Wasted Beauty: A Novel [Hardcover]

Eric Bogosian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

With his dark wit and corrosive dialogue, Eric Bogosian tells a powerful and emotionally wrenching tale of two lovers who form a mesmerizing and destructive bond while trying to evade the looming failure of their respective lives.

Reba runs away from her shabby and desolate rural community for the lure of New York City. Her tall and awkward frame lands her work modeling, but she is not prepared for the glamorous, drug-fueled life of a celebrated mannequin. After a series of painful relationships, she sees hope and an exit toward stability and sanity in the man who saves her brother's life.

This man is Rick, a successful SoHo general practitioner with a warm family and an idyllic life that has left him restless and hollow. He doesn't take Reba seriously until he finds himself so enmeshed in her beauty that he risks losing everything--his home, his children and his beloved wife.

Now this master monologist and author of the acclaimed Mall returns with a sprawling novel of urban desperation and desire that brings to mind the winding narratives of Tom Wolfe salted with the dark urges of Philip Roth. The New York Times hailed Eric Bogosian's fiction as "caustic, fast-paced....Adapting himself to fiction with...the same garrulous intensity he brings to plays and monologues, Mr. Bogosian sets in motion a suburban nightmare." And Entertainment Weekly has lauded his "merciless satirical vision (that) takes you deep into the dark heart of the American dream."

Wasted Beauty is Bogosian's enthralling journey through the high life of drugs and fashion celebrity, middle-class guilt and sexual obsession.

Copyright © 2005 by Simon & Schuster

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Actor Bogosian (Mall) takes the "opposites attract" conceit to an extreme in a well-crafted novel that's also a vicarious walk on the wild side. Before he crashes two very different ends of the social spectrum together, though, Bogosian develops each one separately, cultivating suspense: how will these characters come together? In one corner is Reba, a 20-year-old upstate New York farm girl who, along with her nasty brother, Billy, sells apples to Manhattanites on weekends. In a breathless series of events, she becomes separated from Billy and is spotted by a fashion photographer who turns her into a supermodel. In the other corner is Rick, a middle-aged Jewish doctor living in the suburbs with his family. While he likes his life, he's also chafing under certain domestic constraints. It's up to Billy to make them collide by hurtling off the deep end after losing his sister; he ends up in the emergency room, and Rick sends him to the psych ward. The model and the physician eventually begin a torrid, May/December romance that drives the latter toward divorce and the former into addiction. It's a great guilty pleasure of a story line (brainy schlump meets gorgeous goddess), and Bogosian fills it with fresh, frank turns of phrase—the frazzled doctor's eyes are "like slit-open gray prunes"—even if the ending feels a little too sanitized for the gritty story that preceded it. Agent, William Morris. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It has been 20 years since authors Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis created a literary zeitgeist with their novels about the go-go 1980s, especially McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which captured beautifully the excesses and despair of Manhattan's night life. How tempting for writers who missed the party to want to try their hand. Enter Bogosian. His novel features Reba Cook, a 19-year-old hick from upstate New York who is orphaned and left with only her immaculate beauty. While in New York City, she's discovered and immediately lands a modeling contract. For Reba it's all sex, drugs, and bankroll from here on out. Problem is, she finds hobnobbing with the rich and soulless a bummer. Luckily, she meets Rick, a middle-aged doctor with his own practice and a family. Rick's problem is that he's trapped in the "successful" life he painstakingly created. Together he and Reba form a meaningful connection. Although Bogosian is a skillful writer, his points feel cliched (living superficially invites suffering--no headlines there), and his characters sometimes seem like retreads from other novels. Ultimately, although he brings back gossip about the party, Bogosian reveals that it's still just the same old scene. Expect demand based on his name. Jerry Eberle
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1St Edition edition (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743235886
• ISBN-13: 978-0743235884
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,697,222 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read This Book, April 25, 2005

By 

Kevin D (Albany, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Wasted Beauty: A Novel (Hardcover)

If one were to equate Bogosian's first novel, Mall: A Novel, to his play subUrbia, then one could also draw a similar parallel between 'Wasted Beauty' and his recent play 'Red Angel.' The Jeff of both Mall and subUrbia were two closely related characters, much like the leading men in Wasted Beauty and Red Angel. In print, however, Bogosian is able to delve deeper into the characters' inner thoughts. When reading his work, one can just tell that Bogosian is an actor -- he often follows dialogue directly with subtext, which I liked. Rick, the main character in 'Beauty', actually has roots that go much further back in Bogosian's work than 'Angel'. He is reminiscent of the peeping-tom in Mall, who was a descendent of Bogosian's Recovering Male character from his solos. If you've been following his work, I would say you will definitely appreciate this book, and if you haven't, now's a good time to start.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put down, May 30, 2008

By 

Hillary A. Thomas (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wasted Beauty: A Novel (Hardcover)

This was the first novel I have read by Eric Bogosian (I'm currently reading Mall), and I am hooked. His beautiful writing as the three main characters (Billy, Rick and Reba) and the ability to switch between all three to first person will keep you reading. As the reader, you develop sincere feeling for these characters, even though on the outside they look like a raging alcoholic, a drug addicted model and a cheating husband. Bogosian dives deeper into each of their brains, making it a must read!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wasted Talent!, January 13, 2011

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Wasted Beauty: A Novel (Hardcover)

This isn't a bad novel. It isn't "bad" writing; it's "cheap" writing -- cheap thrills, cheap sex drugs & violence, cheap dysfunction, cheap degradation, cheap hatred, none of which are implausible or irrelevant in America Today. But the whole spread -- magazine ad spread, spread legs, spread face down in puke on the sidewalk, the spread between wealth and destitution, the spread between innocence and experience -- reads to me as mere sensationalist exploitation.

Is it Eric Bogosian's fault if people want to read such stuff? To wallow in filth and ugliness vicariously? Of course not! This marketability of misery, this rage for "rage," has been around for a long time. It was the theme if Bogosian's own stage drama and film Talk Radio, at the climax of which his avatar, radio host Barry Champlain, dies for our cultural sins.

So where am I going with this review?

This is a "grunge novel." Specifically, it's a grunge novel for intellectual readers, replete with allusions to Baudelaire, Hesse, and painter Arthur Dove. It's chock full of snappy sentences and terse, well-crafted descriptions. It's a pretty good grunge novel, but that wasn't what I was hoping for.