Two for the Read

Soho Press $20 hard While the catchy title had me eager to read this book, it wasn't long before I realized it had been sadly misnamed. Cowboy Ennui would have been more accurate or, better yet, Wimp Factor Ten. Never have I encountered such a wishy-washy milquetoast of a protagonist. Dennis McCance quits his country band - Cowboy Angst - to go to law school so that he can join his father's firm in Montana. However, young Dennis drops out during his second semester, but stays in Washington, D.C., for several months and lies to his parents because he doesn't have the balls to tell them he quit.

Meanwhile, the girl he thinks he sort of loves moves to Austin to start another band (she was the singer and star of Cowboy Angst) and continually implores Dennis to join her there. Emmons' description of Miss Montana Wildhack (name lifted from a Kurt Vonnegut novel) is magically alluring:

She spotted me and smiled. Then strode toward the table with squared shoulders and a straight back, chin slightly raised. Her straight brown hair was cut like a helmet around her tanned face and moved lightly as she walked. She was tall and wiry and had an aura of resilient wildness that excited and frightened men.

Ooh, boy! That hair cut like a helmet makes my prang turgid every time!

This novel has more flashbacks than Jerry Garcia. The first chapter chronicles the farewell gig for Cowboy Angst in Fort Collins, Colorado. The second chapter opens with Dennis flying home to Montana after pretending to finish his second semester. In the third chapter, we find Dennis beginning law school. Confused yet? I sure was. So as we move into the fourth chapter, we're still waiting for the damn story to start!

Unfortunately, there's not much of a story. Dennis moves home to Montana where, on page 88, he gets up the nerve to tell his parents that he quit law school. These two icy robots, who would have blended right in to Ira Levin's village of Stepford, slap Dennis around and give him two weeks to get out of their house. This gives him ample time to bore us with another couple dozen flashbacks, often interrupting a present conversation with a four- or five-page story from his past.

Mr. Decisive finally commits himself to joining Ms. Wildhack in Austin. She flew up to join him for the drive to Texas, though I can't imagine why a girl even half this cool would have anything to do with this pansy. On page 202, he finally gets around to kissing her! Feel the excitement build in Dennis as he and Montana get ready for a night on the town: "`I'm ready to drive. I'm ready to dance. I'm ready to drink a six-pack of Bud and smoke a big Bob Marley reefer,' I said, dancing in place like a Zulu beside the loaded Angstmobile." Slow down, Dennis! You are one party animal!

Unfortunately, Dennis has a big brother, Miles, who is not only a sheriff's deputy, but hates Dennis as well. Guess who pulls over the Angstmobile on the way into town? That's right, Miles not only pulls his little brother over, but proceeds to beat the crap out of him and throw him in jail. Dennis gets out and has to hire one of his father's partners to defend him on a felony charge of assaulting an officer. Excuse me, Mr. Emmons, Dennis has a full semester of law school behind him and the word "lawsuit" never crosses his mind? Hmm, that seems odd.

One incredibly far-fetched deus-ex-machina finally resolves this family strife. Then again, the very fact that this novel was published requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Dennis and Montana never do make it to Austin. The last scene, at the wake for Miles, finds them skinny-dipping in a river. Let's hope they drown; we've got enough losers moving to Austin as it is! - J.C.Shakespeare

All-American Boy: A Memoir by Scott Peck

Scribner, $22 hard The United States of America is sure one fucked-up country. Ask anyone. Your congressional representative, your minister, your boss, your wife, husband, mistress, lover, friend, bartender. It is the most melodramatically dysfunctional cesspool of repressed, oppressed, suppressed, excessed, or expressed Freudian, Marxist, neo-neo-post-post-constructionist, or whateverist complexes that this old foul cowtown of a planet has ever had the perverted, disgusting, dishonorable misfortune to tolerate.

Tolerance? Did I say tolerance? That's something that wasn't in the pilgrim's vocabulary, except in their revisionist history; something that wasn't in the cowboy's vocabulary, except in our illusory movies. It's something we somehow have a reputation for, a value, an admirable character trait that almost screams red, white, and blue, that is as All-American as the term freedom itself, yet is constantly rebuked and vilified in our everyday conversations and interactions with, dare I say it, an almost patriotic zeal?

Scott Peck's autobiography, All-American Boy: A Memoir, will get a lot of press because his father, a Marine colonel, testified before the United States Senate that he wouldn't want his son to be in the military because Scott is gay and lord knows the people who are paid to fight and kill and die in support of freedom would go apeshit having to tolerate a consenting adult who in the privacy of his own goddamned bed sticks his wanker into another consenting adult's own goddamned butthole like it's anybody else's goddamned business. Gotta be a story there. Military homoeroticism meets itself on the killing floors in front of the Playboy channel over apple pies and the strap.

Well, yes and no. Actually, the father was so totally engaged in the war thing that Scott barely knew him. His parents divorced when he was five and his mother married a drunk. That's where the hell of this story begins, which has less to do with the military than with the everyday, workaday horrors of the typically low to upper class, the prized life of the ideal, targeted Wal-Mart-Kmart-Rodeo Drive shopper, the regular church-going, tax-paying, good ol' average Joe 'n' Flo from Highland Park Kokomo, independent voters with a subscription to TV Guide and Reader's Digest and the Bible on Momma's nightstand and the Playboy in Daddy's along with a pint of Ol' Grandad. Ah, America the Sordid, America the Hyperbolic.

Yep, it's no wonder our children are a little confused. Everybody's lying. - Ric Williams