porn, vampires and serial killers

last week i completed The Serialist by David Gordon, yet another highly touted debut novel.  the book features henry bloch, a writer under every name but his own, who writes a column in a porn mag, vampire novels, sci-fi novels and urban, inner-city novels....  all under different pseudonyms.  his long-time girlfriend has left him and henceforth not only found some success in the writing world, but married a successful writer (whose novel smugly stares at him on feature at the local bookstore, as he digs his just-released vampire novel out and places in alongside on the feature display).  it's not far into this one that i became worried this would be another of those woe-is-me, struggling writer in new york novels.

but inasmuch as the book certain is partly that, the plot thickens when harry receives a fan letter from a prisoner who read his porn column.  this prisoner, a well known serial killer nearing his final days on death row, has an interesting proposition for harry, involving harry writing his memoir (harry's ticket to success?).

what follows is a story full of murder (3 straight books i've read dealing with murders of some variety...  i don't think i've read that many books where murder is a central theme in the past 10 years), sex, criminal investigations, braggery and insecurity...  a strange mix of a lot of the same stories you've heard before, but juxtaposed together in a way you haven't seen them before.

i don't think this book would pull in those who want pure crime fiction, nor do i think it's going to appeal to the sci-fi vampire crowd, nor will it grab the literary heads.  but it's got enough of each of these little plot lines that it'll grab a lot of people's attention, as it already has.

i'm not going out on any limbs for this book.  i enjoyed reading it, but there were moments i absolutely despised....  moments when gordon's too cool for school, indie-writer humor nauseated me

He wore plastic red eyeglass frames and a Gumby T-shirt and sat with a woman whom i recognized as important from somewhere. Maybe on Charlie Rose. "Thanks," the young writer began. "This story is from my book. It's called, 'The Alien Invasion of Scarsdale.'" There was a lot of overly enthusiastic laughter at this. Branborn laughed too. "I used to really dig these toys called Transformers. Does anybody here remember Transformers?" More whoops and howls. "Cool. Well this takes place in the summer of 1990, which, as you might remember, was the last year for the original Japanese line of Transformers." "Yes!" someone shouted, and Michael laughed again.  "All right. Cool. Ha. OK so anyway, here's the story." He took a sip of Brooklyn Beer from the bottle.

Gordon goes out of his way to set himself apart from the tragically trendy; and after reading the book, i can't help but feel it's his strong desire to be up on that pedestal that drives his scorn for it. There are so many occasions when Gordon is downright funny (for example, the way he uses his friends, his mother, or even himself in woman's clothing to fake photographs for the fake authors he is in his various writings), sad (his best friend is a high school girl whom he tutors, and he clearly isn't over his ex), dark (towards the end, the portrait he paints of the serial killer is pretty chilling) that i can forgive him for trying, at times, to kill me with corny clever-ness; he took on something hard to take on, and, while he didn't amaze me, the book rarely left my hands until it was done.

like his ideas or not, he writes well...  and maybe he sums up his book best when he writes:

What love poem, what manifesto, what high cry of art has ever done what the lowest, dumbest scratch of dirty words can do to a lonely soul late at night?