7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Young Artists, Beware, May 12, 2009
In his latest novel, Eric Bogosian offers a cautionary tale about life, death, love, and art (though not in that order). Perforated Heart is the story of two Richard Morrises: one, a successful fiction writer in 2006 who, after heart surgery, goes to recuperate at his country home in Connecticut, where he rediscovers his journals from 30 years earlier; and the second is the young Richard, circa 1976, just beginning as a writer and resident of New York City.
Bogosian is back in his element with this first person narrative (his last two novels were in the third person) which is more the style of his monologues. Structured as a journal (like his
Notes from Underground), Perforated Heart lets the character tell the story, and Bogosian succeeds at creating two distinct voices for young Richard and old Richard. Young Richard is brash but passionate; old Richard is refined but cynical. Old Richard bears a striking resemblance to David Blau, from Bogosian's
Red Angel, while young Richard is more reminiscent of Barry Champlain from
Talk Radio.
The elder Richard is a bit of a recluse, but in his earlier life he was surrounded by a colorful cast of characters. The apartment he shared with a man named Haim and a woman named Dagmara could have come from the pages of Sartre's
No Exit: Haim loves Dagmara, Dagmara is in love with Richard, and Richard is in love with himself. Richard's acquaintances are rendered somewhat 2-dimensionally in his journals, serving mainly as his companions on a series of crazy party and nightlife adventures. The most memorable of these characters is Big John, the mysterious, stuttering, little-known-history spouting drug dealer (I kept waiting for John to say, "And these are my dogs, Harley and Davidson.")
Richard seeks out new experiences and altered states of consciousness, seemingly as field research for his writing. What is he researching? Life--human existence. His transition from wild child to successful writer provides the main crux of the story (although I imagine the path to sobriety is more difficult than Richard, or Bogosian, lets on).
But is all of his sexual and chemically induced "experience" supposed to convince us that Richard is a great writer? Here Bogosian stumbles somewhat with the story-within-the-story trap. There is occasional talk of Richard's new novel, "A Gentle Death," but we're just supposed to take it on faith that the book is really good. While it was easy for me to buy the fact that Reba in
Wasted Beauty was model gorgeous after Bogosian described her appearance, I didn't like simply being told that Richard's book is good. Don't tell me his book is good; show me, and I'll be the judge. Granted, Richard's journals are coherent, which would suggest that he's a competent writer, but with respect to "A Gentle Death"--there's no "there" there.
Despite his achievements and professional success, Richard's personal life is a disaster, but he has only himself to blame. He revisits some of his old friends and discovers a 3rd dimension to them, but it only seems to stoke the fires of his self-loathing (or his loathing of his younger self, anyway). The climax is somewhat anticlimactic, but perhaps that's the point? That in our youth obsessed culture we tend to shoot our proverbial wad earlier than we'd like.
The Fan, a character from Bogosian's
Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, shows up toward the end of the book, which gives old Richard a chance to say what he might have said to his younger self. Tragically, however, Richard always wants what he can't have and rejects those who love (or might love) him.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, but..., May 3, 2010
>>First off, in response to other reviewers, none of the women Richard dates are models, young or otherwise. 2nd, I don't think we can know if the women in his life are as shallow in their values as he, because he seems not to know the women he lives with, f**ks, professes to love. He knows Elizabeth somewhat, Sara not at all, Katie not much.
(Spoiler alert--though I'm veiling somewhat--this paragraph:) Oh, and I would tend to guess that if D was convinced it wasn't consensual, it probably wasn't. Even Richard didn't seem to dispute that in a drunken black-out he'd be capable of that (in his conscious thoughts he later contemplates it) he just doesn't care that he did what he did to D. Doesn't care. <<
So. I love Bogosian. (Meeting him personally very briefly at a book reading cemented the sense of him as modest, authentic, available.) There are passages in this book, most connected with drugs actually, that are wonderful, even brilliant. They thrilled me as writing. And the passage when he first meets the woman that strikes his young self as female perfection. The metaphysical (for lack of a better word) epiphany he experiences is wonderful. A beautiful, brilliant passage to read and savor.
And puzzling, because that open-heartedness is exactly what women look for in a man (I'm generalizing, of course; it's what I and anyone I would associate with value in a man), and open-heartedness is exactly what the 56 / 57 year old Richard preaches is wholly foreign to men, who he says live only for p**sy, and is what the 57 year old Richard proves himself incapable of.
My husband identified with the maleness of the Richard character in a sort of "there but for the grace of good relationships with the women and children in my life go I" way. He assumed Morris to be close to the real Bogosian. But noting that Bogosian is a man married since the age of 27 with two children, clearly that's not so. Is his artistic strategy, here and in "Talk Radio", to inhabit the a**h*le he might have been had he allowed fame to lure him into betraying his wife in the early days? He seemed to say something of that sort to Charlie Rose while discussing the evolution of the Barry character from "Talk Radio".
So we have works by an I'm-gonna-guess good man about bad men. Okay, fair enough.
Richard is so putrid that the trip to Eastern Europe and learning what he himself is responsible for impresses him not at all. (Nor does he note that D could have sold her story to a tabloid and never did.) He is so loathsome that he is desperate to push Theo, who might be "the new Richard Morris" off the low rung of the ladder, while basking in his own renewed success. A success that seems doomed to subside, by the way, as Sara will never be content with Richard. Not because he is older--I am married, 16 yrs, to a similarly older spouse--but because he doesn't give a s**t about her, has no clue who she is (and gives us no clue).
So, what am I complaining about? I want to read great books. (I'm a writer; it's a professional obligation. And beautiful writing is one of the most lovely things in the world, on too many levels to enumerate.) But I don't want to be kicked off the ladder myself, nudged into depressive states. If I want to contemplate despair, I can just talk to my mentally ill mother--she calls all day--or check in with my own chronic ailments. That teaches me all I need to know about impotence, hopelessness. (And frankly my own coming of age was decidedly harder than young Ritchie's, so I'm not impressed by the dues he paid.)
Morris says that to be a great artist, you have to hate the world. Yet the world has been good to him (an easy job, unemployment benefits gained fraudulently from his accommodating, hip employer, a stable middle class family he could always go home to, he's had the good fortune of good health all the way 'til age 56).
Why is the canon over represented with nihilism, cynicism, and despair, while all the studies on the subject say that human beings are more happy than unhappy, with a sort of inbred capacity to keep plugging, and even keep smiling, under all but the worst personal or collective circumstances? Is it because, as Ian McEwan said the other day (again to Charlie Rose) "Everyone says that happiness writes white," that is bland. (He was making the point that when Tolstoy described happiness in A. K. it was not white but delicious, lush. Tolstoy knew how to make human happiness interesting.)
Isn't literature supposed to reflect the human condition? All of the human condition, not just the parts that most easily lend themselves to drama?
(An example of a wonderfully human and humane book that is also thoughtful and well written--and charming--is "Marrying Mozart", by Stephanie Cowell, which chronicles the lives of the Weber sisters, with whom Mozart was intimately connected throughout his adult life. One has to search for books like this, that include redemption in their portrait of the human condition and offer a more affirming portrait of reality, yet are also substantial works of art, not poorly written and disposable.)
A story like this ("Marrying Mozart") gives emotional sustenance, making the human condition easier to bear. The last 30 pages of "Perforated Heart," in which Richard, having proven himself incapable of redemption, frantically nurses his borderline depressed state, and his rancid final gesture (reminiscent of the ending of The Dying Animal, but merely surprisingly rancid instead of metaphysically shocking) made my own human condition harder to bear.
I don't hold this against Bogosian. As Leonard Cohen recently said to Terry Gross, he sometimes thinks he'd like to give the world some happier songs, but all he can do is follow the tiny flame at the tip of his pencil. (Richard at 57 would make a wry penis joke here.)
Perhaps this is a gender thing. (??) Early female fiction writers seemed to be fueled by feminist rage and the need to expose the depravity women are often subjected to. But perhaps as women become empowered, since they are often tasked to tend to the wounds of their fellows in the real world (and more often wounded themselves...?), they are more interested than men in conjuring the capacity of we humans to wound each other less, and the fortitude that enables us all to keep going in the world as it is.
"Perforated Heart" is full of brilliant writing. (The wonderful irony of the entry in which the young Richard says this day will turn out to be the best day of my life, a day he spends loved by Katie.) I'm glad Eric Bogosian wrote it. I don't understand why complex artists who are able to be ambitious and successful without becoming inhuman tend to write about lesser beings who lose their souls in the process.
But that's the way much of the canon is (it shows us the ugliest sides of existence), and this book deserves its place on any bookshelf. It is a beautiful piece of work, despite my discomfort with the landscape it surveys, and my discouragement that this seems to be the landscape so many of the great writers choose and chose to survey.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Obsession works, June 1, 2009
PERFORATED HEART (2009) by Eric Bogosian is a fascinating study in obsession for pussy, money, and fame. In this instance that obsession revolves around the life of a middle-aged, successful, American Jew writer in New York who reflects back on his path via his journal from the mid 70's, as he struggles in the present (2006-7) to reclaim his place atop the literary field. This is an intensely honest story and I could identify with it completely. I agree with most all of the positions the main character, Richard Morris, takes on the human condition and what it takes to succeed. I can relate to his methodology, and the relationship problems that ensue from it. He is single-minded, selfish, and driven completely by his obsessions. He attempts to defend them as unchangeable facets of his genetic make-up, or "fate," as he calls it. He posits that he is an artist and must be faithful only to his craft/art - a seeker, recorder, actor, and teller of truth -- and damn the consequences. Is his self-image accurate? Others disagree--friends and lovers. (eg. pgs. 204-212. Was it consensual sex or rape?) There is scene after scene that Bogosian writes about that I found myself saying, "damn - perfect! I've been there." Be those scenes back in the 70's or present day. "Big John?" I know him, and in fact just tried to find him. "Zim?" Know him, too, and in fact had just that same confrontation (pg. 214-217) last month. "Elizabeth?" Yep. And so on through all the characters and their interactions. Eerie. Probably, that's because (apparently) the author and I are the same age. But, we are not the same person. We have our different "fates,' locales, and traits; i.e. personalities and interactions. The character, Richard Morris, has a fixation on beauty, female beauty; and was born on March 6, 1950, "The Day Of The Beauty Lovers" (according to "The Secret language of Birthdays.") Eerie. I am going to purchase this book for my library, and maybe a few more for some "friends." Is this book autobiographical? I don't know, don't know the author. But, I know it's good, very good, and honest and true. I can't, however, give it five stars because of the ending. Endings in novels are so hard ...
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