About Face

by William Giraldi

A tragicomic novel of a fame-obsessed American society yet again on the brink. Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi’s About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face. Assigned to write a profile of Val Face during his much-hyped New England tour, thirty-year-old impoverished journalist Seger Jovi pens a brutal hatchet job. But Seger, at once curious and incredulous, is soon sucked into the mystic’s vortex of fame, becoming a devotee himself as he contends with the machinations and absurdities of Face’s many protectors, from beefcake bodyguards to helicoptering handlers to Face’s unwavering spouse, Nimble. At first unwilling to sacrifice his principles to fulfill his own ambition and rise from privation, then touched by Face’s unexpected humanity, Seger oscillates between acting as Face’s cynical foil and becoming his unlikely ally. Just as the exalted guru appears to be reaching the apex of his powers, danger threatens from the periphery in the form of an obsessive stalker who wants Face dead. To curb this stalker before he can do harm, Face’s security team enlists the aid of Jackie Jaworski, an ex-Marine and resourceful Boston detective who moonlights as a novelist of thrillers. And so About Face , building to a denouement that will astonish readers, takes us into the convergence of violence and fame that has come to define so much of American popular culture over the last half-century. With its indelible array of characters, hypnotic pacing, and shocking conclusion―and “a mesmerizing prose style that is downright pyrotechnic in its brilliance” (Andre Dubus III)― About Face is a novel in the grand tradition that dances along the tenuous line between the sacred and the profane.

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Novels

384 pages, Paperback

Published October 24, 2023

About the author

William Giraldi is author of the novels Busy Monsters, Hold the Dark (now a Netflix film), and About Face, the memoir The Hero's Body, and a collection of literary criticism, American Audacity (all published by W.W. Norton). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is Master Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.

Reviews

[viktor · Rating 1 out of 5]

you may be asking, "viktor, why, if you hated this book so much, did you read it in a day and a half?" well, firstly, it's spring break and i have nothing to do, and secondly, haterism is my passion. indulge me.
the first thing i noticed about this book is william giraldi's deep, almost carnal love of the thesaurus. he's doing a lot to make these sentences as unique and erudite as possible, but no amount of grasping for obscure synonyms can make up for the utterly nothing plot! nothing in this book ever surprised me. from page one you could form an accurate summary of the books events. no twists. no inversions. no mystery. nothing to reward the reader for the herculean effort of slogging through 400 pages of bullshit. every scene is predictable, and yet takes as long as possible to get to the damn point and let me move on with my life. the characters were empty and lifeless, and this emptiness wasn't justified by any real satirical point. in fact there's about as depth in this whole book as there is in a puddle, even when said puddle is located on the most bostony boston street.
the main character of this book is (say it with me) a writerrrr, so of course the narration has to be packed with the most exhausting, simultaneously cringingly self deprecating and masturbatory writery writerisms on earth. if that's not enough, he's also totally obsessed with boston. if you took a shot every time boston, bostonians (kill me), or weird references to the puritans/founding fathers/general east coast American history worship, you would be dead from alcohol poisoning by the time you reached chapter two. the combination of the hypermodern celebrity culture setting and constant references to 80s male popstars produced a sort of cultural headache, and since i don't care about bruce springsteen or bon jovi i felt totally left in the dust. all these things that i just described are probably supposed to make the book funny. funny it was not.
it may be uncharitable to declare something a failed satire because it is unfunny, but i'm tired of being charitable. i'd go so far as to say that this book isn't merely a failed satire, but just a general, run-of-the-mill, all-around failure.

[Matthew Blum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this masterpiece.
Gonna hit some points/add to this review asap.

All right: Won this in a Goodreads giveaway. Man, did I luck out because this William Giraldi can write up a storm! The thematics and electric prose work in a symbiosis that bolster and enhance each other, and I gotta say, this Giraldi is a novelist I’m gonna be reading henceforth.

Ok, with that said, lemme throw out a few (hopefully non-spoiler) little passages that blew me out of the water with this shark-remora symbiosis I (in a vague way) mentioned above:

This one is kinda my overall reaction to the novel:

“There just was no getting used to what you weren’t used to seeing, even if you kept seeing it”
(Obviously I mean this in the best light)

“Honey, therapy’s cheap. Therapy’s a racket, you ask me. Val doesn’t do that. He’s not a therapist or guru or anything like that. He really is, as he says, he really is a charismatic, and so that’s why I can’t fully explain it. Like a magician, right? You love what they’re doing but you can’t explain it, and if you could explain it, you wouldn’t love it anymore. It’s like that with Val.”

“I did have a purgatorial hour last night before I dropped off, true. Fork in the road, as it were. To mix my metaphors. Unless, I suppose the fork in the road is in purgatory, though I don’t know the highway systems down there.”

This one for pure cheeky wordplay:

“. . . ‘I’ll have my people arrange it with yours. It’s my people’s people who’re handling this one, so have your people or people’s people reach out to my people’s people’”.

The Springsteen album debate, the meatball breakdown (I’ll not say anymore).

I’ll leave off with this as my praise for William Giraldi and his (look: it’s my own damn opinion, Masterpiece novel) straight from the horses mouth—or his protagonist’s mouth:

“The racket of self-emphasized humility: praise a guy for something praiseworthy and he tells you he isn’t worthy of the praise, which causes you to praise him all over again, so humble is he. . .”

Praise or whatever, I was captured by this novel.

[Estibaliz · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Thanks to Liveright Publishing and Goodreads for providing me with an Advance Reading Copy of this novel, scheduled to hit the market in a couple of months time, September 6th 2022. Here goes my honest review...-

This was definitely a mixed bag. I struggled some with it in the first half, but ended up growing quite fond of the story and the characters, even though I mostly hated them, to be honest.

My main problem with this story is its verbiage: tons and tons of unnecessary words, sentences and pages, too much beating around the bush to convey just a couple basic ideas regarding fame and human nature (yes, there's some interesting ideas here, but they are not as far as profound as the author wants them to be... or makes them look like).

Now, the thing is this story is narrated in the first person, our storyteller being the royal scribe Seger Jovi, who is basically a contradictory doofus; a writer that certainly has lots of trouble with oral communication, and is in the clumsy side, with a very grandiose idea of himself and his talents. This results in the most tedious prose at times, with endless pointless sentences and lots of learned words here and there. And while I can admit this is very fitting when considering the kind of personality that is telling the story, I also felt that it was just excessive and had me questioning if the author can really write in a different manner... and one more relatable at that.

Actually, here's what another reader had to say regarding one of Giraldi's previous works, 'Hold the Dark: "Giraldi wrote this book as if he had a thesaurus on his lap and burning desire to use every adjective and adverb he could find." I sure agree with this idea, which just makes me feel that the affectation of Seger is actually that of his creator, and this certainly is a minor issue for me as a reader (and yes, I will admit this probably has a lot to do with the fact that English is my second language... but still, I rarely have to go check the dictionary as often as I had to while reading this, if ever).

So, all in all and as I said at the beginning, a mixed bag. Some interesting ideas here, but nothing revolutionary, and some odd characters that are sure worth the reading, if only for their clownish value. All in all, it was entertaining enough, regardless of it being too heavy handed on the elaborate vocabulary.

Wouldn't go running to get another title by the same author...

[TC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended.

Review posted at Tzer Island book blog:

https://www.tzerisland.com/bookblog/2...

[Jennifer Spiegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to say stuff like I'm Giraldi's biggest fan, though it's a lie because I haven't read all of his books. I don't know how this lie began. I really, REALLY liked BUSY MONSTERS in 2011, and I made my husband -- who only reads nonfiction except for my stuff BECAUSE HE HAS TO -- read it. Don't know why I was so smitten. But since then, I've periodically made attempts to get Giraldi to blurb whatever minute book I have on the table at the time. (It has not worked thus far.)

Which leads me to this novel, a decidedly Boston novel--and you gotta love that.

It abounds in truths/secrets/lies as it follows a hyper-smart Bostonian journalist in his assignment to cover out-of-control famous VERY HOT celeb, Val Face--who, I guess, is famous for charisma? Like, the guru-zen of him seems to outweigh any other quality he might have? He fills stadiums with his BIG TALK and pretty face. (I actually needed to get this a bit better. Like, he did movies? )

But the truths about celebrity and contemporary culture and how we derive meaning are here, and the prose sizzles. I mean, it POSITIVELY SIZZLES.

This might be a mixed review. These are the things I might say:
--I'd give it 5 stars for its sentence-level perfection. Reading Giraldi is like reading a literary genius. No exaggeration. The individual sentence can be a beautiful thing. I read this is short bursts of many pages at a time, and those sentences were HYPNOTIC.
--I kinda felt, because it is pretty long, that there was a lot of nothing much happening, until something suddenly does . . .
--And then it ends prematurely. I still wanted to go a little further.
What did I learn or think newly upon with this? Listen, I'm practically a fake (so fake) Luddite these days when I discuss Tiktok with my teens, so I do think about this stuff, frankly. Despite my rants, however, there ain't no way I'm going off the grid, which is probably why I was very into this meditation on fame and celebrity, set in Boston. Yeah, let's stay in the City, friends.

Nice quote: ". . . their earbuds were attached to them like signs that said No Trespassing. Or else No Vacancy. Earbuds are the new veils. I CAN'T HEAR YOU now means YOU CAN'T SEE ME. Hawthorne would have written a story about earbuds in New England that connected them to Puritan dysfunction: 'The Minister's Earbuds,' he would have called it."

MAY I SAY THAT HATE WHEN MY KIDS WEAR EARBUDS?

AND, Ironically, I'm moving to MA in 2025 because the nonfiction-reading husband craves a return home. My caveat: close to Boston, please.

Five stars for Giraldi.

[Judy Lacourciere · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved "Hold the Dark." Giraldi said so much by saying so little. I couldn't put it down. So I was pretty excited to read "About Face," until I started reading it. It's basically the polar opposite of that other book--he never shuts up. 100 pages in, I felt too claustrophobic to keep going. Giraldi's definitely a terrific writer, and if I go by the accolades on the book's cover, I wonder what I'm missing.

Of course, expecting every book an author writes to be the same book with different characters is asking for trouble, right? Now I know better.

[Jaylianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book in a giveaway from Liveright Publishing and Goodreads, and I’m so glad because I loved this book so much! I sorta hated Val Face in the beginning for his hypocrisy, he demonized social media and yet that was how he found his start, and he just seemed like you the stereotypical celebrity who was just faking for the fame. However the readers get to see who he really is towards the end of the book, and that he never really expected his life to spin out of his control, like it has. I could understand and sympathize with him, because we get to see a side of celebrities that we usually don’t get to see. However I don’t think this excuses any of their behavior or applies to he large majority of them, but Face is a man who truly wanted to have real human convections with real people, and although he enjoyed the fame it wasn’t what he truly was after when he started his journey. Seger Jovi was the normal person in the chaos that surround Face and allowed us to see how crazy of world he really lived in. I also believe he was what helped Face to come to terms with what he wanted and the drastic action he would have to take to escape the life he was in, although he may have been contemplating this for a long time. There were many memorable quotes from this book, and it was a compelling commentary for on celebrity culture. My only complaint with this book was the amount of times I had to check my dictionary, but this sort of language seems very fitting for the main character, and on the bright side my vocabulary definitely expanded. Overall I definitely loved this book though.

[Karen M · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia charisma is compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others. It seems charisma is maybe luck of the genes or a personality which is cultivated to please others but there has to be more to it than just that.

I love descriptive language and this book made my heart flutter with the joy of words. The storyline was creative but far more important it addresses what is going on right now. People who are held up as “special” simply because they have what their followers do not, fame, fortune, and recognition, deserved or not. Well developed characters who were not very likeable but I truly liked this story.

This book is about charisma and just how powerful it can be when surrounded by those who find it irresistible. A charismatic person is surrounded by pandering servants who believe in the person, whoever they maybe, believe in the cause, whatever it may be and what started out as small and, perhaps even sincere, can be pushed to the limits beyond which even the charismatic has any desire to go. This is the story of such a person told by one who begins on the outside but is quickly absorbed into a lifestyle never dreamed of by this lowly personage. The end may surprise some but not others but it is still an enjoyable journey to the land of charisma.

I won this ARC in a First Reads giveaway. Thank you to Liveright Publishing Corp and the author, William Giraldi.

[James Worth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cuppa tea. Although it is well written, I just could not get into the narrator/protag’s language. I know it was supposed to be satirical but he spoke like a 1920’s auctioneer and it just wasn’t as endearing as I think the author was going for. Not much happens plotwise and when it does, it falls flat. Really nothing too interesting to say about celebrity and fame culture. A couple of funny lines though, I was tickled at times! Mostly bored though and again, opposed to the narrator’s rambling nature.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This came recommended, but was disappointing. It has some obvious things to say about celebrity culture wrapped up in a so-so plot about a charismatic motivational speaker. So many scenes went on for pages and pages without moving forward (was the author stuck?). e.g. five pages of two characters arguing about Springsteen albums, or four pages of a character taking food from a buffet, dialogue that was supposed to be funny but wasn't. By the end, I was speed reading just to finish.

[Matthew Yeldon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I expected. I enjoyed Giraldi’s previous novels, but this one fails to deliver something as deep as the premise suggests and succeeds mostly at being a comedy, its narrator being more of a bumbling inconsequentiality who makes more throwaway observations than astute, relevant ones. And it all ends in a lack of promised poignancy. It does succeed at capturing our fascination with celebrity, our reliance on social media, and our dumbass herd mentality.

[Julie Kleckner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the writing a little hard to read at times but it was an interesting story. I didn't know where he was going with this but had to keep reading to find out. Face is not the most likable person on the surface but you start to see a different side to him as the story progresses.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF @ 50%
I can't tell if the MC is intentionally annoying or not, but he certainly succeeds in frustrating me. That, combined with the boring plot line, made it hard for me to get motivation to read this.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sorry, when I start a book and in the first two pages there are already a dozen unusual adjectives and bizarre verbs, all making for jerky reading, and all designed to make the writer sound erudite or clever....I laugh and put it down.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. There were a few scenarios that were ridiculous and I had to skip - getting the food to the bus. The main character paid close attention to so many details and then couldn’t get the fashion thing right. I enjoyed the writing and was annoyed when it dipped into absurdity. Fun ending.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't blow me away but did make me laugh aloud a couple of times. The book is trying to comment on celebrity culture but I don't think the plot supports what its trying to do; it's too out there while also not being out there enough. Still, overall the story has its moments.

[M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a good read.

[Pamela Vicik-smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I have ever read. The writing just rambled with meaningless prose and the narrator was insufferably annoying. Could hardly wait to finish it so I could read something else.

[Brianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super slow to start, but picked up about halfway through the book. Based on the description, it had great promise, but didn't really deliver. It felt like a rushed ending with too much lead up.

[Tiandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book in a giveaway. It wasn't for me. I couldn't get into the dialogue or writing. The plot didn't catch me either.