two book reviews

[June 19th, 2002] a year in van nuys
by Sandra Tsing Loh
(Three Rivers Press, 240 pages, $13)

You wonder if NPR commentator Sandra Tsing Loh rewrote Bridget Jones's Diary on purpose. Loh's quasi-autobiographical heroine is a married-Californian version of the British Bridget: Both adorably neurotic thirtysomethings are on a deadly serious self-improvement mission via weight loss and/or superstardom. Miraculously, both characters discover that those pesky imperfections are actually the keys to approval, success and peace, and they stop hating themselves. Van Nuys, like Bridget Jones, is structured as a journal, only each entry here sets the scene with the temperature rather than the heroine's weight. The similarities between the books are obvious and many.

Still, Van Nuys is hilarious, magnifying trivial things like "swingy hair" into a crazed rant that consumes us and diverts our attention from the book's copycat feel. Aside from the inherent humor of Southern California life and a roster of vividly weird characters, Tsing Loh employs visual effects like font changes and handwritten charts that seem gimmicky but intensify her namesake narrator's ridiculous misadventures. Sandra (the character) lives through highs (the chance to write for a "fresh, edgy" sitcom) and lows (writing a column about wedding fashion for Amelia.com) in her rocky writing career, allowing Tsing Loh (the author) to poke huge fun at utero-media such as the Lifetime Network and Oxygen.com. Just as Sandra wins the plastic fascination of SoCal media moguls, Tsing Loh's brilliantly written and excitedly paced portrait of Sandra in all her obsessive glory leaves us panting and sighing with laughter. Teresa Freeman

my loose thread
by Dennis Cooper
(Canongate Books, 121 pages, $18)

One needn't read past the first page of My Loose Thread before the teenage narrator confesses his plans to kill someone. Shocking? No, it's just Dennis Cooper up to his old tricks. In celebrated--and, almost as frequently, excoriated--novels such as Closer, Frisk and Try, Cooper has told the tales of character after confusion-twisted character driven to perverse acts: teen promiscuity, drug use, pederasty, sadomasochism, murder and worse. With his skeletal prose, Cooper has always dared to rip morality's meat off society's bones and stare into the depths of atrocity like few since Burroughs, Bataille and Genet.

Unfortunately, My Loose Thread reacquaints readers with Cooper's usual themes--alienation, sex and violence--as if they were merely casual bystanders at a cocktail party, needing no new introduction. Cooper's undecorated vocabulary and choppy plot structure mirror the communication vacuum in which his dysfunctional, disconnected high-schoolers exist: Dialogue is little but shrugging non-sequiturs, conversations divergent from the first word. But unlike in other Cooper novels, here this technique makes characters' thought processes opaque, so when sudden, easy violence occurs it's often as surprising to the reader as it is to the characters themselves.

Of course, the existential ennui that runs through all Cooper books is one cause for violence: These people simply don't care enough not to kill. Columbine (which Cooper name-checks) and the Springfield shootings were his primary inspiration.

No one expects moralistic revisionism from Cooper, just a clearer window into the combustive inner turmoil of his damned antiheroes. Without that, many readers will feel as alienated from the characters as they are from each other. John Graham