False Positive [Paperback]

Harold Jaffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 11, 2002

Each of the fifteen fictions in False Positive originated as a nationally known newspaper story, which Harold Jaffe has "treated" to bring to its prosaic surface a maniacal subtext. The original stories cover the familiar American postmodern grotesquerie: high school mass murders; sexual molestations; rock star suicides; internet police; serial killers on the loose. Jaffe enters each published version, and through rearrangement, nuanced rewriting, and strategic interpellations, exposes the host text's latent madness. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic creation is released into our culture to do its unsettling work. Jaffe's fictive "treatment" of these everyday nightmares is ambitious and startling. He embeds his found story in his own heightened versions, leaving the traces of the original text alongside his own, or insinuates the ghostly presence of journalese within his own deadpan lines. As The San Diego Union has said of Jaffe's earlier fiction, False Positive is more "exquisite chaos from the master word processor of our generation."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Ripped from the headlines" may be a promotional catchphrase in the world of prime-time television, but exploring the nooks and crannies of news and media remains a literary way of life for Jaffe (Beasts), the so-called "guerrilla writer" who provokes, titillates and amuses in this collection of 15 vignettes that he adapts from real-life news stories. The most startling by far is "Zealous Hysterectomies," an eerie foreshadowing of September 11, which describes the rise and spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden during the civil war in Afghanistan and also incorporates some brief, cheeky musings on the potential sexual benefits of hysterectomies. Jaffe's normal modus operandi is an entertaining mixture of the ironic and the macabre, a vein he mines most effectively in "Severed Hand," the story of a man who cuts his hand off with a power saw, then sues his doctors for not being able to reattach it. Most of the pieces follow a similar track "Pizza Parlor" describes the attack of an ex-wife and her mother-in-law on the child molester she married, while "Faux" deals with the ramifications of duplicity as Jaffe explores what happens when cops use phony IDs to catch sex criminals on the Internet and HMOs use fake patients to test the services of hospitals they help manage. In this ingenious collection, Jaffe gets plenty of mileage from life's extensive menu of disturbed, deranged behaviors and the way the media covers the perpetrators.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Mass murder!...Germ warfare!...Islamic extremism!...You've read it all before, now read it again here...I enjoyed Jaffe's False Positive hugely."

—Brian McHale, Author of Constructing Postmodernism

"These uncannily skewed para-documentary fictions burrow into a reader's consciousness like viral worms of great subtlety and cunning to explode the dangerous illusion of safety. Jaffe's is a necessary and bold strategy that marks out new territory for fiction itself."

—Patricia Eakins

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Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2; 1 edition (February 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573660981
• ISBN-13: 978-1573660983
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,375,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jaffe's Magic, August 12, 2002

By 

Lawrence R. Fondation (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: False Positive (Paperback)

Many people read the newspaper. Harold Jaffe dissects it, deconstructs it, retools it, and transforms it. Jaffe is the author of numerous groundbreaking works of fiction, including BEASTS, STRAIGHT RAZOR, and SEX FOR THE MILLENNIUM. In all his work, Jaffe makes us think and re-think about we see, what we hear, what we know. Among its diverse attributes, Jaffe's work constitutes a brilliant form of postmodern epistemology. His latest volume, FALSE POSITIVE, his tenth book of fiction, takes Jaffe's reconstruction of reality to new heights.

The starting point for each of the 15 fictions in FALSE POSITIVE is a salacious news story -- an execution, Columbine, a mass murder, assisted suicide. Jaffe then "treats" each story, bringing out inherent assumptions and implied meanings.

In "Geeks Dream," young people muse on both the torment and the killings at Columbine High School. Wally Cox of Boston passes on an offer of a 9mm semi-automatic because he "couldn't cough up the sixty-five bucks," while Adam R. from Moscow, Idaho, is remanded to seven mental health sessions at Kaiser for saying out loud in class that he "could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers." Jaffe adds: "Seven was the maximum allowable number of sessions underwritten by Kaiser Permanente...the school district HMO." It is just this kind of touch -- the deadpan addition of a fact about limited health care -- that makes Jaffe's treatments so brilliant, and thought-provoking.

Many of the pieces are chilling -- both in the physical details Jaffe adds and in the social implications of those details. "Karla Faye," Jaffe's account of the execution in Texas of Karla Faye Tucker, includes a list of inmates put to death by the State of Texas on February 8, 1924, the first time the state used electrocution to kill prisoners. All six on the list were Black. The piece goes on to describe the malfunction of the electric chair during the execution of Velma Jean Barfield in 1984. It took 19-and-a-half minutes to kill her. The tale does more to make you think than a dozen Amnesty International reports.

Jaffe's stories can also be funny. The closing piece in the collection, "Dr. Death," recounts a talk show interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian of assisted suicide fame. The show's co-host is Charo, who sang and danced with Xavier Cugat, the "original coochie-coochie girl."

Other pieces are moving. "Salaam" is a Rashomon-like telling of several outcomes of an encounter between a Palestinian would-be terrorist and an Israeli shopkeeper. When their debates (suicide bomber vs. freedom fighter, etc.) end in stalemate, one version ends the debate in final fashion -- with detonation. Jaffe then adds an alternative. ...

FALSE POSITIVE is, in short, a tour de force that gives a vigorous, mind-rattling, extreme sport workout to our frenetic, violent, lascivious culture. A truly great book for our time and beyond.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So-So, Average Attempts at...whatever this is., May 28, 2004

By 

Valerie Grey (NY NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: False Positive (Paperback)

This isn't fiction, this isn't even art. It seems Jaffe is trying to tell us something about the permeable nature of the news and how easily it can be altered. After two or three "stories," I had to ask myself: so what? The point has been made. Maybe this should have been a chapbook. I got bored very fast, so I changed the channel.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Deliciously Skewed take on American Culture, October 13, 2003

By 

Kathryn DeWoskin (Arlington Hts, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: False Positive (Paperback)

Jaffe's subtle hand works magic with fifteen real news stories, and creates from them an absurd, yet incredibly believable world which is a very close parallel to today's Jerry Springer society. The opening story, "Geeks Dream" displays the undercurrent of insecurity and vengeful feeling of the so-called "geeks," those that were punished for expressing their understanding of the Columbine shootings even though their original tormentors were not. This story is subtle compared to the rest, with the author making a few overt stylistic touches. The rest of Jaffe's alterations are invisible.

Throughout the collection, Jaffe's stories are woven together with small details and the repetition of names, images, and phrases. These include Jesus figures, unnecessary surgery, child abuse, and Larry King. Throughout the collection, Jaffe is careful to maintain a journalistic voice, and only deviates from that when appropriate, such as during the pseudo-interview segments of the book. One of the most strangely haunting stories, "Carthage, Miss." is strikingly haunting. It is a contrast of two stories about the same event, with slight details altered between the two, making them appear almost as completely separate texts. While reading, one begins to wonder if one story is the source material and the other is Jaffe's "prosthetic text," or if these are both derived from the same text.

If these stories were to stand on their own, they would not work nearly as well as they do collectively. Even though Jaffe did publish some of them in several anthologies, the stories by themselves lack the interplay of the repeated images, and lose the impact of the inherent insanity of modern American culture. It is very interesting to note that Jaffe does not include any references to his source material anywhere in this book. That forces the reader to take the stories included at face value instead of comparing them to their original. That allows these stories to be almost taken as actual articles, and force the reader to reconsider the events around him.