Customer Reviews

False Positive

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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.

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.

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.

Harold Jaffe's new book False Positive I found to be both great and unsettling. Each narrative takes an article of our collective official culture, a news story, and creatively blends it with embellishments, refigured parallels, and other innovative techniques into new kinds of fictional structures that at once hide the author's hand and reveal the non-objective quality of the news.
Jaffe's stories have the power to startle, enlighten and remind us. The pieces, containing elements of truth, make a detective out of a reader. Trying to figure out the method of each new form and looking for the "real story" within each piece sharpens the reader's focus.
With captive audience, Jaffe traverses a horrific landscape that most people spend a lot of time and money trying to ignore. In doing so, he renders the insanity of some of our national policies and tendencies.
The privatization of prisons, the lack of national health care, the crazed profit-lusty practices of rabid corporations, the wide spread transmission and acceptance of "expert" testimonial, the intense obsession with sexuality (especially deviant) and the attempt to simultaneously consume it and repress it, and the abandonment of our kids to inept schools unable to control the cruel, darwinistic cliquishness of the teen age level of development are just some of the themes and issues that Jaffe takes up in his latest, great book.

Darkly comic-and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious-the fifteen texts in Jaffe's False Positive are also deceptively potent infections, injected into the bloodstream of institutionalized media. Each fiction in the volume works like a rogue phagocyte, undermining the tissues beneath the telegenic skin of the infotainment corpus, delving deep into the genetic structure of the poisonous cells. Jaffe's virus reconfigures the genome of official mediaspeak, rendering the dark ideologies visible. The patient wakes with boils on the flesh.

In the tradition of the Dada surgeon, the Fluxus healer, the guerilla artist, Jaffe uses the found object of the information age, data-the nightmarish constant flow of data that daily passes beneath our deadpan gaze--and turns it by varying degrees. So that it may be seen. Seen perhaps for the first time.

Jaffe's fictions evoke emotions from every part of the spectrum-laughter, anger, sorrow, disgust. False Positive is a strong remedy for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Hard Copy. It is not innocuous medicine, but is recommended for those who wish to remain awake, alert, and engaged.

Harold Jaffe offers the curious spectator a circus mirror reflection of contemporary American society. Under inspection are the random act of violence people inflict on people everyday.

Lifted from the newspaper, Jaffe performs wonderful dissections of the truth. In the story "Glendale & Palmdale," Jaffe offers two views of the same story, altering it only enough to let the reader wonder at what angle the truth lies. In "Chesus & The Dead Amputee," selling Jesus and pursuing happiness in amuptation combine to push the limits of our acceptance.

This collection is Jaffe's way of making us look at ourselves and examine our culture. He is demonstrating that the level of degradation has risen into the ink of newsprint. And he is right. School shootings, assisted suicide, possesed body parts, racial, sexual, religious stereotypes; reading this book is like bingeing on the sweet corrupted bits of our society and discovering, horrified, that you have become a cannibal. Being a fast read, it may prove deceptive how much examination this book requires; of society and yourself.

If you like you fiction dumbed down, ho-hum, or feel yourself easily confused, Jaffe's fiction is not for you. But if you enjoy witty dialoge and intelligent writing with a purpose, be sure to read "False Positive."

Jaffe's post-modern docu-fictions rips the mask off of media dis/misinformation and addresses it with a witty style and radical esthetic. In "Zealous Hysterectomies" Jaffe combines a "news" story of radical Islamic insurgents with a "follow-up report" on unnecessary hysterectomies. Jaffe is writing between the lines here, teasing out what is embedded in sensational terms like "distrubing new phenomenon" and "preventative procedure par excellence." Radical Islamic insurgents are allinged with radical hysterectomy procedures. Jaffe's "treatment" of these offerings exposes the absurdity of what we the reader have been told what we are to believe.

In Jaffe's hype-reality show news media and popular culture are scrutinized under a high -powered microscope and strategically rearranged in an artful fashion to expose their grotesque subtexts. These "found" stories seem short but you will be thinking of them as Jaffe's fiction tends to stick with the reader long after the mine has been planted

"False Positive" is a skillfully crafted piece of work, which forces the reader to examine United States' culture and our obsession with horrifying news. In each section Jaffe has taken a piece of real news and doctored it up (what he calls `treating') to create several satirical pieces on the sadistic and gruesome happenings that our culture loves to read about. The stories he writes are terrifying-and terrifyingly relevant for today's reader. Starting with "Geek Sympathy," Jaffe writes about the Columbine massacre and high-school losers across the continent who feel sympathy with the trench coat mafia. Ending on a mock interview with Dr. Kavorkian titled "Dr. Death." The back of the book says that Jaffe's work "exposes the host text's latent madness," which, in doing so, brings the reader to understand the latent madness in the society in which they live.
"Cartage, Miss.," in my opinion, is the piece in which Jaffe best shows off his unique approach to prose. It is the account of a boy, who, finding his mother dead, lives with the corpse until he is found by his aunt and uncle. This section consists of a short paragraph, followed by the same paragraph in italics with different details. By such an approach, Jaffe has asked the reader to pay close attention to the italicized differences in order to cipher out their reflexions on both texts.
Pizza Parlor, another section, was a particularly gripping account of the assault of a convicted child molester by his wife, her mother, and her aunt. Written in a mock newspaper style Pizza Parlor, using the same gripping techniques that newspapers use, crosses over to the outrageous, leaving the reader with mixed residual feelings of a pulp novel and a typical piece of `good' bad news. Toward the end of the section Jaffe briefly notes that the convicted child molester never admitted to the crime. This denial ominously stands out to the reader.
As well as doctoring up articles on tragic events, Jaffe is able to tackle some less grotesque subject matter while still poking fun of the same sort of societal problems. In "Chesus," he writes about the image of Che Guevara being used as the new image of Jesus Christ. Comparing both men as revolutionaries, Jaffe seems to poke fun at what people of this era will come to know as "Che-Wear." Though the phenomenon of Che Guevara's image popping up on hipster's tee shirts across America, I was not sold with Jaffe's sarcastic approach to anything relating to Christianity. Aside from "Chesus", throughout his collection, Jaffe refers to the Pope several times, each time noting that he is polish. With this attitude Jaffe is introducing a much deeper side to his point and I'm not convinced that he explored it as much as he should.

Harold Jaffe's False Positive, through altered news articles, examines contemporary American society and the media through which we view it.
The subject matter included in this collection is mainly concerned with violent crime and the legal system, with a tendency toward the absurd. Punishment is considered - in "Karla Faye," Jaffe provokes thought on capital punishment, and in several stories, he mentions that the criminals he writes about are destined to be raped in prison. While keeping the narrative seemingly subjective, Jaffe brings our attention to the strangeness of both the actions for which people are punished, and the punishments themselves.
Jaffe's alterations are sometimes difficult to pinpoint, highlighting the arbitrary facts we receive about stories in the paper. "Severed Hand" is a question-and-answer dialogue about a man, Huntz Hall, who amputated his own left hand, believing it possessed by the devil, and then sued the hospital where he was treated because, according to his request, doctors there did not reattach it. The questions range from typical ("Tell me about his family.") to the unexpected ("Wasn't there a Huntz Hall movie actor? One of the Dead End Kids?") The reader's uncertainty as to what Jaffe has added from the original transcript forces an analysis of what questions are really important, and the realization that what we're reading in the newspaper doesn't always ask the right questions.
The added questions can be funny, too. In my favorite piece, "Pizza Parlor," a (possibly unjustly) convicted child molester is attacked and tortured by three female in-laws. The questions in this story seem to be the ones anyone might ask after reading the original story in the paper, but that would be out of place in a published article.
False Positive is entertaining and provocative. Jaffe has a knack for choosing what to include, that ultimately comments on the choices made by the news media.

Earlier reviews on this site focused heavily on the themes Jaffe explores in this collection, but I have to say I found my enjoyment of the fifteen stories differed depending on which technique the author used to construct them, rather than their subject matter. I was drawn more to the seven pieces in which either there were multiple narration points of view, or when the newspaper format is abandoned. "Salaam" is an example of one of a few fictions Jaffe has where two points of view are given for the same story. "Salaam" has a Jewish shopkeeper and a would-be Palestinian suicide bomber attack trade off lines from their diametrically opposed points of view. "Body Bag" takes the structure of a conversation without a setting or any descriptions, and "Severed Hand" and "Dr. Death" tell their stories through talk show transcripts. "Pizza Parlor" has a paragraph first describe a news story, and then has fourteen numbered questions asked and answered in what seems like an interview between a reporter and a source.

Eight of the fifteen fictions followed more closely to the newspaper format from which they originated than those described above. I preferred the other seven, the pieces which deviated from the more "normal" format. I felt using different media structures said a lot about how we get information in our society-especially when news becomes entertainment, and when already ghastly and macabre stories have to be sensationalized to maximize interest. And the multiple points of view pieces were just plain more interesting than many of those with only one, showing the subtle changes different labels and different backgrounds can make in narrating the same event.

That's not to say that the newspaper format/single point of view pieces are bad, just not as engaging. Four of the newspaper format pieces followed only one news topic, such as the relevance of the Columbine killers in "Geeks Dream", and a condemned killer waiting on death row in Texas-distinct because she's a woman and is white-in "Karla Faye". In a subspecies of the newspaper format, Jaffe paired separate stories in order to show their connections. "Slurry" exemplifies this type-there are pieces on a mentally challenged man who literally scratched himself to death, a man who inexplicably threw rocks at authorities until he was shot, and an odd coda on the practicalities of deploying anthrax from an airplane.

This is an interesting collection of modern "nightmares", as the back cover puts it, a retelling of actual news stories with added commentary and details. Jaffe does a great job in fleshing out their relevance to our society-and often how sick it is that we find them so relevant in the first place. And the pieces do have a lot of deadpan, black humor hiding among the grizzly details of dismembering, rape and murder-it is by no means a boring group of morality lessons. However, I think it could have been better if all of the stories went with the more radical retelling techniques of the seven pieces mentioned above, and abandoned the newspaper format.