Customer Reviews

Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick: A Novel of Separation

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Read the two reviews below this, as they very aptly describe the weaknesses of Resnick's writing. I almost wouldn't write in, at the risk of being redundant, but quite frankly I'm monumentally annoyed that I wasted my precious time and money reading this painfully amateurish, and appallingly un-original piece of navel-gazing. Perfect, however, for bratty, MTV-fed 13 year olds in the mid-west with dreams of "making it" in "HelL.A.", as it most closely resembles the journal of a whiney, self-obsessed teenager. It's like "My So-Called Novel", trying too hard to be gritty, edgy, and eccentric, and inherits the worst traits of not only Bret Easton Ellis (as noted below) but Tama Janowitz. And what's worse, it's like, _so 1992_. Look, I live in L.A. and if I wanted to hear this sort of pretentious, self-absorbed, superficial name-dropping I'd actually listen to all the show-biz wanna-be's who are not good-looking enough to be stars, and not capable enough to be execs that litter the streets here.

Well, I have mixed feelings on this book. Obscured by all these annoying I'm-so-blase-and-hip descriptions of places and people are actually a few prosaic gems. But, alas, Ms. Resnick's writing is indeed like B.E.E., as someone else noted above, in that it's entirely too self-absorbed. The author tries too hard to name-drop, place-drop, and brand-drop, while at the same time trying to make the reader think the protagonist is all broke and tragic. Ugh. This reminds me too much of Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Poor Ivy League Girl on Prozac Who Sluts Around and Acts Like a Disaffected Spokesperson for Generation X" attitude. Fun to read, but this book needs some editing (sorry, but Resnick ain't no female Jack Kerouac - the run-on sentences and grammatical inconsistencies just don't work) and its author a bit of an attitude adjustment.

Like B.E.E., Rachel Resnick has no greater fan of her writing than...Achelray Esnickray. She has Ellis's same penchant for brand name dropping (both products and people) which give her writing an almost immediate sense of being dated, just like Bret Idiot Ellis. He and Resnick should be pen pals. They could write to each other about all the cool clothes they wear and neat people they've met and cool and neat places they've eaten. At a reading in Los Angeles, Resnick bragged (incessantly) about how long she worked on F*cked up chick and the furor over the title, and how radical she is (maybe radical in the juvenile, valley girl, surfer sense) and how wise an audience we were for being there to support her greatness. Sheesh! Her personality certainly carries over to her fiction, and both are extremely f*cked up. Maybe some day, when she gets OVER herself, RR will write a book we can care about. Until then, she can continue to work hard at becoming one of the vapid celebrities she thinks she's making fun of. If she's teaching writing at UCLA, time to apply to USC.

Where are the women writers who write women characters that overcome obstacles or are just plain interesting? I dont think this is what V Woolf meant when she spoke of Women and Fiction. Here is the situation. This writer was teaching a class at UCLA called Strong female characters. I thought great title for a class so I bought her book and read as much as I could fathom. Have I been hit by a train? What a dissapointment. Who is she trying to fool? Will the real Rachel Reznick please stand up and write. I know she has it in her. I saw her read, she seems sexy enough to write sex and smart enough to write good characters..but Huh? shocking and disappointing that she would subvert feminism or project a feminist sentiment when in fact her writing is just some cool slick way to write.

I had to read the book in patches, since the chapters are episodic and do not really follow a comprehensive plot. I will not say that the book is badly written because it is not, at least not in the way that A Million Little Pieces (James Frey) is badly written. The book was just boring to me. The premise is all MONDO Los Angeles as skewered by a cynical feminist. Yes, originality is uberlacking and MONDO cool is just so typical to me. Even the title of the book, Go West Young F*cked Up Chick, has that smug ring of I'm so cool (soso mediocre cool would be more the reality).

Still, there are A FEW enjoyable chapters in the book. The most intriguing ones are when the protagonist talks about the entry level PA jobs in films and the little humiliations endured just to get your foot in the door. If she just stuck to topic and plot the book would be exponentially better but she had to go off into that MONDO world where she encounters every coolio bizarro Angeleno she could describe: all of them caricatures, stereotypical in their strangeness, none of them with any real character depth except "weird dialogue".

She even has a 2 page chapter titled "Bukowski Doesn't Live Here Anymore- He's Dead" and is about how if a girl was as ugly as Bukowski was she would never have become a famous writer regardless of her talent- the small chapter may have a point.

So if you don't mind reading a book where you skip whole segments of chapters because the writer indulges in typical MONDO coolness but where the writing is still interesting enough to go to the next chapter, then I recommend this book.

Whether it properly portrays LA or not, this book is still f*cking amazing! I love how it is unlike any other book I've read and how it jumps from here to there. This girl can write!! Could not put it down!

This novel feels so emotionally honest to me. It's violent but also vulnerable. It's drenched in a sense of place, a seething LA I've never seen elsewhere. The narrator, Rebecca Roth, is braver about revealing herself on the page than some people are on the therapist's couch. And I love the way Resnick swings from blunt to poetic & back. Here's Rebecca Roth, the narrator, on her latest Hollywood lackey job, in servitude to a director: "'You're my assistant, you're supposed to be thinking so hard about me you read my mind,' he hissed. My life as a slave, part whatever." And just a few pages later: "What I remember most about the abortion is the blue paper slippers...That papery rustle, shuffle, toward the abortion room and back. Barefoot in the cold metal stirrups. Riding and bucking toward death, sucked empty. Put them back on. Blue paper slippers." One reader compares Go West to a train wreck--well, yeah, if that means you can't tear your gaze off the page, even when it's 3 a.m. and you have to get up at 6. Damn, I love this book.

"Go West Young F*cked-up Chick", is one very F**ked up book. You how when you drive by a traffic accident, you can't help yourself but to look. Well reading this is lot like that. I can't say it was good book, I can't say it was bad book. This was a disjointed story, a train wreck in the making. I still have no idea where the author thought she was going this book, and yet I feel that I have followed a life so completely. Perhaps I don't think deeply enough to understand, and yet I must at some level have gotten it, because I didn't hate the story.

I don't know quite what to say in the way of a recommendation, other than to tell reader you are fore warned of mayhem.

ok, so i'm a young woman writer in LA (born and raised) and this books appears by another young woman writer in LA, along with some of the most vehemently positive reviews i've seen in a while, including one from this guy who runs a workshop i used to be in, and another likening the author to kathy acker (a personal favorite)...so i have to get it...and it is a good book, and this resnick chick does write well and do some interesting stuff with structure and form and language, etc etc...but i'm left feeling like i should be more blown away after all the hype and glorious exaltation...it's just not so so so experimental (i mean, with a reference to acker..), and this LA she presents does exist but it's not the only one and some of resnick's vast conclusions about the city are unfounded given that this is the story of one (albeit one very oft-told) city within the many that make up LA...of course it's cool to find a guy reading delillo in al's bar, because , i know this ,"no one reads in al's bar", but people do read in LA,some people do "escape vanity here, [and] shallow dreams [and] basest desires"....and, with a producer character named BZ, i am thinking again that didion has already done this city...and isn't it time for la literature that is not about slick movie folks or noir?...honestly, resnick has written a good book, and i read it straight through, and it's fantastic and encouraging that there is room in the lit world for a young woman's perspective (esp a f*cked up one)...but it's not "f*cking amazing" as stahl says (and, i know, he would)..worth the read, and i'm glad she's had this success, and there are some extraordinary moments..she's just not really all that near acker ....not yet, at least...

Avoid this pumped up, oversized, utility vehicle. Get in another lane and let it pass.