THERE'S GOOD NEWS...
and BAD NEWS...
First, the good news.

And I can't tell you what it's like to have that burden lifted off my shoulders: another set of interlocking deadlines in which I constantly fell farther and farther behind... Well, yes, I can: It feels like a burden has been lifted off my shoulders.
More good news:
I got my "repaired" DVD player to work again: the problem was not in the "repair," as I had convinced myself the other night, but in my rather inattentive attempt at connection (third glass of wine, anyone?), as became clear as soon as I tried to untangle the cables in daylight. So, I'm back in Movieville. And I had been completely unprepared for the desolation that set in when I couldn't watch a movie; it isn't that I do it that often, I just didn't want to think that I couldn't. Does that make any sense at all?
And now the bad news:

Bad Troll, no doughnut!
Leave aside for the moment that his mother and the "Finch" family both felt monstrously ill-used by their treatment in Running With Scissors. [How could they not? His mother spoke out on NPR with considerable equanimity, even magnimity, given what he had written (click here); the "Finch" family went public with a lawsuit (click here), later quietly settled.] However unfair he may have been to everyone who ever had anything to do with him, at least he had turned his experience into howlingly funny material. No matter how often one questioned the truth of it, he kept making me laugh -- and it was not a period when I had a lot to laugh about. So I was grateful.
I found Dry funnier, and less loaded, but remained grateful to him for making me laugh out loud. I've come to believe that anything that can do that has some redeeming social value. Yes, he used his wit to skewer, not to say demolish, his mother, his therapist's family, in fact, almost anyone who had had much of anything to do with him up till then. But he was funny.

It doesn't even try for humor, which makes it profoudly sad: it's just not good, either as a story or as "writing." It sounds like a spoiled child's carefully tended grievances, well-aired, or a therapist's imagined explanations of inchoate dreams and memories foisted onto real experience like an ill-fitting garment...
The saddest part: I could have saved myself $15 if I had waited to read Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times. [That will teach me to buy a book without reading a review because I don't want to lose the fun of discovering it for myself. Oh, well...] Not only am I robbed of my long-anticipated laughter, I had to see, once I started checking the web for reactions before posting this, that practically everyone who reviewed the book felt the same way I did.
Now I don't even have the consolation of casting the first stone...
sigh
Hang in there, all.
C
Thanks for telling me about the book.I loved Dry but was bored with Running with Scissors..
ReplyDeleteI wont bother with this new book.
Augustin seems to me like a self aborbed narcissistic ex drunk:)