Arthouse: A Novel

by Jeffrey DeShell

An audacious transformation in prose of fourteen Modernist films

From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell’s inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor’s journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.
 

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2011

About the author

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of four novels: Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone 2006), The Trouble with Being Born (FC2 2008), S & M and In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2) and a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction. He has co-edited two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics (FC2), and was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, 1999-2000. He has taught in Northern Cyprus, the American Midwest and was on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is currently an associate professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Reviews

[Joe]

Hey I wrote a review of this for Colorado Review:

http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/r...

Here is the first paragraph:

Crime novels have always been about the traces crime leaves in the external world and within the psyche of the criminal, and how the criminal and those who follow him make meaning of these traces. Modern entries by authors like Kobo Abe (The Ruined Map) and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) have elaborated the genre into high literature while also underscoring essential deficits of meaning in traces in the post-industrial world. With many of the narratives of his predecessors tipping into the void, where is a literary writer of the hard-boiled to go? On one hand, there is a return to economy of plot and rugged realism as represented by Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Urban Waite’s The Terror of Living. On the other, there is Jeffrey DeShell’s Arthouse, a piece of pulp fiction related to a Tarantino-esque pastiche of filmic styles translated into prose. Like Tarantino’s films, Arthouse is, by turns, banal, mystifying, and brilliant.

[Angela Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arthouse is like a Jim Thompson novel done up sort of Europeanly and smashed sideways, bleak and philosophical and funny and detailed in the lore of crime. It’s a film education as well, and the reader immersed in film history would read layers into it that defy me. A film professor finds a better living making and dealing drugs with his brother and assorted hellish friends than teaching as an adjunct. Two hapless partiers end up on the drug ranch in the middle of the night, and the professor acquires a lovely young hostage. This entertaining and violent plot sustains a strong narrative propulsion. Each chapter takes on the lens of a different art house film—Satyricon, Contempt, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and a dozen more—so that the voice and point of view shift with each new movie. This premise gives DeShell broad scope to display his brilliant, often hilarious prose. Some highlights—the professor trying not to watch pornography with his brother, a meal in a nursing home, and a melting, surreal pseudo-ending on Capri. A crazy lark with wistful notes of what are we living for and how do we genuinely experience it?

[Brandon Figliolino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

[Colorado Review]

Read our review by Joe Hall at http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/r...