Customer Reviews

Seconds of Pleasure: Stories

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Fans of Neil LaBute's mean-spirited films such as "The Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors" will not be disappointed with his collection of short fiction, "Seconds of Pleasure." There is plenty here to shock and stir-up controversy. Take the story "Ravishing," for instance, about a man's encounter with a prostitute that ends with the making of a snuff film. Or "Maraschino," where a young woman knowingly picks up her drunk ex-stepfather and seduces him. For the most part these twenty short stories are terrifically written and provide insights into the male ego: its vanity, secrets, and desires. Many are constructed as scenes and could easily have been done for a beginning playwrighting class, setting up characters and conflict: an adulterous couple breaking up at a train station in the collection's title story, a married man flirting with a single woman at an airport restaurant in "Layover," a married couple arguing at a diner over eavesdropping in "Some Do It Naturally," a wife catching her husband in a compromising position with a neighbor in "Time Share." Luckily Labute's writing skill elevates his set-ups -- he has a Hemingway-ear both for quick, sharp dialogue and capturing the sly elusiveness behind deception. The most interesting stories, however, are the unpredictable ones when Labute stretches himself into unexpected territory, such as "Switzerland," a lovely tale of a man's obsession with a Johnny Quest lunch pail, or "Opportunity," where a woman remembers her younger sister.

neil labute's collection of short stories plumb the extremes. at times, sparklingly insightful and at other times mind-numbingly cliched. the author delights in devious and dark tales populated by characters that one can hardly empathise with. the writing is always sharp and edgy but not always entertaining or enlightening.

a lot of the stories have a trademark dark twist, but soon one tires of them. the 20 stories collected here are, sadly, a bit too single tracked. one wishes that labute had provided enough variety in characters and situations. and while one desperately wishes to come across characters that are adorable, nobody can complain that they are dull.

in all, one fels that the editor lets her author down here, probably not adding enough variety to the collection. neil labute shows glimpses of his ability to stun and shock the reader, but the trick tires quickly. part magical madness, part mundane mayhem. a half-way performance.

Some of these stories floored me. The dialogue is realistic, the sparse language is somehow powerfully evocative, the plots are refreshingly acidic (like savory sour candy), the character insights are penetrating. The best of these stories are twisted, dark, full of bitter pathos--and unbelievably powerful.

But some of the stories in here (as other reviewers have noted) are flat, rather pointless, and dull.

All in all, I would say 1/3 of the collection is outstanding, another 1/3 is very, very good, and the bottom third is a little below average in terms of short-story quality.

Anyway, if you enjoyed "In the Company of Men" (as I did) you will undoubtably get more than a few seconds of pleasure from this collection. The uneveness of the the collection does not detract from the brilliance of its best stories.

I finished this book about three weeks ago, and this book has stayed with me ever since. It's probably too soon to say this, but this is one of the two best books I've ever read.

The way that I read this book is that I read each story twice--After I finished a story, I started it again. They say that if a short story is a good one, then the second time through will be better than the first and this was the case for every one of his these stories. I recommend this approach of reading them twice to everyone. These stories are so good and have so much in them that if you've only read them once then you'll miss so much.

The two hardest types of writing are the short story and the play. It's very interesting that Labute crosses over into the other hardest type of writing, and makes something this incredible.

While I was reading this, I thought, "Labute is just showing off here." Showcasing, I think is what they call it in sports. For me, it was kind of like being able to rewind time and see the greatest moves of Michael Jordan. It reminds me of the dirty joke about the dog, which has the punch line of "Because he can." And, I wonder why Labute writes this stuff and writes it so well. Is it simply because he can?

This book also allayed my fear about Labute, which is that he's eventually going to run out of material. I've read most of his plays now, and I've been kind of afraid that he would eventually run out of material because some of the themes are starting to cross. I now realize that as long as darkness lurks in the hearts of men, that Labute will never run out of material.

These stories are haunting and dark. Some of them are so horrific that I would be unable to describe to a friend what they are even about. Somebody said that one story in particular left him in the fetal position, and for the life of me, I'm not sure which one that would be, because about half of these stories did that to me.

Some of these stories have a surprise twist, and some of them don't. I found it really interesting how they were mixed up. And if you think the point is just the twist, read it again. These stories are much more complex than just mysteries.

And, I love the title of this book. It begs the question of "What lengths will people go to for only seconds of pleasure?" It's a very multi-faceted title also, because it's a lot more than just that question--one of the stories is called "A Second of Pleasure," and gives a different take on the title.

If I ever meet Labute, I'm going to ask him these questions: "Where did you meet these people?" "How did you get to know them so well?" He's clearly going above and beyond just writing from his own experience here. These people are so amazingly different and he brings them to life. I know these aren't real people, but they seem so real in this book.

If anyone who is reading this didn't like any of the stories, then go back and read the one you didn't like just one more time...you'll appreciate it more, I guarantee it. This, of course, doesn't apply, if you didn't like it simply for the subject matter, which, like I said, is haunting.

While I would not say that these stories bring "seconds of pleasure" to the reader, they certainly shock and awe. Mr. Labute with sparse language and crisp dialogue creates little stories that provoke us with their relentless look inside the human heart. He is the master of the shock effect. You are reading along, and suddenly he gives you a body blow. Although these stories all are about the conflict between heterosexual men and women, some of them go far beyond the cynical treatment of women by men as seen, for example, in "In The Company of Men," Mr. Labute's best-known movie. Here an unnamed narrator recounts the making of a snuff video and muses on what will happen to the soon-to-be dead woman's child: "OK, we hear about the kid, that seems fine, few days from now she'll get passed on to welfare, adoption agency, who knows what." Then a woman many years after the fact remembers providing her father with an alibi when he murdered her big sister. Finally a woman picks up her very drunk father or stepfather-- we aren't sure which-- in a bar and beds him. He is completely oblivious as to who she is.

Before we send the author to the literary dumpster for his cynical, dark view of mankind-- particularly the man half of mankind, perhaps we should ask ourselves if he is accurate in his assessment. A day or so after I finished this little volume and was wondering if the human male could be so completely insensitive and ugly, I caught on television the prosecutor's opening statement in the trial of the actor Robert Blake, accused of murdering his wife. The comments about the victim she attributed to Mr. Blake could have come straight from the pages of this book. I rest my case.

This one isn't "The Sound of Music" but it's a collection of short stories you won't soon forget.

Why did Eugene O'Neill decide to publish a book of his poems? Granted, I could ask the same of, say, Leonard Nimoy, but the famed Star Trek actor never laid claim to caring for the written word the way the great American playwright did. Yet, both published hideous doggerel for the same reason- they could, because of their celebrity. This phenomenon is not limited to writing of course. B actor David Hasselhoff, of Baywatch fame, has released CDs, and many a singer, especially noxious rap stars, has claimed to be an actor. Following in that ignominious tradition, playwright and film director Neil Labute released a collection of `short stories' called Seconds Of Pleasure back in 2004 that, well, as he might say, `suck really, really bad, dude.' This is because they are wholly devoid of insight, of the sort that populate the best Raymond Carver tales- an influence whose touch is all over these pallid echoes which lack any real style. They typically consist of losers who get involved in some absurd or pitiable sexual situation, and then chuckle about their loserhood.

Don't get me wrong, Labute is a good filmmaker (In The Company Of Men, Your Friends And Neighbors), and I've read a couple of his good plays. That is his métier, and he's good at it- sort of a younger David Mamet. But, playwrights have to write character first, and let the characters define themselves, inside out, while fictionists have other options which with to limn their characters; ones Labute either ignored, or was unaware of. Just as poets almost never make good prose writers, and vice versa, Labute's stories, really just pallid posturings- not even full blown `scenes', go dramatically nowhere, and are highly repetitive. Were it not for each succeeding stories' title pages one could hardly know the scene and characters have changed. The actual book, itself, is digest sized, in a pallid attempt to puff the large type on the small pages to 221 pages. In reality, each story is perhaps 2½ normal sized book pages in length; just slightly longer than micro-fiction, or short shorts.

That all said, Labute's familiar world of modern day losers is more well realized than the similar fictive universes of a David Foster Wallace, Rick moody, or Dave Eggers, simply because he can write. Yes, as a whole, these tales, and the book, fail, but there are some moments, now and again, that show a writer of skill, and not one addicted to mere `coolio posturing'. Yet, these are rare, as most of the tales in Seconds Of Pleasure are mere first person confessions of some sexual misdeed, usually by a philandering husband, whose female `victim' somehow deserves what she gets, which even include incest and murder, but Labute loses sight that in order for a reader to be drawn into a tale they need to be able to relate to a character. Too often, Labute is content to be a voyeur, or worse, a zoo watcher. His condescension toward the human element could work in a few selected tales, but in story after story it drones and becomes stale, as well as trite....Of course, these tales almost all devolve into childishness, and are wholly dependent upon shock or twist endings, like all bad melodrama is. Reading these tales was like reading the writing exercises of a nineteen year old fetishist at a Creative Writing 101 workshop. The clichés abound, and the `dark' tales never really scare a reader because Labute's characters are so unrealistic. What works onscreen, when handled by a skilled actor, does not necessarily translate to a purely page-driven product. After the third or fourth story the endings of the tales scream at you from several pages' distance. These are mechanical and ultimately hollow stories.

Perhaps I should be happy, though, for Grove Press, which sought to milk some money from this unadulterated crap, only let Labute get his bad fiction out into the public arena. It could have been worse. It could have been verse. Or is that still forthcoming?

"Seconds of Pleasure" gave me just that - only seconds of pleasure, and hours of distaste. Neil LaBute is a talentless, charmless hack. His book was like Bukowski without the heart, and "American Psycho" without the wit.