I haven’t fared well with crime fiction in the past, despite being easily sucked in to crime television and true crime spectacles, so I approached Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me with some degree of apprehension. Maybe not expecting much from the book made the reaction I had all the more powerful, but I am rendered slightly speechless by Thompson’s unsparing approach to his knowingly psychopathic criminal narrator.

A deputy sheriff in a small county in Texas, Lou Ford, spends his days patrolling the town with a friendly, approachable manner, spouting cliché, idioms and platitudes as advice to his colleagues. Yet behind his provincial facade, Lou is suffering what he terms “the sickness”, an uncontrollable and insatiable anger and urge to lash out violently, usually against women. When he is involved in a blackmail plot between the son of the man who possibly killed his adopted brother and a prostitute, Lou’s sickness bubbles over into reality and a chain of vicious beatings, ruthless murders and self-assured plotting follow. The less said about the actual narrative, the better – it’s a story best enjoyed through Ford’s eyes rather than mine.

I’ve loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you’ve probably seen me if you’ve ever been out this way – I’ve stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn’t piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I’m just laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people.

Told in the first person, Thompson involves us from the beginning with Lou, though he is a classic unreliable narrator. We’re completely aware that he may not be always telling the truth, that his justification for murder is warped, that things are not going to work out the way he wants them to – and yet, somehow, for most of The Killer Inside Me, I wanted Lou to get away with his sickening crimes. To somehow fool everyone, to slip between the cracks of justice. The reader is never made implicit in Lou’s crimes – they’re described in so little detail that the crimes themselves are never the point of interest. Rather Lou’s acknowledgement of his image of a bumpkin sherriff as an act to cover the murderous intent and his insistence that people believe his act despite all the evidence to the contrary is compelling. Any trace of paranoia is easily dissolved by his illogical reasoning and his staunchly held belief that he is smarter than the cops trying to track down the culprit. Ford drags us, in spite of any moral objections we may hold,  into his obviously deranged way of thinking.

The Killer Inside Me felt more like a curt slap in the face than a reading experience. It left me with the same sense of defiant shock, a speechless disbelief of what has happened. Ford is a character not easily forgotten, and Thompson’s narrative style is understated, yet effectively terrifying.

“Uh, you’ve gotta read this Mötley Crüe book. I swear, you get to the point where Ozzy Osbourne snorts a row of ants and you think, it cannot get any grosser, and then you turn the page and oh, hello, yes it can! It’s excellent!”
Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls episode 2.18, “Back in the Saddle”

Quoting Gilmore Girls may be the least rock and roll way to introduce The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe (with Neil Strauss) which may possibly be the most cliché-ridden, overblown rock and roll biography of all time. Who would open this book expecting anything less? When it comes reading about excessive rock and roll exploits, one doesn’t only expect cliché, but craves it. And the dirt is definitely all here: the alcohol, the drugs, the groupies, the sex, the near-death experiences, the band member feuds, the record company feuds, the replaced lead singer, the fans, the jailtime, the gossip, the marriages, and a little bit of the music.

Unlike other music biographies I have read recently, I can’t claim to be a fan of Mötley Crüe’s music. Sure, I went through a hair metal stage when I was about six (and I still have the cassingles to prove it), but the Crüe never really interested me. Their music still doesn’t interest me, but they have lead some debauched and voyeuristically interesting lives. The Dirt is told through multiple perspectives, each band members voice is given equal time, and other major players also get a look in. It’s difficult to read all the activities both legal, illegal, questionable and unmentionable that they got up to and know that they came out of it alive. And The Dirt shows that maybe, just maybe, they came through it all with some semblance of self-awareness and insight. Or maybe not:

After the insanity of the Girls tour, I think we lost sight of ourselves. Mötley Crüe became a sober band, then we became a band without a lead singer, then we became an alternative band. But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight. I suppose a happy ending would be to say that we learned our lesson and that it’s wrong. But fuck that. (Vince Neil)

I may have had to suspend some of my usual critical faculties in order to enjoy the book – particularly the attitudes about women: of course marriage break ups are never the fault of boozing, high, cheating men, but always of the wife that doesn’t understand him. I recognize that the problematic mindset was there, but my lack of previous connection to the band meant I wasn’t heavily emotionally invested in them as people. I didn’t expect them to have amazingly progressive approaches to well, anything, and they didn’t. They do paint themselves as clichéd rock and roll caricatures: the drug-addled “creative genius” with the troubled childhood, the tempestuous and egotistical lead singer, the quietly suffering guitarist and the hyperactive bad boy drummer. There are a few genuinely heartfelt moments – through debilitating disease, depression, death – where they begin to appear as human, but these moments are brief and quickly shoved aside in favour of more cartoonish misadventures.

That’s not to say that The Dirt isn’t insanely fun to read, because it really is an ant-snorter of a read. But, it is also enjoyable in a way that allows the reader to look at that rock and roll lifestyle and realize the sheer ridiculousness and scale of it, and to feel immense gratitude for quiet anonymity. The Dirt is the band’s way of self-mythologizing beyond their music, because even non-fans like myself want to read this book, thus cementing themselves in the public imagination as rebellious degenerates, as the “world’s most notorious rock band.” Mötley Crüe’s decadence is seedy yet glamourized with a strong undercurrent of misogyny, male rage and sadism. Many may find something to admire or aspire to in that, and while it does make for riveting reading, it is also faintly distasteful.

All the rhetoric currently being thrown around thanks to the recent Franzen inspired media maelstrom about the commercial/literary or popular/serious dichotomies feel like the same tired arguments over legitimacy, popularity and media coverage being rehashed for us yet again. In part I feel like these discussions are intended to create hype for the publishing industry itself – look, we are still relevant, look at the impassioned discourse that is happening about our product, I mean, artform! – an industry struggling to maintain footing in a culture that is rapidly shifting toward a preference for the visual and the hypertextual. Thanks to uncanny timing, reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone felt like his voice, strangely silent amid the social media mavens, and his position in the conversation. And yet, these essays were mostly written over ten years ago, when the technological landscape looked nothing like it does today.

The majority, and the best, of these non-fiction essays are written about literature, the book and its position in the society of the spectacle. Surprisingly, for a collection of pieces written at different times for different publications, it contains a strong thematic cohesiveness. “Imperial Bedroom,” an essay about the concern over the demarcations between public and private spheres is rich in foresight, having been written in 1998, that is, a pre-Facebook world. Franzen makes a compelling argument about the appearance of loss of privacy versus the reality of an increasingly isolated existence. Facebook is the medium that tirelessly intrudes on discussions of personal privacy online. Is Facebook a reaction against the privacy we’ve been given/worked for (personal isolation through architecture, landscape, transport, communication, etc.), is it a way to make ourselves visible in an imaginary “public” space, to make ourselves the tabloid stars of our own social circles? (In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m pretty anti-Facebook. It’s the internet for people who don’t know how to use the internet.) Intriguingly, it is Franzen’s personal anecdotes and observations in this essay that lends it its power.

Then there is the shining jewel in this collection, the apparently infamous “Harper’s essay” on the death of the novel, “Why Bother?” written in 1996. What a slow, horrible death the novel must be suffering! Again, it is Franzen’s personal input that gives the essay the extra level of understanding, he talks about his depression, his writing “process”, his own position as a reader; like many of us, Franzen feels he was saved by literature. For readers who constantly face accusatory remarks from people who don’t have time to read, “Why Bother?” is the ideal antidote, an affirmation. Franzen examines the cultural context and consumer economy that he sees as oppositional to the longevity of the book, the incompatibility between “the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life.” He does suggest the problematic divide between “serious” and popular fiction, though doesn’t define his terms. I like to think of this as a technique to allow us to define the terms for ourselves: what does serious fiction mean to me? Despite reading “teaching us to be alone” as he states in a latter essay, it also ties us in with a disjointed communal group of increasing rarity: readers.

Readers aren’t “better” or “healthier” or, conversely, “sicker” than non readers. We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community.

While many of the essays struggle with the distinction between the personal and the public, the social and the act of reading, others focusing on unconnected topics can also be read through Franzen’s main concerns. An essay on the Chicago postal crisis of 1994 looks at the social, political and spatial issues that led to the decline in the services in the area; Franzen visits a small community disappointed that a new local prison hasn’t been the boom to their economy that they expected; the pleasures and contradictions of cigarette smoking; filming a segment for Oprah in his hometown, briefly touching on the scandal when he expressed discomfort at the Oprah’s Book Club label would discourage male readers. However, ultimately the best and most engaging essays in How to Be Alone are about fiction, and the possibility of it remaining a potent social medium. I loved it, the message, Franzen’s willingness to bear his vulnerabilities and thoughts, the erudite and considered style, and the obvious love of literature and reading.

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner should read it. I’m going to leave you with this quote from “The Reader in Exile”:

Elitism is the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art, an invitation to the poisoned arrows of populist rhetoric. The elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one – an aristocracy of alienation, a fraternity of doubting and wondering. Still, after voicing a suspicion that nonreaders view reading “as a kind of value judgment upon themselves, as an elitist and exclusionary act,” Birkerts is brave enough to confirm their worst fears: “Reading is a judgment. It brands as insufficient the understandings and priorities that govern ordinary life.”

For a number of books I’ve been reading lately I can’t really justify writing an entire review length post on them, regardless of liking them or not. Here are a few shorter than usual reviews of some of those books.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (2009)

I should have waited until I’d read the Black Dossier before diving into Century: 1910, as it dives straight into the newest incarnation of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a few years after the end of Volume Two (which you may recall I loved the ending of, I felt it offered complete closure thus making it difficult to understand the reason for continuing the series.) The literary characters that make up this version of the League, still led by Mina Murray, are more obscure than those in Volume One & Two which is a bit alienating. Here they appear with none of the rich back stories of the earlier League, which makes me feel like the Black Dossier must be a necessary link between the two. Nonetheless, the story of Century: 1910 is as exciting as we’d expect from Moore and O’Neill’s League. Captain Nemo’s daughter escapes to London against her dying father’s wishes and is viciously raped (as most female characters are in this series), and seeks her vengeance by succeeding her father’s post as the captain of the Nautilus and unleashing hoards of violent pirates ahead of the coronation. There are occult secrets, song and some inter-League feuds, but Century: 1910 seems undernourished compared to the narrative strengths of Volume One & Two.

Books Do Furnish a Room by Leslie Geddes-Brown (2009)

Though I enjoy books and well stocked bookshelves, I don’t think that that Books do Furnish a Room is really aimed at the book lover. There is lots of advice on what books to keep in different rooms and how to store them, but the advice on what particular types of books to keep in the guest rooms of your house felt particularly out of reach. This is not so much an exploration of the love of books and how, or why, we keep them in our homes, but rather looking at books serving a decorative purpose. There are lots of gorgeous pictures of bookshelves, some of them featuring some astounding design, but mostly unpractical and completely unattainable for those who do not live in converted barnhouses. Even the erratically placed books seem like they were done artfully, with design and aesthetic in mind. You’re likely to find more practical and realistic ideas on flickr or tumblr, try Bookshelf Porn or Bookshelves instead.

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi: Words We Pinched From Other Languages by Chloe Rhodes (2009)

I have been coveting this series of books in the bookstore for a long time, they feature a lovely nostalgic design, sturdy hard covers, and nerdy themes. Alas, working in a bookstore doesn’t mean that I get to sit around reading books all day (true fact!), so when I saw A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi on the shelf at the library I couldn’t resist. It is an interesting, if short, reference guide to how foreign words and phrases, some familiar and some not so, made their way into the English language. Rhodes traces each phrase from their foreign root words and the historical contexts which may have lead to their adoption into English. Illustrated by example sentences and cartoons, A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi is brief look at the etymology of foreign phrases but I’m not sure how much of it I will retain. Nerdy wordy fact du jour: did you know that the word LOOT came from the Hindi word “lut” meaning to plunder?

I know. You’re suffering from Man Booker longlist fatigue too. However, I give you my word that this and Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky are the only titles on the longlist that I have any interest in reading. For a while it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas‘ The Slap was the novel that everyone in Australia was reading, discussing and arguing over. It’s a little pleasing to know that the novel is having the same divisive effect overseas. Nonetheless, The Slap feels inherently Australian, so intimately linked with our issues as a nation and as a culture that I have to wonder if it has the same potency outside of our shores.

The Slap is also one of those books where you feel like a broken record in repeating the plot, so intrinsic is it to the title and the hype surrounding the book. At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne, fittingly with multicultural backgrounds and a variety of age groups present, a man slaps a misbehaving young boy who is not his own. The Slap follows the consequences and reverberations in the lives of those who witnessed the slap that afternoon. Intriguingly, all of the stories, despite the multicultural, gender and generational differences, are all told in the same the same third person voice.

I expected class to play a big role in The Slap, and was surprised to find it difficult to recognize any class aspects coming in to play. The Slap opens with the perspective of Hector, a man who is hosting the barbeque, and is feeling not so much trapped, but definitely unappreciative of the benefits of his middle class male existence. The parents of the slapped boy parrot politically correct dogma, echoing sentiment they believe they should have – and are noticably poorer than the rest of the characters. Sure, the characters throw around “middle-class” as an insult, but for the most part it seems that class has become such an intangible issue, secondary to cultural, gender and generational differences. Tsiolkas is forcing us to look at the negative aspects of all of these characters regardless of their financial position, we’re invited to explore their faults. The characters are hugely unlikeable, except for the two younger characters.

Anouk, a childless by choice writer on a television soap, should have by all rights appeal to my liberal sensibilities. She too has made the unpopular decision to not bear children – most of the female characters in The Slap are burdened by their choice to have children, motherhood defines them. She is a confounding character, it is difficult to understand how someone so supposedly intelligent can have such simplistic views about class and her friendship with Rosie. Why does someone who fiercely holds to her decisions in all other aspects of life so quickly back down for someone she doesn’t even like any more? It’s a question that is raised repeatedly through The Slap, and the answer seems to be compromise. It’s not a romanticized compromise, it’s a compromise always marked by bitterness and resentment.

Anouk’s liberal attitude only gets her so far though, and in particular it made me extremely frustrated that she is so ignorant about the culture that lies “out there”, beyond her inner city comfort zone. Her presumption that her usual treatment of immigrant men – a Muslim taxi driver in the given example – is above the “immense sea of indifferently racist Australians out there, a world that existed – as far as she could tell because she’d never visited ‘out there’ – somewhere beyond the yellow lines that marked the inner-city zone-one train and tram tracks on the Melbourne transport maps.” This hit hard, as I live in the forbidden blue zone two and I resented Anouk’s inner-city presumptions because it felt like they were, implicitly, a reflection on me. However, while doing some research on my electorate for the recent election, I discovered some interesting facts that reaffirmed my position. My electorate has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in Victoria, the third highest in Australia. For Anouk, Muslims represent her taxi drivers, “out here”, they are our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues. Yes, racism exists in the outer suburbs, but it is not any worse, or any better, than inner-city exclusive racism.

The shallowness of Anouk’s nameless apology for her rudeness to her taxi driver is later strengthened by Manolis’ later comments about the ease with which Australians say sorry. Forgiveness is a large part of the Slap, characters seek it, characters forgive for the wrong and right reasons, yet the hollowness of these apologies was always read through the lens of Manolis view, and reflected on the greater problems related to our own national and cultural apologies.

The words dropped easily from her lips but they meant nothing. Australians used the word like a chant. Sorry sorry sorry. She was not sorry. He thought she loved him, respected him. He’d nursed this hope for years. He wanted to strike himself for his vanity and foolishness. He had never asked anything of her before and she must know that he would never ask a thing of her again. Sorry. He spat out the word as if it were poison.

Anouk is not the only frustrating character in The Slap, the other adult characters are completely unlikeable: emotionally unavailable, potentially violent and dangerous, dangerously irresponsible, constantly lying to each other and themselves. However, The Slap is thematically very rich, covering so many aspects of contemporary Australian life that it would be impossible to cover them all in one review. One other thing that had strong resonance with me was the nature of compromise. This could be because I am much too self-involved to truly understand the complexity of compromise involved in marriage, relationships and motherhood, but The Slap repeats that compromise made under the guises of these important roles are often made to someone characters are not even sure they like, let alone love. There is a deep-seated resentment behind these decisions which is not healthy. The Slap asks the question of where do our loyalties lie? With family? With friends? With strangers? With ourselves? The answer is never clear, and identity is so built upon traditional roles that, by their very nature, force us to define ourselves in relation to another.

Again she experiences a wave of weariness, a numbing heaviness to her neck and shoulders, to her very bones. This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unattainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired.

And then, there is Connie and Richie. One of the things I loved about Tsiolkas’ debut novel Loaded (incidentally, does anyone else think that the Ari at the barbeque who gave Hector speed could possibly be Ari from Loaded? Just coincidence, or a wink to knowing readers?) was the exploration of a multitude of complex issues and themes related to growing up in Australia through the energy and exuberance of youth. Tsiolkas knows how to write about adolescence in a way that, compared to the hateful and bitter adults, gives hope: I almost wonder why he is content writing about middle-class, middle-aged bores when the real passion and excitement comes through his sensitive treatment of his younger characters. Connie and Richie are marked by a fear and anticipation of the future, but in their confrontation with their future, they change in a way that the adult characters can not. Previously held prejudices disintegrate as they learn, adapt and evolve. They are the only ones truly willing to forgive their friends and family of minor and major transgressions, and thus the real hope of The Slap lies with them.

In summary, I can’t honestly say that I liked The Slap. It didn’t leave me giddy with pleasure, but it did force me to think about issues about identity and compromise, and for that I am appreciative. It begins to approach the problems and concerns confronting contemporary Australian society in a way that is easy to relate to, yet avoids taking an overly moral tone. It is a completely frustrating novel for so many reasons, but absolutely a worthwhile read.

After weeks of reading Dennis Cooper, Joan Didion, introductory philosophy texts, I needed something to lighten the mood. I hadn’t heard a thing about Paul Magrs’ Exchange and only picked it up because of an intriguing cover, a collection of colourful letters smashing up against each other. Discovering that an exchange bookstore was a main feature of the novel was more than enough to entice me. However, for all the appropriately bibliophilic tendencies Exchange evokes, the main story is something of a disappointment, almost undoing all the joy to be found in the young character’s love of books.

Simon has moved to a small country town to live with his grandparents after the tragic death of his parents. Unusually unlike most other protagonists of young adult fiction, the still grieving Simon is quiet, awkward, self-conscious, without whipsmart comebacks to the taunts of the local lads. At first the heavy use of British slang – lots of lads and dafts – grated, but gradually faded in to the background. A fervent reader, Simon and his grandmother, Winnie, bond through a love of charity store book shopping and reading, a passion his surly grandfather doesn’t share.

The saving grace of the drab charity shops would be the inevitable shelves of paperbacks. This was the cheapest way to buy books, and he liked how they were jumbled together: ancient classics cheek by jowl with recent popular blockbusters; westerns and romances; fantasy and stark, searing realism. The erratic order of things exactly reflected his own reading habits and the almost random way he chose what would take up his attention next.

By chance, Simon and Winnie happen upon an exchange bookstore, manned by the artificially limbed (yes, really) Terrence and confident goth girl Kelly. Winnie discovers a book written by an old childhood friend about their lives growing up together and the narrative sometimes diverges into stories about Winnie and Ada’s past, leading up to a feelgood reunion. Simon too strikes up a friendship with Kelly, that borders on the romantic but due to Simon’s awkwardness is never quite able to move beyond friendship. Just as I was warming to the bibliophilia present in Exchange, enjoying long passages of the simple pleasures of reading and drinking tea, I stupidly read the back cover again which referred to “a terrible act of revenge.” Though it wasn’t evident in the style, story or structure itself, this knowledge filled me with a sense of dread. The story was so gentle, so peacefully quiet that I became anxious about what would happen to Simon and/or Winnie.

“Yes. It seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of books. You need them. They’ll remind you of who you are. And where you’ve been. And you’ll need them even more, when everything is changing…”

From there, and not just because of my rather unfounded dread, the story falls apart. Yet, I can’t really pinpoint exactly why. It could be that the story doesn’t particularly go anywhere, and there is no recognizable change or evolution within the characters. There seems to be the faint suggestion that reading is just a way of avoiding confrontation with real, abject feeling – whether grief, unhappiness or jealousy – which I do not agree with it. The final half of Exchange is uninteresting despite the interesting premise, and denies the pleasure that Simon, and surely the reader, takes in books and reading.

I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, naïve things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head, you might get your hand bitten off.
– V.I. Lenin

Terrified of saying the “stupid, naïve things” that Vlad mentions above, I’m going to be quiet about my relationship with the music (and associated culture) of the Manic Street Preachers. How could I possibly sum up the amount of influence they’ve exerted on me over the past twelve years? Yes, I was a reader before I listened to their music, but the Manics made me realize that literature could be dangerous, exciting and even sexy. This is a band whose mainstream breakout hit began “libraries gave us power.” For me, the Manics promoted literacy over rock and roll excess, and it doesn’t feel over the top to announce that I came to literature through their music/culture. Sorry Vladimir, I just can’t help it. Anyway, this isn’t meant to be autobiography, but in reviewing Simon Price’s biography of the band Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers, one can’t help but be a little bit confessional. Really, that personal introduction was just a warning that what follows is intensely coloured by my own connection to the music, the band and how they changed me.

It’s rare to see music biography reviewed on book blogs. I think that these books are usually seen as puff PR pieces, cut and pasted from the media releases and not given to criticism or careful analysis. Everything doesn’t fall into this category, it’d be impossible to get away with doing so given how keenly literate the band itself and Manic Street Preachers fans tend to be. That’s a generalization of course, but a band that references Valerie Solanas, Primo Levi and Octave Mirbeau among others isn’t going to be given the same treatment as other music biography publisher friendly unit shifters.

[on Motown Junk] This was rock ‘n’ roll patricide (the Manics had once described themselves as ‘four baby Hamlets’): the clearest expression of their impulse to destroy history, both musically and culturally. As they told the NME: ‘By denying ourselves a past we are trying to find a worthwhile present out of this junky wreckage of life.’

The band’s history is anything but straight forward – outrageous statements, messes of eyeliner and spraypaint, the darkest (and best) contemporary rock album ever (The Holy Bible), the tragic disappearance of key member Richey Edwards, the comeback album, and the comfortable segue into the league of rock and roll royalty. It’s a history fraught with tension, depression and contradiction. No matter how familiar you are with the trajectory of the band, hardcore Manics fan and music journalist Simon Price brings his enthusiasm and first hand insight to make it interesting. Even the sections discussing the music itself don’t resort to the clichéd language of rock journalism. Price carefully portrays the energy of the music, as well as analysing the meaning without coming across as ostentatious. Thankfully, he’s also not afraid to call out the truly awkward moments on their albums as overblown, dated, or impenetrable. However it is a criticism that is clearly couched in love.

Price’s criticism isn’t limited to the music. Interspersed throughout the traditional band history are essays on various topics: one for each member of the band – the politics and contradictions of their public persona, the devotion of the fans, how they interacted with all levels of popular culture, ruminating on the lack of success in America, the implications of the bands Welshness and the casual racism of the music press, sex and gender as embodied by Richey Edwards, self-harm and mental illness and the band’s continuation after the disappearance of Edwards. It is these essays which help raise Everything above the bog-standard music biography format, instead offering a new way of looking at and thinking about the Manic Street Preachers and their music.

[Also, this book possibly has magic powers as while I was reading it the Manics announced their first Australian tour since January 1999. To say I am excited is understating it just a little.]

Those of sensitive dispositions would do well to avoid Dennis Cooper’s work, and even this review may prove too much for the squeamish. Cooper pushes the boundaries of the accepted expressions of desire into the taboo. It’s when I reread books like Frisk that I realize just how my memory has faltered – the strongest memory was of the intricate detailing of sexual murders, which turned out to be only a chapter in this book, and I wish that I had some record of my thoughts about reading Frisk seven years ago so that I could see the ways my reading changed. Frisk is the second novel in Cooper’s George Miles cycle, a loosely connected series of books exploring the complications of desire through masochism, sex, murder and death.

Frisk makes use of the technique of having a central character with the same name as the author, Dennis Cooper. The ideas expressed here are so far removed from what we are usually willing to accept, that it seems like Cooper is urging his audience to project the depravity on to him, or his fictional persona. In a sense, he’s removing that step where readers guess that the expression of the abnormal must reveal the deepest hidden desires of the author. But, this very projection is also at the heart of all the sadomasochistic violence within the novel, and fictional Dennis Cooper’s fantasies: the worst of it comes from our imaginations, so who is responsible and are we willing to confront our complicity? Cooper’s technique is decidedly self-reflexive:

“I don’t know,” I muttered, shrugged. “Well, that’s not totally true.” My forehead crumpled up. “I sort of know…well, basically because I realized at some point that I couldn’t and wouldn’t kill anyone, no matter how persuasive the fantasy is. And theorizing about it, wondering why, never helped at all. Writing it down was and still is exciting in a pornographic way. But I couldn’t see how it would ever fit with anything as legitimate as a novel or whatever.”

The novel opens with a graphic shot by shot reconstruction of a snuff porn image, presumably, we learn later on, the same pornography that Dennis saw as a young boy. The novel weaves between Dennis’ later sexual experiences with a boyfriend, Julian, and his fascination with a particular type of young man. Through a brief relationship with a man, Henry, who looks exactly like the man in the original still, Dennis realizes that the image may have been faked, that is, not a real image of man being murdered. It got me thinking about how images seen at crucial times of development can become ingrained, informing desire itself, even if the image is violent, demeaning and dangerous; that learning the desirous image is faked doesn’t lessen the desire for it, despite the impossibility (or criminality) of achieving it.

Nonetheless, Dennis explores his fetish for the combination of sex and death, and extreme sadism through his graphically depicted fantasies. He reconstructs the story of an object of his desire, Joe, supposedly a masochist, who was murdered before Dennis could form a relationship with him. The line between fantasy and “truth” is absolutely essential to the theme of Frisk – that so much of our desire is based on a unachievable, unrealistic fantasy with little concern for reality. Dennis moves to Amsterdam and writes letters to his former boyfriend Julian about his murderous exploits, claiming to have killed and dismembered a number of young men. Julian and his brother Kevin visit Dennis, intrigued by the letters, and discover that Dennis’ letters were the creation of his imagination. However, Kevin is determined to recreate the original image for Dennis. The novel ends on another shot by shot reconstruction, this time revealing the imperfections of the image, the ways in which it has obviously been constructed. It’s almost a melancholic ending, as we come to see that unless Dennis can block out his morality, he’ll never achieve what he views as the ultimate sexual release. It’s a ruthless metaphor for how desire is so controlled and obstructed.

I think it is clear that Dennis Cooper’s fiction is not going to appeal to everyone. The sexual violence is told in brutal detail that is difficult to read, it revels in the horror and pleasures of total destruction. That the imagined (again the postmodern roots show, as a fiction novel isn’t it all imagined?) violence was my only memory of Frisk seven years after reading it suggests that maybe I read it on a purely literal level, and I don’t remember it affecting me very much at all. For those willing to brave the darkest corners of the psyche, Cooper raises a lot of relevant questions and does so in an inventive, if visceral, way.

I love Watchmen, it is up there as one of my favourite books. Not one of my favourite graphic novels, but this re-imagined past populated by retired costumed heroes is one of my favourite stories ever. I think it comes down to not only the quality of the storytelling, the philosophical implications of the story, and the artwork, but also the time of my life that I discovered it. I’ll save divulging that sad sorry story for another time, but of all the titles in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, Watchmen seems the most deserving of in-depth philosophical enquiry.

Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test collects a number of different essays exploring the Watchmen universe and how it relates to different philosophical theories and concepts, from the problem Dr. Manhattan’s morality, to the feminism of the Silk Spectres, to the Kierkegaardian humour in Rorschach and The Comedian. It seems a little ironic that a graphic novel that is so intent on questioning all forms of authority and power has been given a treatment which relies solely on “legitimate” ways of analysis. The problem here being that all of the discussions, all of the issues raised in these essays seem implicit in Watchmen itself, so eloquently explored through the graphic medium, character and themes that these essays seem, well, a little extraneous.

Familiarity with the Watchmen universe will help the uninitiated wrangle with the philosophical jargon and get to what the writers are trying to get across, but other than a few moments of “hey, I never thought of it that way!”, there’s not much that isn’t, in some way, already evident within Watchmen. There are some interesting discussions about the morality of different characters and the virtues of different philosophical ethical motivations, but the most engaging essays are those which operate on more of a cultural level. Only one of the essays seemed utterly pointless, an attempt at an ironic (I think?) exploration of homosexuality within Watchmen which reiterated all the usual hateful arguments and came across as immature and repulsive. The argument may have been well intentioned, but the approach was completely off.

There is a tendency in the essays to rely on the more philosophically and ethically complex characters of Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, but other characters do get a minor look in. Watchmen offers an obviously hyper-real version of our own reality, giving a heightened story through which to ask questions about identity, change, time and space. However, most of these essays use Watchmen to highlight and elaborate particular concepts rather than using the concepts to illuminate Watchmen. Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test is one for die-hard Watchmen fans only.

On the surface Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays looks like yet another story of a beautiful, privileged woman suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is going through the breakdown of her marriage to director Carter Lang. Yet, Didion’s writing avoids the typical hysteria. Her technique is sparse, the restraint she shows is purposely alienating, intent at keeping the reader at a distance from the true horror of Maria’s suffering. It protects us from the oblivion of nothingness that Maria feels, and forces us to confront it ourselves.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

To recount the plot seems futile, the narrative is built from key events seen through Maria’s eyes. Maria has been committed to some form of institution, and looks back over what happened in the lead up to, during, and after the breakdown of her marriage. There is no clear linear progression, but events, signs, symbols gradually do fall in to place. Maria has an abortion. Maria visits her ex-husband on a movie set in the desert. Maria watches her close friend commit suicide. Something as simple as a stilted telephone conversation, as momentous as an arrest in the desert, or the nightmarish hallucination of the contents of blocked drains are all told in a brutally dispassionate third-person voice.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

The structure of the novel is interesting too, opening with single chapters told in the first person from major characters – Maria’s manic, compelling voice, Helene reflecting on her conflicted relationship with Maria, and Carter trying to pinpoint where things started going wrong. From there, most of the novel is told in this distant third-person narration, until the end where Maria’s voice is heard again. This seems to mirror the state of Maria’s internal self, beginning with rampant self-obsession, turning to looking at herself from a disconnected and distant viewpoint and finally, we hope, gaining a stronger sense of her own identity by the end. It’s bleak, but Didion’s writing is so controlled that the emotional effect of these events, and of Maria’s perception of them, doesn’t hit until after. Play It As It Lays is a novel that lingers, becoming all the more powerful as time passes.