We Can Report Them (Brodsky, Michael) [Paperback]

Michael Brodsky (Author)

Book Description

Series: Brodsky, Michael | Publication Date: September 20, 1999

In We Can Report Them, Bert, the director of an unorthodox TV commercial, aims to canonize a serial killer as a viable cultural hero. Pudd, the serial killer, has undergone a pseudoreligious conversion. These two, plus Joyce, a patient combating her fatal disease on any terms but the real ones, all seek answers through creation, expressing their unique slant on what passes for reality in defiance of authority.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brodsky (Three Goat Songs, Dyad) belongs to the avant-garde school of novelists who dispense with plot in favor of the referential possibilities of language. His latest novel loosely follows the adventures of an advertising man named Bert, who is making a strange TV commercial. Rather than promoting a product, the 30-second segment is intended to be a theatrical depiction of a serial killer, played by an actor called Gift, who constantly ridicules Bert. Bert also endures exclusion from a surreally influential Best Dressed list produced by powerful social arbiter Floyd Flowers, and the disdain of his boss, B. Austin Samuels. Off the set, Bert's sharp-tongued mother-in-law is hospitalized with cancer, tended ineffectually by her current and ex-husbands and by her daughter, Belle. Inspired by his worries, Bert's obsessive monologuesAin which he stews over the motives and philosophy of the serial killer and ponders larger quandaries involving Heidegger, Pierce and mathematical theoryAfuel the novel. Brodsky's Pirandellian conceit is that nothing ever seems to be filmed or acted: the whole content of a play (or in this case, the commercial) is the director instructing the players how to act it. Still, in the end the commercial is completed. Critical opinion is divided on Brodsky's 10 previous works of fiction, and the writer has alternately been read as a brilliant prose stylist and an off-putting obscurantist. Though the comic density of his language here yields some stunning verbal pyrotechnics, it just as frequently thickens into unintelligibility. While persevering readers will cull something from the book, others will likely give up. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A review written in Brodsky's style "The author, like his protagonistABert (producing a 30-second serial killer commercial somehow requiring as fulsome a rehearsal as a feature film, irritated by having to tend to first his dying stepfather and then his living hellion of a mother-in-law)Ain seeming to believe `the world was a circus of horrors' (God, this pedestrian journal demands those anachronistic quotation marks!) engages in an endless ontological roll in the hay of `pseudo intellectual high fashion' dispensing his favorite words (kerf, triturate, meechy, muniments, fungibility) as if to impress the thesaurus challenged, taking a stab at evil, but bogging down in the merely vile." Some critics praise Brodsky, but this reviewer agrees with Charles Salzberg: "Language...is supposed to communicate, not alienate; enlighten, not confuse" (New York Times Book Review). Recommended only for the largest collections and for dilettantes wishing to impress people at cocktail parties by pretending they have slogged all the way through this depressing miasma.AJim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; First Trade Pap edition (September 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581440
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581446
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,224,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We Can Report Him, March 5, 2000

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"hairtic" - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Can Report Them (Brodsky, Michael) (Paperback)

Whenever I read Brodsky, I find myself falling back on the philosophy that the critical criterion for determining the measure of value to be drawn from a particular work of literature has less to do with the meaning intended to be conveyed by the author during the act of creation and than it does with whatever insight any given reader is able to extract from the work during the process of reading it. I prefer to wander through the terrain to which his books transport me, guided by my own lights. A principal focus of his novel, We Can Report Them, is just that dynamic which exists between an artist's vision and the likelihood of an audience's ability to access that vision on the artist's terms. At what point will the erosion of compromise, made in the service of bridging that chasm, undermine and extinguish the creative motivation?

Both critical acclamation and commercial success have eluded Bert, an inveterate perfectionist and eternal journeyman plying his trade as a director in the film industry. His current project, a 30 second television spot aimed at elevating The Serial Killer role to the level of entertainment and cultural icon, may be his last chance to make good before finally accepting the mantle of failure and exiting the business. The sponsors, presumably a group whose money drives the entire entertainment world, are paying for an effective product, while Bert, driven to place his own personal artistic statement before the public, attempts to walk the line between achieving his own ends and providing his employers with the commercial they are paying him to produce. He swings between unbridled, swollen self-confidence and a flood of paralyzing self-doubt, but is always fiercely anchored in his loyalty to "the work." The intensity of interpretative effort and plot manipulation he applies to the project becomes absurd within the context of a 30 second TV commercial. He is plagued by a troupe of actors who are variously inspired in, derisive of, and clearly bored by his direction, a hostile arch-nemesis of a film critic constantly hovering around the shadows of his set, sponsors who become increasingly confused and upset with his handling of the project, and, for good measure, the outside distraction of a mother-in-law, dying of cancer and determined to make his life as miserable as possible on her way out. Still, the project proceeds to completion carried by forces within Bert of which he appears to have little control. This is when we realize that Bert's success or failure in pleasing his sponsors, capturing and touching an audience, or even crafting his film to embody the perfect fruition of his vision becomes irrelevant. The power resides in the process. When all is done, it is the doing that matters.

Evelyn Woods grads can steer clear- Brodsky is not an easy read. He demands a lot of attention and hard work on the part of the reader, but invariably rewards the extra effort. With the exception of the more contemplative Goat Songs, his novels always contain a prose that is relentlessly driven forward, creating a momentum that drags the reader along in its wake. At times, the dialogue/diatribe takes off like a great post-bop sax solo, bobbing and weaving, slowly building in intensity while chasing down a circus of tangents and mounting a full-blown assault that claws at the absolute limits of of a listener's attention span, just before apparently exhausting the fuel it feeds on, setting you gently back down in the familiar and comforting refrain.

Not having been near a university in decades, I have no idea how much purchase Brodsky's body of work has managed to gain with the academics. If the semiotic vivisectionists still hold sway in the Ivory Tower, he may have to wait a while for the recognition he deserves. I suspect that his writing may tend to frustrate and confound both their methodology and their warped take on what literature is all about. But I hope that if he is not receiving it at present, he will, in time, achieve that recognition, because, for my money, Michael Brodsky is the most important man of letters to be published since 1939.