A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want...
Mix David Foster Wallace with Patti Smith, Augusten Burroughs, and Karen Finley, throw in powders and pills, stuff it in a deep-dish pizza box, and you’re in the territory of compulsive blogger Boyle’s post-postmodern blockbuster.
“Feel like I’m about to vomit and I’m being watched and my execution is soon.” So writes sometime Vice columnist Boyle toward the end of this long, loping hyperextension of the “quantified self” or life-logging movement, by which every thought, every detail, every meal, every bed-wetting, every kiss, every bowel movement, every drink, every drug over the year 2013 gets recorded, “everything i do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability.” Oh, are there drugs and drinks, and oh are there all those other things, most of them definitively in the realm of the First-World problem. Xanax, Adderall, heroin, energy drinks, phenethylamine, doughnuts, pizza, zinfandel, kale, cocaine, and kombucha: Enough of that, and some weirdly surreal moments are wont to happen, as when Boyle, as if discovering language, writes, “ ‘bumpy fish’ is a code name for bumpy fish. and maybe that’s all you need to know.” Maybe. Probably. It stands to reason that living in Brooklyn while entertaining such a diet, staying up all night and sleeping all day, and spending your life on the keyboard might impede one’s financial progress, and so it is: “dad agreed to give me money for groceries and things,” she writes. “seems shitty of me. i’m 27 years old. i’m sick.“ Dad is always there to help, it seems, and so is Mom, while others in the chronicler’s life are less helpful, from the landlord demanding rent to “everyone who doesn’t floss regularly.” Still, Boyle’s log/blog, billed as a novel, is full of zeitgeist-y stuff that will puzzle future historians, punctuated by moments of millennial aspiration, self-direction, and exhortation, from “Do not fuck with me” to “hang up clothes/laundry.”
A stunt more than a literary achievement; not without merit but requiring more effort than most readers are likely to want to give.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992186-2-4
Page Count: 712
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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