Customer Reviews

Celebrities in Disgrace

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This whole collection feels strong and sure. Elizabeth Searle's style is such a pleasure!--the rhythm, the images, the sensual intelligent prose. These stories center around women and girls wanting and needing to be watched. The title piece works perfectly as a film noir novella. Tight, fast but complex; shapely; and it has a satisfyingly dark ending. I also like the story The Young and the Rest of Us. It has a lot of style and power, and a lot of feeling. Compassion for all characters. I read in order to learn how to live life, how to see the world and other people more clearly and deeply. Elizabeth Searle's writing gives me that!

"Celebrities in Disgrace" is Elizabeth Searle's thoughtful exploration of the disturbingly egotistical souls emerging from a celebrity-obsessed culture. The downfall of characters whose driving desire to be placed on a pedestal is tragic in "Memoir of a Soon-To-Be-Star", humiliating in "What It's Worth" and disturbingly and comically familiar to scandal-saturated pop culture watchers in the title story. "The Young and the Rest of Us" touches poignantly on the role of television in the life of a family struck by tragedy. And "Celebration" seems to be the antidote to these often-disturbing characters, portraying one couple's struggle to make the life and death decisions surrounding modern pregnancy.

rating for CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE: 5 stars *****
The Mind of a Wannabe

Fiction takes us strange places, and none are stranger than a
fame-addicted mind. Searle's book is full of vivid people lacking all identity except as others see them - like a stalker looking for the next Pamela Smart, an adolescent acting out horror movies, a photography student imprinted on a charismatic professor. These are real people who will do anything - anything - to fill that gap where their self should be. Searle does us a great service in letting us see the cult of celebrity with new eyes, washed clean from the banal bios - "meteoric rise leads to substance problem but they're getting their life together" - we absorb every time we surf, watch, or read media.

This collection of stories is both humorous and sad. Searle is a fine wordsperson and she takes you into the original world of imagination within her characters. Her themes are loss, longing for recognition, real or imagined, worlds of celebrities and dysfunctional family issues. An interesting minor theme is Searle realistically portraying individuals with developmental handicaps in a real way. Their characters are neither grotesque nor "happy angels". This collection tells wonderful and original stories, a real treat.

I normally don't enjoy and so don't read what I call "psychological" fiction. My pleasure reading consist primarily of nonfiction and history, occasionally I dabble in Sci-Fi, biography, historical novels, pornography (literary mostly) and thrillers (at least on airplanes :-). Being partnered with a "person of letters" this disinclination for modern "serious fiction" sometimes leads to interpersonal difficulty. But frankly I find most modern explorations of feelings and relationships both unbelievable and ultimately boring.

I received a postcard about the publication of Celebrities in Disgrace (CID) and before tossing it I noticed the quote "smart about sex, unblinking ... funny". Hay I'm a guy it said "sex" right. Pornography I like, usually found on-line or in Susie Bright style anthologies, tends to explore the way people feel about sex and relationships in an unbiased and honest way. You often need to read a story to the point where this obviously isn't in the cards and then move on in hopes of better elsewhere. Written honesty about sex and it's place in genuine relationships and inside the heads of the participants is more rare and I imagine more difficult to achieve and so more worthy of complement then most other literary subjects. It is more commonly found in upscale porn then in "real" fiction and the lack of it in my opinion makes much serious fiction unbelievable at best creepy at worst.

When I saw CID on display in a bookstore I decided to see if the quote on the postcard meant "smart" as a synonym for "Honest" or "Intelligent" rather then something entirely different as I suspected. I started on a random page and was hooked in several minutes, further after reading the entire collection I don't think this was a coincidence. I found almost all of the CID stories believable, the prose entertaining and artful, the quirks of characters remind me of people I know, the subject matter is believable, the humor is that of my real experience and the treatment of physical intimacy, it's causes, results, motivations, tangles and wonderful improbabilities are reminiscent of what I feel and have felt though it is in no way recognizable, formula or patterned.

For those other frustrated readers of modern fiction who don't find yourself or your friends and acquaintances in most serious fiction in fact find yourself saying "I would cross the street to avoid this character", CID is your kind of book. For those of you porn readers out there (come on admit it) who wonder cynically why the length of a penis is invariably mentioned (in inches), the causes and results of the action are trivially depicted and the action itself is so repetitive as to make you skip it in boredom, this is also your kind of book.

The category division between porn and "real" fiction has created a void in modern written literature into which most of the reality of the wonders of physical intimacy and its place in life disappear. In Celebrities in Disgrace Elizabeth Searle hits the center of this void resulting in refreshingly new, startlingly funny, recognizably genuine depictions of what it is like to be a normal modern human being. I suspect she is saying that we are all celebrities in disgrace something that the professional reviewers unfortunately seem to have missed entirely in the title. Any of us who shop in a grocery store know more about the supposed sex lives of many disgraced celebrities from the covers of the tabloids then we do about anyone else but ourselves. Elizabeth must have stood in her share of grocery checkout lines; her reviewers must not do their own grocery shopping.

Since there was not yet a reader review, I paused to write this while ordering Elizabeth Searle's other two books from Amazon.com. I wish she had more then two. I presume an author can't get higher praise then that.

On the whole, I found this collection of short stories by Elizabeth Searle to be a disappointment. I was intrigued by her fascination with this unlikely topic and the glowing reader reviews this book received. However, I found it to be a fairly unfulfilling read. Searle's narrative style is distinctive in its scarcity of language and description, but does not do much to engage her readers. Nor did I find her prose to be particularly poetic; rather, I found the language choppy and indiscriminate. I had to literally force myself through some of the drab pages of this book.

By in large the characters Searle creates are interesting, but are not drawn out to their full potential. In stories like "Memoir of a Soon-to-Be Star" and "The Young and the Rest of Us," Searle very consciously creates vivid, young "wanna-be" characters whose perceptions are strangely fixated on the lure of fame and TV life, but the intricate issues these characters create are never fully realized or developed. Similarly, in "What It's Worth" and Searle's title novella, "Celebrities in Disgrace," Searle's language often seems disintegrated, particularly at their conclusions where the reader is left with no true resolution. Although, overall, I found this edition of Searle's work to be below par, there was one piece that I did enjoy. In "101" a virginal aspiring photographer is swept into her mentor's sexless open marriage. This piece, unlike most of the others, has a greater sense of purpose. Its characters are fully realized and present reader with a multi-layered scene that explores the realm between fantasy and its lure.