Hi all! I’ve been busy, but do have some Gen X Project project updates! I’ve read some other stuff I want to talk about, but the theme of this update is…
Interesting surprises!
I had read one novel apiece from Douglas Coupland and Mark Leyner and strongly disliked both. I bought Leyner’s 2012 novel, The Sugar-Frosted Nut Sack, on the strength of its insouciant title and low low price at a used place. It was stupid, I don’t remember what it was about but I remember being unimpressed- frenetic, supposedly funny randomness, a sweaty performance. I read the debut book that Coupland will almost certainly have named in the headline of his obituary, Generation X, when I started this whole Gen X project. It’s also bad! Meandering faux-sophisticated conversations between three identical idiots in Palm Springs. No one was happy, very much including Coupland, that the age cohort got named after his stupid book (which didn’t come up with the term- there’s a whole dumb, vague history behind that too)... except maybe some marketing people. Both would likely make a list of the hundred or so worst novels I’ve ever read (hmmmm…).
So, it was with a sigh of trepidation I picked up other efforts by these same authors, as I continue this Gen X project. “Here I go again, reading utter crap in my unpaid efforts to be an intellectual historian no one asked for,” I sez to myself.
Well! Neither Coupland’s 1992 follow-up effort Shampoo Planet nor Mark Leyner’s 1998 The Tetherballs of Bougainville are exactly -good- books, but my expectations were beneath the floor, and both were… around the level of a nice comfy ottoman? Not the empire, the furniture piece. I only cringed a little reading both books! I gave them both three and a half out of five! It’s a little tough, honestly, assessing books’ quality on even an arbitrary, “did I enjoy it” basis in this kind of situation. I was so surprised and relieved that I probably felt better reading these than, say, a somewhat disappointing effort by a much more skilled writer, which would be objectively miles better than either of these nineties joke-books but which produce a different feeling… I know people like it when I let my hater side out. And I do enjoy discussing how and why books are bad. But I do feel warm fuzzies when someone I don’t expect produces something better than I expect, especially when it means I can have a respectably enjoyable reading experience versus a joyless slog.
One way in which Shampoo Planet marks a vast improvement over Generation X is that our Canadian litteratuer of fin-de-siecle fecklessness graces us with a plot! It’s not much of a plot, but hey, it doesn’t have to be. Instead of three slackers talking about nothing in a desert, we get Tyler, a maybe twenty-year-old community college student trying to go-getter himself out of his eastern Washington town. He does reasonably well at it, too, pitching ideas to his favorite corporate guy (“we used to bomb his company!” ex-hippie mom exclaims), saving up the money he makes from selling fake designer bags to take a whirlwind trip of Europe, studying hotel management. And truth be told, life doesn’t sound that bad in his toxic-waste-producing town. He seems to have a lot of friends, who seem to have a lot of money and free time on their hands? Anyway, unlike the usual Gen X lit protagonist, Tyler (remember when “Tyler” was kind of a novel name? I remember it being not outlandish, exactly, but in a category of names that seemed “new” - I remember when “Kyle” seemed that way too… am I just old?) doesn’t strongly bemoan his existence. He just wants to experience things. He does. A mean yuppie ex-stepdad messes with his mom and he gets in trouble protecting her. His Europe fling visits his podunk small city and disrupts some applecarts. He has a bad time when he moves to Hollywood. But in the end, life goes on.
It’s not profound. It’s not that interesting. It does have some bits and bobs about what Coupland wanted to get across about the zeitgeist, which I can likely incorporate into my work- postmodern stuff about the priority of surface over depth, history repackaged into consumer items, blah blah, nothing novel, but a water mark for when by-then-twenty-year-old theory had wandered on down to pop novelists like “Big Coup” (do you think anyone ever called him that? I bet he wouldn’t like it). And obviously there’s some cringeworthy bits, but I barely remember them. It was… fine! If I didn’t read it for a project, I’d be minorly annoyed, at worst, for having read it! Amazing.
The Tetherballs of Bougainville had a bit more ambition, but was also several degrees more annoying. An old friend of mine was on the Bizarro fiction scene for a while. Is that still a thing? As far as I can tell, the deal with Bizarro fiction is that it’s dada horror, with a lot of nineties-aughts “that’s so random” shit, pop culture references next to depictions of dead babies or what have you, thrown in. More of a scene than an actual genre, as far as I can tell, the sort of people who like that kind of thing and are willing to show up and support/backbite each other at conventions and online glomming together, etc. My friend is a talented guy, he had all the pop culture and horror cred of any of those dudes and also knew actual art and writing, so his Bizarro stuff wasn’t bad (I prefer the horror material he’s been doing more of in the last decade or so). I liked neither the other Bizarro works I read, nor most of the people I interacted with (probably entirely online) who identified with the scene. They were rude, and the Idles line, “Hey try-hard, you should have tried harder!” comes to line.
Anyway- Leyner reminds me of Bizarro and it wouldn’t surprise me if Bizarro impressarios claimed him (these internet micro-genres are not picky, scavengers usually can’t be), and it further wouldn’t surprise me if he bounced some attention back when the scene was bigger, a shoutout, a blurb, or a even a con appearance. Am I going to google this? Not until I have to – like if I discuss Bizarro in the big project – and as yet, I don’t. That said, I’d say The Tetherballs of Bougainville would be a Bizarro novel I don’t reject altogether, like my friend’s. It does not completely lack for good ideas, compelling imagery, or laffs.
It’s got more po-mo slathered onto it than most Bizarro, which came into being when the theory wars were mostly in the rear view mirror (and before they came back in the form of CRT/gender-theory panic), doesn’t. So, our narrator (Mark Leyner – get it? That’s the author’s name! – but as a thirteen year old who does tremendous amounts of drugs and swans around in leather pants sans shirt) is telling the story of writing a screenplay of telling the story of writing a screenplay about some doings he either was or wasn’t supposed to have actually done, blah blah blah. He is either relating this, or writing about relating this, to the middle aged warden of the prison where his father (Joel Leyner- that’s also Mark Leyner’s real dad’s name, except this one is a PCP addict and murderer!! Whoa there!!) lives through a botched execution, who is also a sexy older lady he nails.
So far, so tedious. Did you know… modern society… kind of messed up? Like, what’s the deal with all these brand names? And kids doing drugs? But somehow also seeming weirdly mature, like obsessed with stuff (careers, designer goods) that people born in the mid-twentieth century didn’t care about at similar ages? Also, wars and murders and TV!
Well… I said I was surprised by how much I did -not- dislike Tetherballs. What… didn’t I dislike about it? Leyner shows some reasonable comic timing in some Mutt and Jeff and “who’s on first?” bits with various people in the execution chamber. He’s pretty droll about the ridiculousness of it all, not displaying the same level of frantic desire to shock that a lot of writers who fish these waters – Bizarro people being among the least offenders because they at least tell you up front about their doing – do.
There’s a reasonably funny bit where, if the State of New Jersey (where all this takes place) botches an execution, they let you go… but then are free to take you out, “with extreme prejudice,” at any time and place, according to the whim of some mainframe. It’s not funny in and of itself but Leyner does a pretty good job with the concept and some fun legalese around it. Another bit I had a minor chuckle explains the title. Young Mark-character loves the game of tetherball, as young kids do, and a conceit of this world is that the best tetherball players come from Bougainville, the war-torn island off of Papua New Guinea, and surrounding areas. Again, that’s not funny, but the way he expands on it is, especially when, in the many multiple layers of narration, near rock bottom, we get the news that many of the major writers of the time, 1998 – David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bret Easton Ellis, etc – are actually mere anagrams of the names of Bougainvillean tetherball champs, Borgesian writer-characters made up as a game… whose identities were then taken up by imposters pretending to be major writers who never existed. There’s a whole courtroom scene about this, the lady who wrote “Anywhere But Here” scandalized at being revealed for being a pretender, etc etc.
Again- not that funny in and of itself. A little funny the way Leyner plays it. Here’s what it is- a lot funnier than Sugar Frosted Nut Sack, and I’ll tell you what else… funnier than that other po-mo “world is a joke” “except… is it??” novel… Infinite Jest. And Leyner doesn’t cop a moralistic, Christian-but-too-NPR-to-admit-it, stance by the end, as Wallace does in IJ. Other than sheer weight – and, now, a reaction against annoying internet Wallace-haters – it’s the crypto-Christian morality in Wallace that seems to recommend him over others playing similar games. Funny, that.
Anyway! I wouldn’t exactly recommend either Shampoo Planet or The Tetherballs of Bougainville, unless they sound like they’re more “your thing” than mine. I don’t think they’re great. But, they were surprising in their not being just terrible to read, and they do point to a somewhat less… contrived? Or contrived but at least funny? Nineties literature… which isn’t really what anyone wanted, if everyone wanted Ellis, Wallace, and company. Alas!
Mithra says hi