harold's end / mcsweeney's enchanted chamber of astonishing stories / generation kill: devil dogs, iceman, captain america and the new face of american war

[December 22nd, 2004]

^harold's end

By JT LeRoy

(Last Gasp Publications, 98 pages, $19.95)

It's hard to write about a book by JT LeRoy without remarking upon who else is reading it. His curious, exquisitely packaged new novella, originally published in McSweeney's, arrives now in book form with the stamp of approval of John Waters ("savagely authentic"), Lou Reed ("few writers have his heart and courage") and Nan Goldin ("knowing he's in the world makes it easier for me to live"), among others.

You'll probably wonder what all the fuss is about. Even bulked out by an earnest Dave Eggers introduction, an afterward by LeRoy's editor, and some haunting watercolors by Australian artist Cherry Hood, Harold's End feels decidedly slim.

The story goes as follows. An unnamed teenage heroin addict meets a rich patron who makes pets out of San Francisco street urchins. Needy but wary of surrogate father figures, the narrator allows this man to adopt him and ply him with really good H. He also accepts the gift of a snail, the Harold of the book's title. And then things begin to go down hill.

In spite of the celebrities haranguing us to treat him like Joyce, sentence by sentence LeRoy is not an especially crafty writer. There isn't a single metaphor or image of note in the entire book. Instead, it is the story's primitive quality that is supposed to appeal. To a certain degree it does; if Pickwick Papers were published today, it might have the same spiritual vacancy. But you get the sense that Dickens would have had little patience for the creepy voyeurism that has made LeRoy's career such a grim spectacle. John Freeman

^mcsweeney's enchanted chamber of astonishing stories

Edited by Michael Chabon

(Vintage, 328 pages. $13.95)

As in last year's similar McSweeney's volume, Enchanted Chamber's editor, Michael Chabon, lays out his gripe and scheme in his introduction. Once, people read short stories. Now, unless they're short-story-writing grad students, they mostly don't. Chabon's antidote to this decline is something like a heist movie's wind-up--he calls in an intriguingly mismatched team to pull off the Big Job.

You have the Young Guns (U.K. sci-fantasy phenom China Mieville and ever-effervescent Poppy Z. Brite); the Arcane Specialists (L.A.'s always-strange Steve Erickson); the Muscle (Portland's Charles D'Ambrosio and Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler); the Sly Old Hands (Stephen King); and, oh, so much more. Their task: to write old-fashioned genre stories.

The assignment's possibilities are endless (post-nuclear space opera? Ninja noir?). But the biggest disappointment here is that some sort of plot virus seems to have our authors thinking much alike. Of 15 stories, I count five centered on cursed children, at least three haunted by ghostly lovers, two hooked on ominous stigmata. Obsession, insanity and the-unseen-lurking-horror-of-it-all are the watchwords of pretty much every one.

In the well-plowed furrow of damned youth, Margaret Atwood succeeds with a short, gripping tale of monstrous deformity. Roddy Doyle's protagonist finds himself pursued unto doom by a spectral little boy in a genuine creep-fest. D'Ambrosio's twang-talking rural gothic delivers a nice and ooky conclusion. King, predictably, writes circles around just about everyone. Best of show goes to David Mitchell's loose, atmospheric and ultimately shocking hardboiled Pacific Rim ghost/succubus story.

The Enchanted Chamber, of course, contains a few total duds as well (by Jonathan Lethem and Mieville). But if Chabon's all-stars are predictably uneven and sadly like-minded, their assembled walks in literature's nightland are still worth taking. Zach Dundas

^generation kill: devil dogs, iceman, captain america and the new face of american war

By Evan Wright

(Putnam, 354 pages, $24.95)

Evan Wright's Gulf War II combat memoir details the exploits of the U.S. Marine Corps' First Recon Battalion as it John Waynes itself from Kuwait to Baghdad.

Oftentimes, Wright and the Marines are so certain they're on a lethal detour through a Hollywood backlot, as opposed to invading a country inhabited by human beings, that they frequently compare the resulting carnage with American celluloid and video games. "Grand Theft Auto," observes a 19-year-old grunt after his unit blasts its way through the town of Al Gharraf. "I thought I was living it when I seen the flames coming out the windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was cool." When Cobra helicopters mow over insurgents in a Nasiriyah palm grove, Wright notes, "it suddenly feels like we've stumbled onto the set of Apocalypse Now."

In this high-budget Middle East remake, however, a paranoid and hysterical Marine Corps captain prone to shooting civilians has replaced Brando's lunatic Kurtz. The Marines of Second Platoon--including a frantic ephedra-stoked rock-star wannabe Humvee driver, a battalion commander obsessed with Marine mustache regulations, and a medic who considers the possibility that the invasion may have something to do with oil--round out the talented cast.

Wright makes up for the lack of colorful Asian scenery with vivid character descriptions. He emphasizes the somewhat conflicted personalities of the Marines as they beg for permission to shoot dogs, pump iron, level villages, assure each other that they're not gay and lament the fact that they weren't around to enjoy Hiroshima.

Acting as a human tape recorder and grief tourist, Wright, a columnist for Rolling Stone, offers little in the way of moral reflection or analysis, but his book is an excellent portrayal of machismo and lunacy as the harbingers of democracy. Joel Preston Smith