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Perforated Heart

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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.

>>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.

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 ...

Richard Morris is a writer who prides himself deeply in his own personal honesty. Like Hemingway he believes that his job as a writer is to write one true sentence after another. Like Norman Mailer he believes that he must guide himself toward madness, to glimpse into the abyss and then write about what he sees resident there. Unfortunately, Norman Mailer chose to become a social clown existentially acting-up to promote his books and both writers may have been better served to understand Hemingway's engagement more deeply. As a young man Morris devotes his life to becoming immersed into the hippie life of New York City. He catches glimpses of the Andy Warhol crowd of the 70's and chases endlessly after beautiful, young models. He suffers for his art and I give him great credit for this: but every respectable literary novelist pays his or her dues. Morris takes large quantities of alcohol and diverse street drugs in this quest for pure, artistic honesty. But how honest is the writing of someone on drugs and alcohol? We love Fitzgerald's novels despite his alcoholism for the pure, sober, lyric clarity of his work in spite of it. Morris name-drops a card catalogue of novelists: Joyce, Mailer, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Gaddis, Roth and TC Boyle. But Morris really doesn't add much value in his narrative about them beyond the names. As an older man in his 50's Morris comes to grip with his mortality after recovering from a heart attack much in the same way as Yambo recovers from a stroke in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco. Morris gains wealth and seeks more fame after his latest novel is initially received lukewarmly by critics and the public. Morris performs radically unethical acts, which he writes off cavalierly as honesty. The women of his life are beautiful, but shallow creatures, ultimately fixated like Morris on wealth, fame and epic self-interest. Essentially, Richard Morris is a narcissist and is the sun in his urban solar system. It's credible to view Morris as the personification of New York City. No narrative voice is so singularly vain as the first-person singular. As a result despite his vast social network and audience, he remains totally alone with far fewer days ahead than behind him and unloved with death physically attacking his heart. The writing here is engaging but could have been better served with closer editing as Bogosian seeks to shock us with the gritty reality of his recognitions and articulated truth. Richard Morris does not yet seem fully to recognize that cruel and brutal honesty often serves no useful purpose except to hurt and alienate other people. Vastly more important than his evangelism of cruel honesty is good faith and real love, which are more central to artistic integrity than the vanity of subjective honesty. Does the successful writer have a duty to a worthy protégé? Richard Morris has no duty to anyone, except himself. I understand that he wants the protégé to suffer for his art as the mature artist has done in his youth within the crucible of urban hardship. Richard Morris is essentially compelled to dwell in the hell of his own self-indulgence. He is incapable of any semblance of humanity, except in the treatment of his family, and betrays every soul whom he befriends. Isn't the real job of great writers to inspire humanity? Morris serves to make the world more harsh, bitter and cruel by having focused his artistic integrity upon the easily discerned ugliness of life in the name of brutal honesty. Let's be honest: why can't Morris discern the real beauty of life? Perhaps, his blindness to real, honest beauty is the greatest tragic flaw of Morris.

PERFORATED HEART may be the most bitter book you will ever read. It begins at a posh literary award ceremony where the narrator, the aging author Richard Morris (who long ago achieved fame with a successful film adaptation of a novel), proceeds to dissect and spit upon every literary sycophant and poseur in the room with a delightfully gravelly sense of self-satisfaction --- and disdain. Get used to this bitterness: the thoroughness of his disgust for others and himself is a driving force throughout the book.

When not recounting his litany of disappointments in himself, his money-grubbing editor, or the unappreciative public, he looks through old journals of his life as a twentysomething underground artist in 1970s New York City. You know the type: the young literati so enamored with the intensity of their lifestyles (drink, get high, write) that they're willing to sacrifice any amount of material comfort for their art --- provided they still get to look cool. The character and his travails are positively groan-worthy to Morris and a good snarky read for us. So eager to be the urban Kerouac of his day, young Morris shows all the passions and pains of endless desire bound by limited experience and capabilities.

Eric Bogosian is a trained actor, so it's not surprising that he has a seemingly effortless command of natural speech. Both the aging Morris and his youthful counterpart appear like real, vibrant characters against the backdrop of enveloping landscapes, be they the dimming world of a former gold lion or the land of endless opportunity. His side characters --- while obviously bit players compared to his main stars --- interact with the scenes and settings perfectly to draw the reader in to the emotional highs and lows of the protagonist.

That being said, PERFORATED HEART can get tiring, especially if you feel like you've encountered these characters before and didn't like them. Bogosian will do nothing to make them more likable, just more viscerally realistic. Older Morris can sound like a whiny snob who doesn't know what to do with himself, and it's pretty hard to feel sorry for the guy because, oh no, he isn't the Great American Novelist. As for young Morris, more than a few times I desperately wanted to tell him he doesn't need drugs to write well, and I tired of hearing about who he did drugs with and who he fantasizes about (and notably, not what he's writing about). These characters, while entirely convincing, are cliché to the point of caricature.

However, there is definitely merit beyond compelling description in this book. The insight into older Morris's ruminations and regrets goes beyond the psychological and manages some fairly heady stuff. In one short entry, Morris muses on the postmodern literary condition and wonders if in a world where "all ideas will be equal: comic books, classical theater, advertising, nineteenth-century novels, movies, gum wrappers, the Bible," there can be such a thing as great art. His grisly tone places some serious doubt on this artistic worldview, but more importantly, we as removed readers (who see Morris's faults where he so clearly doesn't) can identify how he entirely misses the point of what postmodernism is and what it can do for us. Intellectual princes are a romantic notion --- and, in Morris's case, tragic for his failure to achieve that status --- but as we see through their human faults, a notion we may be grateful to postmodernism for taking us away from.

In the end, we can appreciate Bogosian's rendering of this engrossing worldview, but it may be that we only get our fullest appreciation for it by condemning its principal advocate.

--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

In his latest novel, "Perforated Heart", Eric Bogosian rumbles, tumbles and thrashes his way through a topic he knows all too well: the male psyche and the male psyche on art (this is your male brain, this is your male ego, this is your male brain/ego attempting to become famous as a literary artist... be afraid, be very, very afraid).

If a gentle reader picks up "Perforated Heart" having no prior knowledge of Eric Bogosian's work as an actor and writer for stage, screen and television, nor having read his previous two excellently rendered offerings "Mall" and "Wasted Beauty", they would probably take it at face value that the author has created a gemini character - two separate ids that are actually one in the same person - from different times in our recent history that have a passionate and obsessive connection to the city of New York. Thus the story of Richard Morris (past and somewhat present) is as much about New York as it is an examination of a self-absorbed, self-serving, nihilistic and desirous of all things sensuous and vainglorious writer reliving, through journal entries, his former self while grappling with the self he loves to loathe and loathes to love.

But being familiar with Eric Bogosian the performing artist (which is NOT the same as "performance art"), the media persona, the theatrical craftsman and monologists makes the reading of "Perforated Heart" all the more rich of an experience. Therefore, I'd encourage you to check out Bogosian's plays, one-man shows, movies and novels (not much about his work as an actor on television will add to the enjoyment of "Perforated Heart" - in fact, there is somewhat of a disconnect between the journeyman actor Eric Bogosian serving the storylines of a network procedural cop drama, and the downtown artist who hung out with modern dancers, graphic and performance artists, and the Avant-garde/downtown underground set that - during the Punk Rock heydays of the late-1970s - partied the nights away in joints like CB-GBs and the Kitchen. Because of this, the argument could be made - from an armchair psychologist - that Bogosian's present state as a suburbanite husband and father - as well as becoming a mainstream actor on a network franchise, coupled with his recent decision to retire his work as solo-performer -propelled him to write "Perforated Heart" to reconnect with (and admonish) that edgy, hard drinking and drugging young man with whom he no longer relates, while juxtaposing the confessional prose of his fifty-something alter-ego Richard Morris who is not encumbered by wife and kids and other mundane everyday rituals.)

The powerful force that propels "Perforated Heart" is that every journal entry, even the most mundane, has within it an honesty and awareness that the author is indeed in on the joke. The book itself is fascinating because it's a fictional autobiography, almost as if it is the ghost of a ghost. Thus there's something rather haunting and penetrating about it that I found lingered with me days after completion.

As mentioned in a previous reader comment, elements of a character from one of Bogosian's solo works called "The Fan" appears in the final pages and becomes the target for the protagonist Richard Morris' venom and resentment. Richard meets a young man named Theo at the mental health facility where he goes to visit an old friend of his named Big John (30 years prior, John and Richard had a falling out because John caught Richard audio taping their conversations without his knowledge or consent. Richard used these tapes as a basis for his short stories which launched his career as a writer). Richard takes a shine to Theo and they begin somewhat of a friendship - but the terms of the friendship are dictated solely by Richard (as is usually the case when a younger person seeks mentorship from an older more established mentor). In short, Morris is definitely not Rilke and this is no "Letters to a Young Poet" for sure! The following are excerpts from the book:

"And so this kid Theo walks into my life. Lovely, vibrant, eager, ambitious, handsome, obnoxious, self-involved Theo. He made a decision to visit the lion in his den. Thought the lion would help him out. No, Theo. Lions don't give aid, they watch the young and helpless pups with apparent disinterest. Then they eat them.

What did Theo think I was going to do? Make introductions to editors and publishers and all my buddies? But, Theo, it's your fight. You break down the doors on your own, just as I did. No one did it for me. I'm not doing it for you.

I see it in your eyes. The rapacious hunger for what belongs to me, for my achievement. But, Theo, you can't just walk up to me and take it. It's mine."

Those passages illuminate Richard Morris' perforated heart and clarify - on a slightly metaphysical examination - the reason why it required surgery. There's absolutely no room for sentimentality in Richard Morris' world. He could be nostalgic, at times empathetic (specifically when dealing with the death of an elderly aunt whose letters and writings had been left in his possession for safekeeping) and prone to reminisce about the past - but never sentimental. Therefore, Richard is totally incapable of offering any kind of mentorship or Rilke like support for young Theo on his journey towards the literary limelight. Morris has not this kind of love in his heart.

Why? I put the book down and continued to ask myself questions for days after. Why so coldhearted toward Theo who had so much admiration for Richard and wanted so much to be accepted and appreciated by him? How could Richard be such a powerful writer when he was such an unremitting bastard? These are universal questions of course. Like: why do bad things happen to good people? (Or as comedian Lewis Black once said in his stand-up routine: "the good die young, but pricks live forever!")

What I, as the reader, appreciate most about Eric Bogosian as a novelist is that he dares to present the ugliness of human nature without apology. There's a beauty in his honesty as well as a frustration with how much the world can suck. It's also frustrating that a prick like Richard Morris gains success and notoriety on the world stage, while others with congenial hearts and more caring dispositions toil endless in obscurity and their work is never discovered nor their talents ever appreciated. I know that I didn't like Richard Morris, but I'm "a fan" of Eric Bogosian. Is Bogosian like Richard Morris in his personal life? Doubtful. This is, after all, a work of fiction probably sprung from the experience of Bogosian finding journals he kept when he was first starting out in his 20s back in those Punk heydays of the late-70s.

Being able to remove himself from the experience by creating two fictional characters from two separate times in one man's life allowed him the opportunity to do what he does best: explore the darker side of fame, fortune, male insecurities and abusive behavior and the obsessive nature of trying to achieve recognition as an artist in a world of vacuous commercialism and material excess.

Bogosian's most confessional offering is probably his most fully realized and one that, after the last page is read, may haunt your psyche like a ghost for days to follow.

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