I Should Have Known Better

by William E. Jones

I Should Have Known Better is a sequel to the sleeper hit I'm Open to Anything (2019), expanding the original's scope and ambition. The new book has been produced entirely with the support of a crowdfunding campaign that reached five figures and 150% funding, an unprecedented accomplishment for a literary novel. I Should Have Known Better's first person narrator, while working at a dead-end job in Los Angeles during the mid-1990s, reconnects with his best friend Moira, recently returned from Central America, and makes a new friend, Bernie, who teaches the history of photography. The two of them convince him to pursue a master's degree as a way of escaping the unrewarding life of a video store clerk. Once the narrator is exposed to an academic environment, he takes a dim view of the education that art school has to offer, but is happy to meet a group of talented fellow students who become close friends. He encounters a number of art world figures, ranging from the brilliant to the abject, who disabuse him of his illusions. The narrator has his most instructive experiences off campus, especially a love affair with the handsome and mercurial Temo, an insolent rich kid who leads a double life. Together they explore their sexual limits in scenes of bracing explicitness. I Should Have Known Better bears witness to the last gasp of Los Angeles bohemia at the end of the twentieth century. The novel paints precise portraits of inspired eccentrics devoted to pursuing their dreams, "shopping artists" who believe in nothing but hedonism, and latter-day leftists who find themselves directionless after the fall of communism. Above all, the book pays tribute to the impulsive experiments and intense friendships of youth.

Genres: Queer, LGBT, Fiction, 21st Century, Gay, Sexuality

223 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2021

About the author

William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. He has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), and Imitation of Christ, a catalogue for the exhibition he curated at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2013. Recent books include Flesh and the Cosmos (2014) and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). His first novel, I'm Open to Anything, was published in early 2019. Jones's writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Animal Shelter, Area Sneaks, Artforum, Bidoun, Butt, Frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, and The White Review.

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Should Have Known Better picks up where I'm Open to Anything left off and, while it maintains the delicious perversity of that first novel, the fisting is much more muted here. Jones is an outstanding novelist and he excels at creating characters so vivid they almost walk off the page. Among those characters is the city of Los Angeles. If, like me, you missed out on the bohemian golden years before gentrification blighted this particular landscape, these novels recreate a lost time in sumptuous detail. The narrator we know only by his friend Moira's Spanished "Guillermito" goes to Cal Arts, works at a Communist bookshop, and falls in with a cast of misfits and oddballs of the sort people used to call "cards". The core system consists of our narrator, Winston Smith (an Albanian expat who named himself after the protagonist of 1984 without having read that book), and Gregorio (a New Mexico expat who was "one of those evil 12 year olds" who experiment early with sexuality and who falls in love with Winston at Cal Arts). This group is set spinning by the rogue planet, Cuauhtémoc, Temo for short. In his fascinating complexity and mystery, all of which is done in masterfully understated prose, Temo almost steals the show. The ending is one of those subtly brilliant denouements that lingers in the mind a long time after the novel is closed.

Take a chance on these books. I'd wager you'll be happy you did.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt probably one of the great books to come out of Cal-Arts as pure enjoyable literature. A page-turner througout the beginning to the very end. It should be required reading for students of all stripes and forms. I can see his works being taught in future classes. It will be only a decade or two, before the Library of America put out a volume of his collected writings.

[Dennis Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart and smutty.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this more than I'm Open to Anything. Both novels feature an unnamed narrator who is quite similar to the author, and real people (the photographer Brian Weil, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, etc) are gossiped about and/or make appearances; hard to tell how much of either book is autobiographical. The cast is larger and more colorful, there's more art gossip/chatter, and the sex is more ummm diverse.

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart and sexy. A true triumph.

[Dan Humphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book very slowly not because I didn’t like it, but because I loved it. At some point I realized I was getting close to being done and I didn’t wanna have to go to bed at night without reading a few pages about these wonderful characters. William Jones uses an unfussy straightforward style that isn’t trying to wow you with complex sentence structures or a sophisticated vocabulary. There are no rich allegories or evocative symbols, it’s just a beautiful story about a young adults’ coming of age. It absolutely makes you feel like you’re a part of the late 90s LA queer art scene, and the rich humanism of the author, continuing the narrative he started with I’M OPEN TO ANYTHING, makes you smile throughout. I can hardly wait for the next book in the series.

[Nick Melloan-ruiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect I can’t wait for more!

[Shadib Bin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m Open to Anything & I Should Have Known Better

This is a combined review of both of the books - Open at 3/5, and Better at 2/5.

Overall, it’s an interesting structure and story telling. I found Open more compelling. I feel like the author lost a bit of his steam in the second book, as it really started to feel disjointed and haphazard.

Open went into territories that may have been too much and very bleak, but it was fascinating at times. I wish the author actually explored more of the notorious or obscure people he is obsessed by, through these characters.

I think the arms length attitude of the protagonist - in personality and the authors writing style - I believe did more harm than good. You are left feeling not much for anyone - especially the protagonist. Maybe that was intentional but it became a chore by the end to finish the book.

I appreciated the overall art school overview - it was something I wondered myself and glad this subset of people was more interested in actually creating work and fucking each other openly, and not the horrors I have recently experienced with some folks who claim to be part of the art world - where they are obsessed with just saying the word more than actually doing the work (whatever form that may be).

I don’t know if I’d have the energy to read anymore of this series - sorry. But I am keen on the authors more non-fictional work. I feel like that’s where the meat is.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Should Have Known Better is Jones’s second roman à clef, this one focusing on the two years of an MFA program and the friendships that develop among three gay men and a woman. Jones has said that he wanted to write a novel in the tradition of something Paris’s Olympia Press would publish, in which books were often as literary as they were smutty. And I think he succeeds: Art theory meets Crisco-coated anal fist fucking (spoiler alert!) and intelligent salaciousness and caprice.

There’s more discourse than intercourse in this book, however, and some real-world art heavies stop by campus—Cal Arts—to lecture and evaluate portfolios. Names are named, their work and opinions assessed (and often found wanting), described in terms of disappointment, dismissal, or adoration. Even without knowing anything about the ‘90s-era LA art scene, which I don’t, I’m sure I’d be able to reconstruct a score card of the time from the gossip bandied about by the novel’s friends, the parties and galleries they attend, and the type of curriculum they study.

Jones’s story-telling skills stumble, however, when he describes one character’s Balkan-Serbian backstory. When he does so, the novel’s momentum is replaced by lengthy throat-clearing as the narrator gets readers up to speed. Backstories can be difficult to work in, especially on a subject one can’t assume the general reader will know anything about. Not that this book is for the “general reader.”

I confess to knowing nothing about Jones’s video art or his essays. The novel stands on its own, although for those in the know, those able to connect the dots and read between the lines and whatever clichéd metaphor of cognition I’ve overlooked, there are probably more knowing nods to people and events than I can spot.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as the first in the trilogy. I find Jones' writing style rather stiff and wooden.. the dialogue is very dry. Even the sex scenes were weirdly dry in this one. Also, having gone to art school, I thought his description of grad school experience was mostly very boring. There are one or two memorable characters and I appreciate Jones perspective on socialism, but overall the book could have been more compelling if the story was weighted differently and told more descriptively.

[Andy Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read. Engaged immediately with the characters - felt almost episodic just in sense that it felt with each book that it’s new set of characters revolving around our main which I enjoy/feels true to life especially while younger.

Felt actually queer too which is rare when everything is so sanitized

[Marinello · Rating 5 out of 5]

So cool and effortless, a true education(but sexy)

[Reynita428 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a vivid portrayal of the 90s LA arts scene.