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Pleasant Hell
You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll feel angry, ecstatic, scared, sad. enlightened. You will feel the disturbingly-awesome, terrible glory of. life. There is nothing more fascinating than a desperate, yearning, misanthropic. humanist. For when he's done with you in the purgatory of Pleasant Hell you'll feel braver, wiser more alive and cleaner than you've ever been. None of which, of course, he intended.Just make sure you ask him not to take his shoes off.
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First published November 30, 2004
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About the author
John Dolan
12 books36 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
See also: Gary Brecher.
See also: Gary Brecher.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 18, 2011
(10/10) John Dolan has been in the trenches of loneliness. He (or at least his narrator in this thinly disquised memoir) knows the things familiar to anyone who's been lonely for a long time -- the way you start to think of yourself as a multitude, the careful lengths taken to avoid social contact, the obsession over the little social contact you do have, and the all-consuming hatred, towards both you and the outside world, that grows inside your guts like a fungus. Without revealing too many embarassing personal details, Dolan hits all of this right on the money in this tale of the only guy unable to get laid in California in the 60s. John could be compared to a character like Ignatius Reilly, but he feels so much more real and visceral. Pleasant Hell is a must-read, an anti-bildungsroman that manages to be bitterly hilarious and yet strangely touching.
April 19, 2009
"No, the man's a homeless idiot...I pray God he's an idiot." -- Dr. Frederick Treves, explaining John Merrick to his peers, in "The Elephant Man"
Dolan lends an authentic voice to the futile position of one who's been marked for exclusion from the tribe with the stink of the outsider. He carves away at the patronizing nihilism of the cool and politically correct, that, scooping all its chips from the table, frowns and compliments one's nice try. He wastes no time garroting the crypto Christian pretension that everything somehow balances out in the end.
As the author of several poetry books, and a shameless nerd (that's not true, he seems full of shame), he deliberately lapses into flowery, distracting prose and verse one could easily imagine being delivered with the moist eighth-grade lisp of a veteran dungeon master. This is especially true when he turns to the two topics most dear to this period he describes: the beautiful and stifling amber vistas of California, and the inscrutable hippie girls he fawns helplessly after (to comically tragic effect).
There is no happy ending here: just an agonizing and oddly entertaining account of the author's realization of his position in the pecking order. A tiring protracted scream out the window of a boring suburban house, immediately absorbing into the picturesque indifference of Northern California.
Dolan lends an authentic voice to the futile position of one who's been marked for exclusion from the tribe with the stink of the outsider. He carves away at the patronizing nihilism of the cool and politically correct, that, scooping all its chips from the table, frowns and compliments one's nice try. He wastes no time garroting the crypto Christian pretension that everything somehow balances out in the end.
As the author of several poetry books, and a shameless nerd (that's not true, he seems full of shame), he deliberately lapses into flowery, distracting prose and verse one could easily imagine being delivered with the moist eighth-grade lisp of a veteran dungeon master. This is especially true when he turns to the two topics most dear to this period he describes: the beautiful and stifling amber vistas of California, and the inscrutable hippie girls he fawns helplessly after (to comically tragic effect).
There is no happy ending here: just an agonizing and oddly entertaining account of the author's realization of his position in the pecking order. A tiring protracted scream out the window of a boring suburban house, immediately absorbing into the picturesque indifference of Northern California.
March 27, 2012
Pleasant Hell was really good, one of the most psychologically acute books about the Love Generation's preterites written. If you've read something like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao then I would say this is similar in that their protagonists are both completely obtuse dorks, but Dolan's writing style is way better. Not only is he really good at finding clever metaphors (so much so that it was noticeable - he's one of those writers where you find yourself pausing at the end of paragraphs to go "hmm, that's a clever way of putting things"), but this was much more unflinching, with the honesty to admit that ultimately there's nothing noble about being a total loser, even if it did give him an interesting perspective on the world. He grew up in the Bay Area when it was at its peak in the late 60s and early 70s, the most artistically creative and influential part of the whole country, and he ruefully admits that he simply wasn't cool enough for it, and suffered through the kind of lovingly described inner turmoil only true nerds can summon. I thought it was a great look at a side of that scene you don't often see - not everyone was in a psychedelic rock band and scoring drugs like they were scoring women, and what was life like for those preterite losers? He makes the miserable pathos of his nerdhood come alive, hilariously dissecting his own failures with work, women, and the world around him with a sharp eye for all of the minor nuances around him, and a way of summing up people in a few words that you don't find very often. In particular his way of describing his own adolescent fantasies of power and revenge manages to be both funny and disturbing and pathetic and somehow almost lovable.
May 22, 2016
'There aint no justice'
An apt saying when one sees the adulation Karl Ove Knausgaard receives for books that are nowhere near a patch on the magnificent 'Pleasant Hell' by John Dolan, about the trials and tribulations of a swotty nerd, growing up in a San Francisco commuter suburb in the late 1960's to early 1970's.
John Dolan, an Irish American raised in the hot desert sun seemed to be a man who was born in the wrong place if not the wrong time. Dolan was at the epicentre of the The 'Flower Power' movement, which was in full force and Dolan was in love with the hippy girls, who, if they cared to admit it or not, were top of the tree in the hierarchy of the food chain, picking out their less than savoury counterparts instead of Dolan, this book is submerged in beautiful, humourous pathos, as the battle for social acceptance trundles from school, into university and into the world of work, his story of a night shift security guard being one of the many laugh out loud moments of the book.
The story has a happy ending, Dolan escaped the Pleasant Hell that entraps so many and went onto live a life more interesting and more rewarding than most of his contemporaries could ever dream of. But the fact remains that John Dolan just made a bad Californian, he would have made a far better Mancunian, Glaswegian or Sydneysider - however, if he had been born Norwegian - no-one would have heard of Karl Ove Knausgaard today.
An apt saying when one sees the adulation Karl Ove Knausgaard receives for books that are nowhere near a patch on the magnificent 'Pleasant Hell' by John Dolan, about the trials and tribulations of a swotty nerd, growing up in a San Francisco commuter suburb in the late 1960's to early 1970's.
John Dolan, an Irish American raised in the hot desert sun seemed to be a man who was born in the wrong place if not the wrong time. Dolan was at the epicentre of the The 'Flower Power' movement, which was in full force and Dolan was in love with the hippy girls, who, if they cared to admit it or not, were top of the tree in the hierarchy of the food chain, picking out their less than savoury counterparts instead of Dolan, this book is submerged in beautiful, humourous pathos, as the battle for social acceptance trundles from school, into university and into the world of work, his story of a night shift security guard being one of the many laugh out loud moments of the book.
The story has a happy ending, Dolan escaped the Pleasant Hell that entraps so many and went onto live a life more interesting and more rewarding than most of his contemporaries could ever dream of. But the fact remains that John Dolan just made a bad Californian, he would have made a far better Mancunian, Glaswegian or Sydneysider - however, if he had been born Norwegian - no-one would have heard of Karl Ove Knausgaard today.
August 28, 2013
Nerd-lit par excellence. Also: the autobiography disguised as novel. Nerds don't exist in popular culture like this. They are goofy but lovable. Geeky but cute. Good-looking but wear glasses. Are socially inept but get the girl. John is none of these things. John is painful to read about. This is cringe literature. Fun and frustrating to read. Also one of the most mesmerising novels I have ever read and the greatest tragedy is how tiny the number of people who will read this novel is going to be. This deserves to be huge. Read it read it read it.
November 16, 2007
i don't read a lot of fiction but i am a fan of dr. dolan's work on the exile at exile.ru. some say that he's the war nerd but gosh i don't know about that. if you wonder what it's like to feel out of place in the paradise of the san francisco bay area or if like me you don't have to wonder i promise that you will enjoy this book.
January 9, 2018
This book is extraordinarily important to me.
August 11, 2020
I'm a Dolan fan as a listener of the Radio War Nerd podcast, so my perspective on categorizing this as a must-read is biased. But this memoir is only partially "the birth of the War Nerd". Mostly, it's about dealing with social anxiety as a college student in northern California in the 70's. There's a lot more body odor, pus-filled foot sores, and masturbation than I expected in this memoir. But I deeply empathized with the protagonist's many internal monologues and worries and I felt like it was one of the best reflections of being human that I've seen written down.
There is no hero's journey here. That's for storybooks. This is a book for the little guy; not the underdog who eventually triumphs, but the one who never gets a movie made about him. The one who wishes he was part of the IRA or the Sinhalese Liberation Army so that he could die a martyr's death at the hands of the police and get in the papers. But in this life, in real life, nothing happens and nothing changes. It's much too much to ask for to die gloriously. Instead you have to live ignobly - as Dolan mentions throughout the book, there are no "quick cuts" and montages in real life like there are in the movies. The audience doesn't get to skip around and only see the highlights of action. There are instead long drawn-out phases of living when nothing in particular is happening. That's what life is made of and what is captured so well.
It's hard to tell exactly how "real" this memoir is. There is little character growth in this snippet of life, focused on ~1 year (probably compressed from real events taking place over a longer span for literary/plot purposes). I listened to the audiobook, narrated superbly by the author in first person, but even with that personal touch, I don't even know how much it is actually a reflection of reality. There are layers of self-deprecation and embellishment to get through first, so I hesitate to call the protaganist John Dolan himself. Even if it's all true with no embellishment, the author is decades older now - it's a familiar but entirely different character portrayed in the book than who "John Dolan" is.
While sometimes overwrought, I felt great empathy for young John's plights. Dolan recounts, in excruciating detail, the half-logical steps his young brain took while navigating unfamiliar social situations as an anxious and awkward young man. I recognize the same patterns from myself as a teenager or young college student: not quite sure how "other people" really work, not sure how to read and relate to social cues and how to act responsibly. He's good at ignoring problems in the hopes that they go away: I was very good at doing the same for a long time.
But in addition to being a deeply intimate portrait of this young man's particular neuroses, it's also a memoir about "Pleasant Hill" the (almost) titular setting of the book in the suburbs of Berkeley, California. Even from a working class background, Dolan describes the paradise of California in the 70's. I recognize it because it's the same setting as where+when my mother grew up and where+when my father moved to the US and fell in love with America. But Dolan, looking at heaven around him, is shut off from any meaningful social contact and lives mostly in his anxiety-laden mind. He creates for himself the Hell of the title, despite the pleasant surroundings. It's a good pun and also a good representative for the situation he finds himself in.
While young John is often pathetic [a prominent example being him pining after a young woman who is 1) already in a relationship 2) a lesbian and 3) spit on him one time], John Dolan-as-narrator gives the reader sufficient distance to not wallow in his incompetencies, low-self-esteem, and awkwardness. By seeing them one-step-removed, Dolan gets to have it both ways: the reader can recognize and empathize with young Dolan and yet still feel smug that we're not him by looking at him from a distance alongside Dolan the narrator. While sometimes there's a bit *too* much wallowing, on the whole it's well-written enough that none of this overstays its welcome.
I don't know if this book will resonate as well for others as it did for me. I too have some Irish blood in me, so I recognize the desire to lionize the IRA. I was an awkward, socially-anxious child with violent fantasies that were never acted on. I liked the study of war (for different reasons, but close enough). I never felt like I fit in with my peers and spent a lot of time second-guessing what to say inside my head. Maybe some of this is universal, but maybe it's just that I too am a War Nerd and so this cult classic hits very close to home simply because I'm member of the cult.
There is no hero's journey here. That's for storybooks. This is a book for the little guy; not the underdog who eventually triumphs, but the one who never gets a movie made about him. The one who wishes he was part of the IRA or the Sinhalese Liberation Army so that he could die a martyr's death at the hands of the police and get in the papers. But in this life, in real life, nothing happens and nothing changes. It's much too much to ask for to die gloriously. Instead you have to live ignobly - as Dolan mentions throughout the book, there are no "quick cuts" and montages in real life like there are in the movies. The audience doesn't get to skip around and only see the highlights of action. There are instead long drawn-out phases of living when nothing in particular is happening. That's what life is made of and what is captured so well.
It's hard to tell exactly how "real" this memoir is. There is little character growth in this snippet of life, focused on ~1 year (probably compressed from real events taking place over a longer span for literary/plot purposes). I listened to the audiobook, narrated superbly by the author in first person, but even with that personal touch, I don't even know how much it is actually a reflection of reality. There are layers of self-deprecation and embellishment to get through first, so I hesitate to call the protaganist John Dolan himself. Even if it's all true with no embellishment, the author is decades older now - it's a familiar but entirely different character portrayed in the book than who "John Dolan" is.
While sometimes overwrought, I felt great empathy for young John's plights. Dolan recounts, in excruciating detail, the half-logical steps his young brain took while navigating unfamiliar social situations as an anxious and awkward young man. I recognize the same patterns from myself as a teenager or young college student: not quite sure how "other people" really work, not sure how to read and relate to social cues and how to act responsibly. He's good at ignoring problems in the hopes that they go away: I was very good at doing the same for a long time.
But in addition to being a deeply intimate portrait of this young man's particular neuroses, it's also a memoir about "Pleasant Hill" the (almost) titular setting of the book in the suburbs of Berkeley, California. Even from a working class background, Dolan describes the paradise of California in the 70's. I recognize it because it's the same setting as where+when my mother grew up and where+when my father moved to the US and fell in love with America. But Dolan, looking at heaven around him, is shut off from any meaningful social contact and lives mostly in his anxiety-laden mind. He creates for himself the Hell of the title, despite the pleasant surroundings. It's a good pun and also a good representative for the situation he finds himself in.
While young John is often pathetic [a prominent example being him pining after a young woman who is 1) already in a relationship 2) a lesbian and 3) spit on him one time], John Dolan-as-narrator gives the reader sufficient distance to not wallow in his incompetencies, low-self-esteem, and awkwardness. By seeing them one-step-removed, Dolan gets to have it both ways: the reader can recognize and empathize with young Dolan and yet still feel smug that we're not him by looking at him from a distance alongside Dolan the narrator. While sometimes there's a bit *too* much wallowing, on the whole it's well-written enough that none of this overstays its welcome.
I don't know if this book will resonate as well for others as it did for me. I too have some Irish blood in me, so I recognize the desire to lionize the IRA. I was an awkward, socially-anxious child with violent fantasies that were never acted on. I liked the study of war (for different reasons, but close enough). I never felt like I fit in with my peers and spent a lot of time second-guessing what to say inside my head. Maybe some of this is universal, but maybe it's just that I too am a War Nerd and so this cult classic hits very close to home simply because I'm member of the cult.
May 31, 2024
Another book best experienced in audio- Dolan’s voice adds much needed emotional context to certain lines and chapters which would seem needlessly bitter (and often still are) without it. John’s saddened sorry voice makes for a great combination with his already apologetic writing, which switches between sadistic fantasy and the saddened reality of a bitter loner. His stories of childhood and college days in Pleasant Hell in Berkley prove all to relatable, even to the midwestern suburbanite. Meditations on some of his romantic “escapades” are interspersed with metaphors various historic and then-contemporary military references, along with his sort of “mental parliament,” a concept which has fascinated me as well. It’s hard not to relate to John as a bitter nerd myself, though there is also another reading, if the author doesn’t mind (he himself mentions the death of the author trope in the work-) but there is a reading of this as a suppressed trans woman (now. This is a very cheap read as well, while he himself wouldn’t acknowledge it, there is enough sprinkled throughout, especially in later sections. combine this with general autistic behavior, and well…) But perhaps I read too much into it. Certainly retroactive diagnosis is overused.
November 4, 2010
Dolan is a gifted essayist and idiosyncratic literary critic whose mordant humor makes his articles a joy to read. He doesn't sustain that level of quality over the length of this entire "novel" (really a memoir), but the reader will find plenty of moments to remember. The young Dolan of the 1970s is a loser, but by no stretch of the imagination is he a lovable one, and Dolan is at pains to make himself clear on that point: in fact, while he doesn't say so in so many words, the very point of this "novel" is that the "lovable loser" is a lie, and doesn't exist in real life.
April 27, 2011
Looking over the other reviews reveals how tempting it is to rate this book 4 stars. Dolan's prose is effortlessly brilliant - it seems to flow so easily that when Dolan stutters--as all writers do--it's instantly remarkable. On the other hand, very few books, and almost no contemporary books are able to sustain the sort of quality Dolan displays here. 5 stars despite that this is also a narrative failure . . . this is a beautiful failure
December 5, 2017
dolan is a fucking genious
March 10, 2023
Recommended to me by an old roommate. Cover looked awful and I put it off for a long time. Finally picked it up while clearing out some old books and had a blast.
January 7, 2021
This was one of the funniest books I've ever read. An unsentimental look at a Bay Area social misfit who gets a scholarship to Berkeley. The poor guy is constantly struggling to get enough money for a tank of gas and is hopeless with women. At one point he works the nightshift at a junkyard and survives on Snickers, calculating that it is the candy bar with the most nutrition. He goes to a karate class and his classmates social distance from him not because he is ill, but because he has such bad body odor. If I remember correctly, the sensei takes him aside and explains why this is happening. He showers so seldom that there are cobwebs in the shower. Is it a novel, or Dolan's autobiography? I don't really know, and it doesn't matter...what does matter is the humor and understanding Dolan brings to the character. No pity for this loser. The climax of the book (and I'll try not to give away any significant spoilers here) involves the protagonist somehow getting a "date" where he rides to San Francisco from Pleasant Hill (he calls it Pleasant Hell). The girls he accompanies studiously ignore him. Since his shower is full of cobwebs he used Vicks vaporub as a deodorant. His feet have sores from never changing his socks and the hobnails cutting into the bottoms of his feet. At one point he gets offended because one of the girls really likes MASH and apparently he had an uncle who served in Korea (yes, he's a war nerd too). Hilarity ensues. Highly recommended.
August 20, 2019
Set in the 70s, this thinly-at-the-atomic-level-veiled autobiographical novel is searing in its self-flagellation. Set primarily in San Fransisco as the summer of love stuttered to a halt, the author is lonely, socially awkward, and has feet that best avoid being described here.
It is honest (God help us if he's sugercoating what went on in his mind at the time) and insightful, albeit mostly in an insular way. When he interacts with other characters, the emphasis is on how they affected him rather than the other way round. He isn't totally unempathetic, but is still very insular minded.
It's a good earliesh insight into the loneliness that pervades many today, but it is unremitting in its navel gazing. Still worth a read at only 270 odd pages, and also worth noting that the author has gone on to carve out a reasonably successful career with some of the hottest geopolitical takes this side of Dr. Strangelove
It is honest (God help us if he's sugercoating what went on in his mind at the time) and insightful, albeit mostly in an insular way. When he interacts with other characters, the emphasis is on how they affected him rather than the other way round. He isn't totally unempathetic, but is still very insular minded.
It's a good earliesh insight into the loneliness that pervades many today, but it is unremitting in its navel gazing. Still worth a read at only 270 odd pages, and also worth noting that the author has gone on to carve out a reasonably successful career with some of the hottest geopolitical takes this side of Dr. Strangelove
December 29, 2021
Dolan's a brilliant cultural and literary critic and probably the finest American takedown artist since Ambrose Bierce (or H.L. Mencken), but he's only an *okay* poet and prose writer.
That's a shame.
Maybe as he reaches death, he'll get over his Cyril Connolly propensities and knock out a stone cold classic, instead of doing that "Enemies of Promise" thing, where he expounds on why he's failed to do so thus far (because of a George Costanzaesque blame of "society"), despite having it well within him.
Until then, we have this, and shit... it might as well be called "Confessions of The Zodiac Killer". Anyone check the stamps on the S.F. Chronicle envelope for this dude's DNA? Cuz after reading this, I'm hedging bets...
That's a shame.
Maybe as he reaches death, he'll get over his Cyril Connolly propensities and knock out a stone cold classic, instead of doing that "Enemies of Promise" thing, where he expounds on why he's failed to do so thus far (because of a George Costanzaesque blame of "society"), despite having it well within him.
Until then, we have this, and shit... it might as well be called "Confessions of The Zodiac Killer". Anyone check the stamps on the S.F. Chronicle envelope for this dude's DNA? Cuz after reading this, I'm hedging bets...
September 3, 2023
Pleasant Hell captures a misanthropic loneliness in a way that almost reads as if Dolan is writing a hit peace on himself. No excuses are given, instead the interior life and pathologies of a lonely kid are explored through the lens of a highly intelligent and funny autobiography. At points my heart broke for young John while also not being able to grasp why he couldn’t seize any form of initiative. From being surrounded by a halo of mold spores at karate class to being spit on by the girl who on a whim almost took his virginity, Dolan writes about adolescent humiliation in an amusing, but also deeply compelling way.
July 15, 2021
Extremely uncomfortable but hilarious and gripping, the trials of a lonely dipshit seem outrageous but also disturbingly relatable
September 2, 2021
This book should be mandatory reading for adolescents.
March 31, 2023
Stumbled upon this. Great writing. But not what I was looking for plot wise.
June 3, 2023
John Dolan, a spirit of our age
April 12, 2025
A subtle but vicious indictment of the hippies, and an excruciatingly painful account of Dolan’s coming of age in the Berkeley of the, I dunno, late sixties? The prose is great but the whole thing, a few funny segments excepted, is such a tremendous downer. Not something I was in the right mood for.
January 9, 2012
scabrous
January 13, 2012
The story of my people
Read
March 24, 2013Stunning.
GLORY TO MASTER DOLAN! GLORY TO LIFE!
GLORY TO MASTER DOLAN! GLORY TO LIFE!
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews