyLives, which is a fantastic read, incidentally) Mr.
Spiegelman has effectively positioned himself as an authorial Bad
Boy Revolutionary, ready to take on the bloated establishment.
So what does all this have to do with a book review of Everyone’s
Burning? Shouldn’t I just shut my trap and get on with
the thumbs-up/thumbs-down already? Maybe so, but the fact of the
matter is that authors these days are sold as much as the books
they write – and when a writer starts making Big Statements
about what a novel should do, particularly a first novel, the polite
separation of auteur and text begins to effectively disappear.
“I think there’s a real problem with what literature
is in America right now,” Mr. Spiegelman told MobyLives. “And
it’s that, you look at any other medium, you look at movies
or music, and they address these situations that almost every suburban
and urban neighborhood is a war zone…. And then I read what
is on the New York Times Bestseller List, and it’s,
well I’m a college professor and I’m having trouble
with my wife.”
What Mr. Speigleman wants, I think, is a writing that does away
with academic politeness in favor of gritty reality. He wants a
writing that has the mass appeal of movies and the social urgency
of political commentary…. And well, basically I think he has
a point. The obsession with self-referential cleverness that came
into vogue in the 1990’s seems to me like the same road to
oblivion that poetry marched down when poets started writing to
each other instead of to the public. Pages and pages signifying
nothing but: look at me, I’m writing Lit’rature! Look
at you, you’re reading Lit’rature! But in throwing down
this gauntlet, Mr. Spiegelman has created some fairly hefty shoes
for his book to fill – and the truth is that in these terms,
Everyone’s Burning is at best a mixed success.
The book follows the misadventures of Leon Koch (nicknamed Crotch)
and his motley band of friends in Brooklyn and NYC. The novel paints
a landscape of despair and maladjustment: Mr. Spiegelman’s
characters are the products of abuse or boredom, alienated and disaffected
into a perpetual adolescence. Everyone’s Burning
has no plot to speak of – only one episode after another,
often out of chronological order – and if it has a theme,
it’s the struggle of his characters to avoid the terrible
burden of taking responsibility for their own lives and histories.
All of Mr. Spiegelman’s characters are incomplete and in pain;
all are looking for something – a something that they almost,
but never quite, find in the oblivion of drugs or the oblivion of
sex. And nothing is resolved, really, except through death. No answers
present themselves, there are no easy outs here. As far as the gritty
reality of broken youth goes, Mr. Spiegelman has it nailed. He writes:
I stood up in front of Carrie. Venages had his back to the storm
in his boxers and socks with the snow blowing around his head,
his shoulders, sticking to the hair on his arms.
“Look at me, slut. Look at me!”
She lit a cigarette, laughing. “Look,” she said, “he’s
all naked.”
He was so scrawny, the snow clung to his body everywhere, made
it bend and twitch like a broken machine. The blade shivered against
his wrist and the air turned to mist around his mouth –
we were nothing but shapes to him.
If he’d had anything in him, he’d have gone ahead
and checked out, but he was a retard, he was a little girl –
he dropped to his knees crying, folded up in the white wind, waiting
for someone to come help him.
And someone came for him. It was Carrie, she got down there with
him – something made her go, the same thing that put Jeanie
Riley’s hand in an old fucker’s rotting teeth. They
couldn’t help themselves, that thing that made them go –
I knew what it was, and I had it too, I hated it.
Watching Carrie lead Venages into her and Jenny’s bedroom,
I felt it screaming around inside me and I stared into a black
spot, and emptiness – swearing to myself there’d be
a way, something I could do, some way to twist my mind so that
I’d never feel it again.
So Mr. Spiegelman’s writing is moderately clever and fun
to read. Watching Leon and his friends do drugs, drink themselves
into oblivion, commit suicide and have lots of kinky sex is immensely
enjoyable – this is Kerouac without all the bits about Zen
and the American Dream, Alexander Trocchi minus the heroin and Bohemian
ideals. And Everyone’s Burning practically crackles
with the ambition of a first novel – remember the feeling
of being nineteen years old and a writer and knowing that, goddamnit,
words can change the world? That sense of eagerness suffuses
every page.
Of course, this is a story that’s been done a thousand times
before. Last year Greg Everett’s Screaming at a Wall,
for example, told a nearly identical tale with arguably more authenticity
and originality. But like a good kung fu movie, it hardly matters
if we’ve seen it all before – this is literary candy,
an afternoon read that leaves you feeling a little dirty and a little
energized from the sheer youthful vitality of the writing. That
is, if it weren’t for the shadow of Mr. Spiegelman’s
Big Statements about literature. Because although Mr. Spiegelman
talks about the need for a new kind of writing, there’s nothing
particularly original about Everyone’s Burning. Troubled
kids do drugs and hurt themselves and each other? Not exactly news.
The only aspect of this novel that’s innovative is Mr. Spiegelman’s
explicit descriptions of kinky sex and unfortunately these are mostly
delivered in a disaffected style that deprive them of much power,
erotic or otherwise. Yes, there’s an honesty here –
the fact that some kids, like the protagonist of Everyone’s
Burning, turn to S&M as a way of refusing responsibility
for their own sexual pleasure. But this is a slim observation on
which to hang a cry for literary revolution, and although members
of the S&M community might welcome this openness in writing
about a normally taboo topic, Mr. Speigleman’s portrayal effectively
turns the lifestyle into a disease.
In twenty years, maybe, when Mr. S has a few more novels under
his belt, it will be great to read Everyone’s Burning
as the fiery juvenilia of our hero. Right now though, Everyone’s
Burning needs to be read not because of Mr. Spiegelman’s
revolutionary rhetoric but in spite of it. Rather than the beginning
of a new American literary movement, this novel is a cover of an
old favorite tune, performed by a promising newcomer.
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