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Colors Insulting to Nature: A Novel (P.S.)

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A full frontal assault against celebrity worship and its deletorious effect on the American psyche, "Colors Insulting to Nature" is not a perfect novel. There are a few too many authorial asides restating the theme - yes, we get that basing your life decisions on the movie "Fame" is not a path to personal happiness. That said, this is one of the funniest books I have ever read. The protagonists' staging of "Sound Of Music" is the best kind of parody - one done with affection and understanding of the source material - and had me laughing so hard that I nearly aspirated my burrito. Highly recommended.

Peppy Normal is a bit eccentric and she becomes obsessed with the movie "Fame." Somehow, she believes if she could just get her two children, Lisa and her shy brother Ned, into the New York City High School of the Performing Arts, then their lives will he set. So she does the most logical thing, from her point of view, and moves to California to start her off spring in training for their eventual audition for the school.

She buys an aging farmhouse and converts it into a theater with the helps of some gay friends, Mike and Ike. Then she starts up a summer drama camp for kids. Ned hates performing and eventually winds up as a reclusive artist, but Liza takes to the stage like a duck to water, however she isn't very good. Don't tell her that, though, because she's bought into her mother's dream hook, line and sinker.

Liza's life turns into a journey through the subcultures that surround Hollywood and its edges, but close as she might get, she isn't ever able to grab that brass ring called fame. However she manages to keep hope alive, her dream too, for over a decade, despite sex, drugs and rock and roll, she plugs on. Despite horrible performances and the laughter of her peers, she plugs on. Despite the parade of one wrong man after another, she plugs on. Despite it all, she does not give up.

Does she eventually get there? I can't say, that would be telling, but I will tell you this, Cintra Wilson has written a non-stop, laugh a paragraph book stuffed with so many chuckles that you'd think you were kidnapped and being held captive in The Laugh Zone, sort of a Bill Cosby, Jackie Gleasen, Robin Williams version of the Twilight Zone. You just have to read this book.

While in a drunken depression, Peppy Normal discovers her life-path from the movie Fame. She'll enroll her children in the New York High School of Performing Arts--on their way to become celebrities. Their modest talent didn't matter--she'd incorporated the lessons of the movie deeply into her life. Unfortunately, that also meant inflicting them on her daughter, Liza. The first step toward New York was, perversely, in the opposite direction--to California. There Peppy opens the Normal Dinner Theater (where dinner was never served) and dresses pre-Freshman Liza like a tramp to take her to auditions and cattle-calls.

With this background, Liza grows up (to the extent her aging process can be called growing up) confused and waiting for that one magical break. A colony of elves teaches her to use drugs to help the breakthrough and she tries this. While her brother retreats into himself, Liza takes the opposite course, finally ending up in L.A. in an ultimate moment of degradation and humiliation. The one thing she finds that she can make money at has no appeal to her. She wants to be a famous singer--no matter how modest her talent.

Author Cintra Wilson teases the reader with author notes, and sends us on a roller-coaster rides of laugh-out-loud humor (certainly the performance of Sound of Music qualifies) and dark depression. The curse of fame and the easy myths that Hollywood perpetuates conspire to keep Liza from enjoying the few good things that do happen to her--there's always hope of that big break just around the corner.

Wilson's writing style is conversational, engaging the reader. Her characters are definitely over-the-top, but Liza's horrible high school experience will ring true with many readers, and who hasn't toyed with the notion that they are only a discovery away from being a star. COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE is a fascinating and highly readable novel. I recommend it.

The profuoundly gifted Cintra Wilson is the Roland Spring of modern cultural criticism--"rare, supreme and without context, like a zebra born in an abandoned grocery store." Certain writers are so adept at language and acute in their observations on life, and the modern world, you find yourself unconsciously imitiating their form of expression--not because you want to steal their thunder but because their prose is so resonant and inspiring that it's subliminally altered your consciousness. Although very few can do it as gracefully and with such rapier wit as Wilson. I've only read a few essays from _A Massive Swelling_ previously, but I was similarly stunned at the breadth of her pop culture savvy and her strikingly original, eloquent and hilarious writing style. I was so sad when the novel ended, I'll need to begin reading the essay collection as soon as possible.

_Colors Insulting to Nature_ is a scathing yet deeply heartfelt story of a moderately, if unexceptionally, talented teen would-be chanteuse with ambitions of fame bordering on Faustian--willing, in effect, to sell nearly every molecule of self-respect she's been dubiously endowed with by her boozy, self-absorbed and delusional train wreck of a mother. Peppy Normal's parenting skills are questionable to say the least, but she does manage to pass on to Liza the legacy of dreams and values gleaned directly from sappy/"inspirational" movies, a masochistic bloodlust for attention in all its debasing forms, a desire to immerse oneself in the world of artifice, and a taste for garish eye makeup. A class-A vicarious-living stage mom, she tries to brutally impose the song-and-dance act on Liza's brother Ned, who is pathologically anxious, socially withdrawn and hopelessly uncoordinated.

The narrative follows Liza, first wobbling precariously in ridiculous spike heels at 14; stomping defiantly in kickass steel-toed combat boots at 16; fluttering barefoot as a strung-out sprite in a hallucinogenic reverie at 21; and sauntering in dominatrix-lite fetish footwear at 23, down her pothole-addled Yellow Brick Road toward self-discovery (although the character would rightfully roll her eyes and spit out some type of withering invective at that statement).

Her quest for true love is arguably even more tunnel-visioned than her quest for fame--and what is that longing for fame, really, except universal and unconditional acceptance and love?--which takes her through a number of wretchedly compelling affairs, from an adolescent love/hate banter with a wealthy young rogue to a slick hustler with a Pygmalion complex to a fallen boy-band idol, while she pines for her formative Ideal Object, the fantastically talented and magnetic Roland Spring, whose true, effortless star quality she emulates as much as envies.

Liza, a deeply flawed but very sympathetic protagonist (and not just because this reviewer had similar, ahem, Star Search pretentions in the early 80's) suffers humilation upon humilation in her naive pursuit of the Dream, but remains doggedly resilient throughout the story. In Liza's ability to pick herself up and continue the journey against all (painfully realistic, not film-contrived) odds, she ultimately bests the "winners never quit" cliches of her beloved Hollywood tripe.

For one to write so astutely about cultural phenomena large and small (her synopsis of 80's "Streetsploitation" film _Breakin'_ was one of the many, many laugh-out-loud vignettes), one has to have presumably spent a little time deep in the belly of the beast. Wilson would be worthwhile reading even if she only dealt in brilliant, highly detailed deconstructions of movies, sitcoms, bands, and subcultures, but that's the tip of the iceberg. The novel succeeds as so such more than a GenX coming-of-age story because those pop-culture digressions, however ingenuous and funny, embellish larger themes such as the search for one's identity, conflicted relationships with family, the paradox of "being true to oneself" and having no idea what that IS, the mythology created and perpetuated by the media, and the complicated nature of love. The supporting characters are also fleshed-out and interesting, and it's nice to see their lives outside the filter of Liza's basically good-hearted and smart but somewhat self-involved perspective.

My only very minor criticism is that in setting the novel in the not-so-distant past (the story spans 1984-1993), certain details--fashions, slang expressions, cultural icons, technology and the like--are a little jumbled at times, which could have been sniffed out by an obsessive pop-cuture geek/ fact checker. That's minutae, however. This was an excellent read from one of the brightest, um, stars, on the literary scene.

Even if I hadn't known Cintra for over ten years and enjoyed her previous work, I would still have loved this book. Liza speaks to that core of many of us who want only to be loved and admired and to feel like we fit in. I was as touched as much as I was amused by Liza's adventures, and the dead-on authenticity of the cultural backdrop contributed equally to the hilarity and the poignancy. For those who have yet to enjoy Cintra's style, imagine Hunter S. Thompson on a date with E. Jean Carroll (okay, don't imagine it) overdosing on truth serum, nitrous oxide and a pint of raw ether. Or maybe not. In any case, buy this book. You won't regret it.

The snake has at last swallowed its own tail and postmodern fiction has found a defining moment. Literature found postmodernism in 1961 with Thomas Pynchon's novel, V, and is characterized by an indistinction between high and low art, parody and irony, celebration of ambiguity, regurgitation and assimilation of previously original work, a preoccupation with the organization of knowledge (not what you know, but how you know it), and a rebellion against consumer capitalism. As such, Cintra Wilson's novel, Colors Insulting to Nature (HarperCollins 2004), serves as a sort of meta-postmodern fiction.

From the moment 10-year-old Liza Normal is awestruck by the movie Ice Castles, she dreams of the glory of stardom. Unfortunately, Liza is not the sort of girl who becomes famous. Vulgar in both looks and personality, Liza is saddles with a maniacally ambitious stage mother and devoid of any marketable talent. Propelled through her mother's bizarre homegrown performing arts boot camp, her stage debut in The Sound of Music is an unqualified disaster that serves only to label Liza a freak at her suburban San Francisco high school. But Liza has one talent of which she is not aware - an indomitable ability to bounce back fighting from any setback or humiliation no matter how devastating by sheer force of will. Through failed love affairs, drug experimentation, New Age religious adventures, and searing rejection, Liza finally discovers that she is a much stronger and better person than the starlet she thought she wanted to be.

Colors Insulting to Nature is easily one of the funniest black comedies of the last decade. The entire price of the book in hardcover is alone worth the deconstruction of the 1978 smarm-fest that was Ice Castles (Columbia TriStar Pictures). I challenge anyone to get through Liza's trials at her mother's summer theatre camp without laughing hard enough to wet themselves. The camp's delightfully bizarre production of The Sound of Music is Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (HarperCollins 1972) for grown-ups.

Wilson's novel is certainly metafiction. Self-conscious narrative interruptions point out the reader's expectation of particular plot devices. Wilson uses this brilliantly to mock the very same tortured tango that she herself is dancing. Liza story contains subtlely hideous intimations of modern Hollywood's best-known templates - not just Ice Castles, but Carrie (by Stephen King, published by Random House in 1974 and adapted for film in 1976 by Lawrence D. Cohen), Pretty Woman (Touchstone Pictures 1989), and The Wizard of Oz (by L. Frank Baum, self-published in 1900 and adapted for film in 1939 by MGM Studios), among others.

Despite Wilson's unapologetic inflations of reality, Liza is an utterly human, sympathetic, and believable character. Her indestructibility masks such a completely credible vulnerability that it's impossible for anyone with a heart not to have it break for her even as we're gasping with laughter at her irreverently contrived escapades.

Wilson uses Liza's story to ingeniously illustrate the uniquely postmodern insanity of personalities sewn together like Frankenstein from Hollywood prototypes, all stemming from a neurotic black hole where one's sense of self ought to be. Our media-saturated culture has fed us on these prototypes with an unrealistic vision of what life and love should look like. Wilson's novel posits that the source of our Western existential crisis is the resulting void of self-awareness when we swallow the big screen's lessons uncritically. As such, Liza's life serves as a recapitulation of the entire modern search for meaning - fame, love, sex, drugs, psychotherapy, consumerism, and marketable fad religions like Wicca and born-again Christianity.

Colors Insulting to Nature is not for the faint of heart, but is unspeakably worth the ride. If I could give this book more than five stars, I would.

Colors Insulting to Nature is one of the funniest, most touching books ever to be created. Once, in the middle of reading this book, I picked it up, looked at the cover like I was staring into the eyes of my one true love, and ecstatically squealed, "I am SO GLAD I AM READING YOU!" And I'm not one to fall easily in love, especially not with a book. I cried when it ended, both because of the sensitive, true-to-life ending, and also because I fell so deeply and madly in love with the characters that to see their story end left me feeling like my best friend had just died. And Wilson's imaginary staging of the Sound Of Music, well, David Sedaris, eat your heart out (and I love that guy). This is the most hilarious piece of writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

If you read this book to completion and don't love it, then you can be assured that something has gone horribly wrong with your soul, or at the very least in your taste in literature. I am an avid reader, and if this is not a fantastic, hilarious, marvelous, life-giving and life-affirming novel, then such a thing must not exist in this world.

Read it or regret it!

This is one of those books that you get so into you laugh out loud because it is so funny and you don't care who hears you. They make think you're crazy for laughing while reading a book but you know different. This book was great.

I knew I had to read "Colors Insulting to Nature" after digesting Cintra Wilson's "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" (one of the top five best titles of all time, IMO). Now, no one is going to accuse Wilson of having written a "deep" book here, but hey, that's not her style, and this is a full-out satire and criticism of our fame-hungry society. Why do you think the main character's name is Liza Normal? Isn't it considered "normal" in America today to be absolutely fame-hungry? What got me, besides the laugh-out-loud moments, was the fact that Liza actually truly grew on me as a character. I got emotionally involved in her plight, and the spate of friends and enemies (including her outrageously selfish mom Peppy) she deals with grew on me too. Wilson is dead-on in her grasp of so many aspects of underground as well as mainstream culture, it's uncanny. What could make this a better book? It could be shorter. Wilson writes wonderfully but there were scenes I felt could have been excised. All in all a great and worthwhile read, if you're not in the mood for "War and Peace."

i enjoyed this book for the most part--cintra wilson can write amazingly funny descriptions of her characters and their situations--but the editorial lapses throughout the book drove me crazy and undermined the genius that could have been this book. and, they were stupid editorial oversights: spelling one character's name alternately as "faun bell" and "fawn bell;" describing chocho as having "muy thai" and "mui thai" boxing skills; and one unforgivable section in part VII: "The joke, presumably, was to ask the humorless, elderly 'Pansy' for a 'Hand Job.' Liza watched Pansy drone, 'Why, sir, never on a first date,' for what must have been the eighty-thousandth time..." (p. 317). sort of funny, right? the problem is, liza is in california at this time, not las vegas where the scene is taking place--peppy, earl and winnie are in the bar where pansy is enacting this painfully bad piece of situational comedy. liza doesn't get to the same bar in vegas until p. 324, which is where i can only assume this description was supposed to be put in. wilson notes how much she loves her editor in the end pages, but i can't help but think she seriously dropped the ball on continuity. the story is obscenely funny in parts, and i agree with the previous reviewer that the first half of the book is the strongest. i also agree that peppy's ending did not ring true to me at all--along with the cirrhosis she should have so rightly developed, i could see her ending more tragically than she does--which again was distracting from an otherwise strong book. i did like liza's ultimate fate, and especially ned's. the golden stag motif was interesting but too prevalent, particularly wilson's portrayal as herself as such, which i found to be a little obnoxious. the whole point of the golden stag is that it is ephemeral, not tangible, and one can never catch it, only pursue it. no offense to a very talented writer, and i wish i could write as well, but you're not the golden stag of literature...less hubris, please. that being said, the characters (particularly delvonn chaka khan d'shawn) were very well-established and wilson deftly plied them with the ironies of their own caricaturistic natures. i look forward to her next book, and hope that the bonds of love professed in the end pages do not blind her to the fact that she desperately needs a new editor.