It was poet Gregory Corso who wrote
of Jack Kerouac and the other Beats that it
was “not so much our finding America as it was
America finding its voice in us…” And before Kerouac, the Fifties and the
Beats, Fitzgerald of the Twenties found himself the voice of a “Lost”
generation. But for generations more recent, the voice of the disenfranchised
has come through the words of the cocaine authors of the Eighties, Jay
McInerney with his novel Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis
with Less Than Zero. It is the middle of the Nineties, and author
Douglas Coupland’s Generation X phrase is becoming pass�; authors
are lining up, and in some cases dressing up in the jackets of the ones they
are trying to emulate, and even rip off.
A journal is found at a flea market held on St. Marks Place in New York
City, a street once described by Allen Ginsberg as “a culture church.” The book
is bound in a “crazy fruit cover.” A week later, in the same spot, on the same
corner, another journal is found, the book’s jacket covered in the same fruit
design. And so the scene is set for Fruit Cocktail Diaries by Brian
Carmody and Gretchen Hayduk (St. Martin’s Press, $15.95 hard). A tale of the
lives of two people, both living in New York, told in alternating chapters. Two
diaries that co-exist without the knowledge of the other until…
The unnamed female character finds herself bored with her promising
advertising career in Ohio and decides to pack up her life in search of
adventure in New York City. The woman finds double shifts and a paycheck
working in a restaurant. It is a world that provides a place for Jillian, a
waitress who goes from nymph to nun; J.C., her gay co-worker who takes it upon
himself to expose the n�ive little miss to the sins of the city; and
Harold, a homeless man she befriends after a random phone call in the middle of
the night.
The alternating chapters, written in two different text styles, follow the
life of a gay waiter who later becomes a cook. He has spent the last five years
of his life “getting laid and getting nowhere” and having dreamt of coming to
New York since the Seventies to do “drugs in the bathroom (of Studio 54) with
Calvin Klein.” What follows is a transcript of failed relationships, suicide
threats, and anonymous sex.
Many writers, including Bret Easton Ellis with his first novel, Rules of
Attraction, have attempted to publish novels dressed up as journals. The
problem, unfortunately, is that daily entries tend to be trivial and frequently
boring. Carmody and Hayduk neatly avoid this problem and produce a short but
poignant piece of fiction.
Portland and New York are the two chapter titles,
used more times than once, of Bongwater (Grove Books, $17 paper) by
Michael Hornburg. David, a misunderstood filmmaker, travels around by
skateboard, and finds himself homeless after a former girlfriend has burned
down his apartment and fled to New York. Courtney, the former love in David’s
life (and as coincidence would have it, Michael Hornburg’s ex-girlfriend’s name
is Courtney Love), heads for the Big Apple to live with Tommy, a crazed
musician who is fighting “a dementia unknown to the common man.” David is left
in Portland to find love with Jennifer, Courtney’s best friend, and Mary, a
stripper on a power trip.
In New York, Courtney finds a ruthless world too harsh for even her
street-wise self. She wakes up in the back of a delivery truck to find “her
pants were curled around her ankles, her shoes still on, her T-shirt moist from
sweat and vomit. She felt patches of sticky sperm on her upper thigh and
started to cry.”
What Hornburg does, that writers like McInerney do so well, is to write
with insight about the hip club scene, a scene full of drugs, erotica, drag
queens, and guest lists. Hornburg succeeds in choosing a story to tell, but
it’s his style of writing that lacks substance – the dilated pupils and sexual
energy of an all-night rave on ecstasy are missing. One wonders if Hornburg is
cashing in on Miss Love, an artist who, herself, spent many years denying that
she has ridden the coattails of others.
– Jeremy Reed
Heart Songs and Other Stories by E. Annie
Proulx (Simon & Schuster, $10 paper)is a
poignant anthology, well-crafted tales of strangers trying to fit in. Some
convince themselves of their honorable intentions, but most are clearly
opportunists, preying on the countryside as they chuckle snidely at the country
folk and turn their culture into sport. Proulx writes about an America fast
becoming extinct, the self-sufficient small town with a factory or mill as its
primary means of support, resisting in vain the looming shadow of the city. Her
world is small-town New England, and she sides with the locals.
It is remarkable how well Proulx knows her subjects. The stories have a
technically precise backdrop of hunting and trapping (in fact, her stories have
been published in Gray’s Sporting Journal), but it is her insight into
human character that makes them so eloquent. To the interloper, the locals
serve only as quaint caricatures, but the author understands them to be rich
without money, smart without education, and closer to nature (i.e., god), all
the while carrying along with their personal baggage a certain archetypal
sadness of the inevitable: that someday they will be overtaken by progress, by
time. But the strangers are kept at bay with the last bit of power these locals
wield, which is in their wisdom and knowledge of the land; these are not the
inhabitants of Grover’s Corner.
Proulx is so thorough, her locations become characters in their own right.
With language both provincial and alluring, the autumn New England landscapes
breathe with yellowjackets, grouse, milkweed, butternuts, and wood sorrel. In
the haunting “Stone City,” the author uses the movements of a brown fox to
represent decades of history through the lingering spirit of a rancorous family
that once inhabited the farm on which the creature roams.
Her rich descriptions appear effortless. In “The Unclouded Day,” Earl, an
accountant from the city, hires the best shot in town to teach him to bird
hunt. The simple matter of their first meeting is adorned by language,
providing insight into their personalities and the recurring themes of the
stories themselves.“Earl oiled Santee with his voice… Santee gave each
word its fair measure of weight….” Her facility with words is no secret;
Proulx is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping
News, and her first novel Postcards won the PEN/Faulkner
Award.
Aside from lyrical beauty, Proulx’s tales do what all good stories should:
pull readers into a world they might not otherwise visit but to which they’ll
undoubtedly want to return. Slow and easy, with a measured eeriness that keeps
the pages turning, these stories are like a small-town day; nothing ever
happens, yet everything does. – Jennifer Scoville
This article appears in August 25 • 1995 and August 25 • 1995 (Cover).