Too Much of Nothing

by Michael Scott Moore

The ghost of Eric, a teenage honor student killed by his friend Tom, a defiant rebel obsessed with A Clockwork Orange, chronicles the story of his life, especially the tumultuous months that led up to his death. A first novel. Original.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2003

About the author

Michael Scott Moore is a literary journalist and novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., "Too Much of Nothing," as well as a travel book about surfing, "Sweetness and Blood," which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist and Popmatters. He was kidnapped in 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage for two and a half years.

His book about the ordeal, "The Desert and the Sea," is due out from Harper in mid-2018. He’s covered the European migration crisis for Businessweek, and politics, travel, and literature for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, LitHub, Newlines, Der Spiegel, GQ, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The L.A. Review of Books.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since finishing the book, it has been in my thoughts frequently; it is a gauge against which I compare my own experiences growing up with the characters Moore has created. The author and I grew up in the same area, only a couple of years apart; we attended the same highschool for a couple of overlapping years, and a number of the locations he has so successfully described in the abstract are readily identifiable as "real" locations in our hometown. The imagery that he manages to pull up elicits a gut level comprehension of the Los Angeles climate. Los Angeles is constantly buzzing with activity, a proof of the converse of the adage "still waters run deep." The surface buzz of Los Angeles is sizable, its populace constantly vibrating on the edge of the now and the next, but with limited consideration for what comes after "next," or the past. Los Angeles isn't so much "sunny" as in a state of constant "glare." The sky isn't blue, nor is it often brown with smog; it's usually a matte silver tone -- a color that tends to simply amplify the sun's natural brightness to a dizzying shine that makes things stand out intensely. But over time that glare damages that which it shines upon, simply by its own intensity. Moore's novel is like that as well. As clearly as it depicts the world we lived in, it also has worn some of the polish from it.