Customer Reviews

Pleasant Hell

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The howls and shrieks of the negative reviews offer the most positive reasons for reading Dr. Dolan's novel, but they left out many of its other fine qualities. Above all, Pleasant Hell courageously and painfully honest. It's one of the first, true books I've read about my generation and about what it was like to grow up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also beautifully written, as if Nabokov and Céline's literary DNA got spliced. It's often quite funny. And, unlike nearly other literary project, it reveals an amazing lack of vanity, right down to the author's jacket photo. In fact, Dr. Dolan is my new hero, our very own suburban Solzhenitsyn. Buy it. Read it. Make your friends buy it, too. This is a book that can't have too many readers.

Be warned: Wound a nerd and you create a monster. Poet Dolan's glorious meditation on the inner life of the outcast manages to make misanthropy feel fresh. No compromises or happy lessons here -- just dreams of Tolkien elf girls lost to a world whose pain is recorded in the stigmata of moldy karate uniforms, runny foot scabs and dog bites. An unconscionable perspective on the value of human life. I loved it.

I inhaled Dolan's book in a single sitting, barring a few interruptions. While each individual page could theoretically be rationalized by the sympathetic humanist, the cumulative impact is amazing, nauseating. Dolan animates cowardly failure and youthful ignorance with no net at all. The freefall of tedium may remind one of personal history--if not, check your contempt and incomprehension at the door. Personally, the viscous bile of my life stuck in my throat, leaving me riveted, terrified and angry.

Just to qualify my admiration: I was not a nerd in high-school, but was a low-ranking, middle eschelon "super person". Yet, in spite of my easily acquired social graces, I still found it necessary to invent an over-evolved, compensatory sexual fantasy-life, in which I presided over a harem of trans-dimensional shape-shifters (these creatures I rather unoriginally dubbed "The Amorphi", and their preferred mode of entry into my teen-age bedroom was through a sudden, luminous gash in the fabric of space-time, appearing first as viscous, lavalamp-like blobs, and then gradually assuming Heidi Klum-esque proportions). My point being: everyone's a pathetic fantasist at heart. Dolan, however, clinging to every nerd's pet conceit--that only the downtrodden nerds deserve oppulent fantasy lives--believes that "cool" people are cool only by virtue of their not being burdened with absurd imaginations. I took this implied slight very personally.

Apart from that, Dolan writes like an angel. There are the plate-techtonic mould-growths covering his never-washed karate-robe (too vivid not to be true); there is the faint patter of falling bullets raining down from the hills (and haven't you always wanted to know, first-hand, what happens to that round fired wildly into the air? And who registers its return to earth?); there is the pseudo-gothic lettering on the love-note written to the most beautiful girl in school (a detail so heartbreaking, so sweet, that the even vapid love object found herself sort of blushing on Dolan's behalf); there is "A huge Buick...snared on the chain link fence, like a seven-gill shark in a tuna net"; and the immortal line, "Blood doesn't really sweep".

The man has chops, but he somehow manages to flaunt them without seeming overly precious. I imagine Dolan would hate this comparison (true to his nerdist creed, he can't stand sports), but it reads a lot like Fredrick Exley's "A Fan's Notes", only filtered through the hyper-educated misanthropic sensibility of, say, Emil Cioran. The back-cover blurb compares him to Houellebecq, but I think that's unkind. Michel Houllebecq is poor man's John Dolan.

For those of us living outside of the US, it's always difficult to understand how one lives in the middle of insidious and mediocre conformity even when you really want to belong. How does one survive? What kind of stories do you tell yourself to make sense of what is happening around you? Why is it that nobody sees what is happening? Dolan's genius is to describe a character who has to learn all of the rules of tribal belonging in 1970s California, rules which, to his bemusement, seem to be obvious to everybody else but certainly not to him. Of course he fails miserably but it's not for the lack of trying. And in that failure rests an essential insight about life of the outsider in America. Not to mention great comedy.
The accumulated effects of the narrator's dismayal attempts at making sense of his life is a sense of warmth towards the reader. But it's not cheap pathos. The narrator has earned it. It's like those moments when Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil addresses the reader directly in a genuinely caring and tender way, or when Céline seems to reluctantly understand and accept the fact that he speaks for other disenfranchised.
The setting of this novel may be 1970s California but it speaks of contemporary America. Dolan gives us a clue as to the unglamorous life of the outsider in times of religious madness and idiotic self-centredness.
 

Dolan certainly has genius and he may yet prove to be a great writer. If the author, a reclusive Californian intellectual who purportedly alternates between Auckland and Moscow, expired tomorrow, then Pleasant Hell at least would stand as a solitary testament to the deceit and parasitism which characterise our breed, much like Ducasse's Maldoror or Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night. Yet with brilliant originality, Dolan offers a strange vision of hope: beyond redemption, the psychological freedom which inheres in authentic expressions of nihilism emerges as the author's great theme. It is a theme to be savoured as our brainwashed cousins continue to sweat out their lives in the tumid megalopolises which will surely prove our extinction. This is an outstanding novel; if you're smart, and looking for a real writer, then by all means READ THIS BOOK.

A brutal scream whispered by a ghost whose experiment was lost upon the winds of time, and there is no second chance, and he has reconciled himself with death, and already feels the maggots on his spine... John Dolan distinguishes himself from the rhetors and word-spinners by writing a book about what it was actually like to be John Dolan. And I'm similar enough to John Dolan to make it a book about me... and about millions more losers like us, who had to spend years of ours lives walking around grinding our teeth at mysteriously, magically happy and successful people, wondering what the secret ingredient was, what was the chemical the fates failed to inject into us at birth, why it was so easy for some people to be happy and so easy for others to be miserable.

"Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to the endless night"

AMEN

Thanks, John. At least I'm just 22 and still have a chance to get out of my horrible misery - especially after seeing your warning, ripped out of the jaws of hell for 200 pages. Not that I'll make it - as you say, people don't change. But I need some illusions.

John Dolan is easily the best writer the 21st century has yet produced.
I don't give this praise lightly - or in ignorance. As a lifelong book-nerd I, like Dr. Dolan, have been brutalized into EXTREME cynicism and find it difficult to praise anything. I've also squandered much of a misspent youth scratching my head over "immortal classics" like . . . The Brothers Karamazov, and blaming myself for not enjoying the dusty bones of such vividly fake literati as Joyce and Hemmingway.
Thank God for Dr. Dolan!
In a ruthlessly clear voice, he has worked a miracle. To write a self-pitying memoir about a largely uneventful life in the (I know) horrible flatness of Pleasant Hill WITHOUT descending into sniveling or dishonesty.
No happy endings, folks. No fun. No catharsis or deep transformations.
This is the genius of Dolan's writing; to reflect life back at you with so little distortion that the shock of recognition - of hearing your own inner accuser amplified and sent back at you - paralizes the will to go on.
Have you ever had a crush on a girl? Did she like you back? Overwhelmingly, the honest answer is "no."
On T.V., in most books, in the lies we tell about ourselves, the truth gets a facelift. We remember ourselves being smarter and better-liked than we were.
Dolan has none of that. Every vignette in this book is horrible. The lesbians who keep him as a pet, the way he gets decked out in his Punk Uniform and drives through downtown Oakland with an attack dog in his car - and the only thing on the radio is Elton John, and the ceaseless self-blame for not being out having a Good Time like the papers tell you to.
God save John Dolan . . . if only because Oprah's fans will kill him someday.

Through self-inflicted martrydom, including wearing a "mouldy" gi to his karate club at Berkely, John Dolan struggles to be a part of, and apart from, "the cool guys who get all the hippie chicks." His obsession with the California Ophelias of the '60s, including Leigh Akers, and later Joanne Whitfield, is almost as masochistic as his need to don his crucifixion boots filled with blood, pus, and nails.

Clomp along with John and Max the German shepherd as they patrol as security guards for SIDOD (Silent Invisible Death on Duty). Or join him as he learns sexual techniques from Joanne, whose own sexual preference is tenuous at best. Will he manage to sabotage his every opportunity to transform from a Pleasant Hill nerd to one of the San Francisco "Super People"? Only an agonizingly hilarious and mercilessly familiar trip through Pleasant Hell can tell.

I started reading this novel not knowing what to expect. I expected it to be funny, sarcastic and amusing tour around mid-70s bay area youth culture. What I found instead was one of the best renderings of life as a nerd that I have ever read.

I think the thing that makes this a perfect nerd novel is that the author does not learn much about the world during his childhood from talking with people or experience. Instead he reads novels, encyclopedias worth of war history, random trivia, watches the occasional nature documentary and a lot of TV. He also reads feminist editorials in the local newspaper and tries to construct how he should interact with the world on this basis.

It doesn't work out at all and leaves him totally utterly confused with the world, especially with women and the working world. I really got into this book at the point where he was hanging out with one of the "Super People" and she showed him the endless variety and adventure of her childhood in a photo album and the author could only remember the mindless years of reading books, watching tv and thinking about slave girls.

Learning from books is fine but novels, sitcoms and history present a world that is perfect or politicized or warped to fit a certain story line that does not often have much to do with real life. This story is a first hand coming of age account of the absolutely jarring dissonance between reality as it is and as it is often written down. It also happens to be hilariously funny and interwoven with ridiculous amounts of random trivia almost leaking out of the authors brain which is generously sprinkled into almost every paragraph.