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Confederates
Jay loves women. Jay loves sex. Jay loves intimacy and acceptance. That is what Jay wants more than anything else in the world.
Jay is dying, and slides in and out of reality. His whole life has slid in and out of reality... geez. All his life people have been scheming about him and tracking his every move.
What Jay needs is to take control, of his life and of many other things. And he does.
Jay is dying, and slides in and out of reality. His whole life has slid in and out of reality... geez. All his life people have been scheming about him and tracking his every move.
What Jay needs is to take control, of his life and of many other things. And he does.
194 pages, Paperback
First published June 25, 2008
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April 15, 2010
Wilson Smith, Confederates (Lulu, 2008)
Okay, I admit it. I fail. I have been trying (actively trying, not putting it on the shelf and not looking at it) to write a review of Confederates for almost six months now. I had a really kick-ass first paragraph, and for the life of me I couldn't come up with anything to follow it. So this may end up being a five-hundred-word whine about how hard it is to be a reviewer rather than anything at all having to do with the damn book. I apologize in advance.
You see, I know Wilson Smith. Not personal-like, over the Internet. But still. We have some friends-of-friends I do know IRL (including at least one who's in this book). And that makes my job reviewing this book ten times tougher, because I have a base idea of what's fiction and what's not. And like a Charles Bukowski novel, you know “fiction” is a very slippery line when reading. (It's quite probable there's more actual truth—as in “stuff that really happened”—in Confederates than there is in any of those hotly-disputed million-selling memoirs you've been hearing about.) The Bukowski comparison is not thrown lightly, by the by. Wilson Smith is a good, solid writer, as previously demonstrated in the memoir Just Dirt, and Confederates, lest I forget to say this at the end, is well worth your time. Smith isn't quite as obsessed with booze as Buk was, and that's a good thing, but the sort of meandering, lazy plot that has more to do with examining life than trying to shoehorn it into a series of events? That's Smith all the way, just as it was in, say, Factotum.
And now I'm reading back over that paragraph and feel the need to add that this isn't a bargain-basement Henry Chinaski knockoff. And hopefully that's all I need to say about that.
Because of that lazy, meandering plot thing, I'm not even going to attempt a synopsis. You need to know this is a book about a guy, and that he's kind of paranoid (though honestly I don't think he's as crazy as he thinks; don't we all feel people are out to get us?), and that his paranoia is a stumbling block in his ability to form meaningful relationships with people, though he's enough of an optimist to not stop trying, even when the person he's trying with is, in his mind, a member of the Evil Empire that's after him. Which is pretty awesome, if you think about it.
All this leads to the question: how much of Jay is actually Wilson Smith? I remember some of these events. I know some is. But I don't know how much. How much of Post Office was Bukowski? Or, from the other end of the spectrum (and Smith being a memoirist, this is germane), how much of Running with Scissors was Augusten Burroughs? There's a point, and to me it's far more forgivable in fiction than in memoir, where you have to just stop asking the question and roll with it. That's what makes Henry Chinaski such an enduring character in American letters. Does Jay deserve the same notoriety? I'll leave that to the individual reader to decide, but I liked this one a bunch. A main character one can empathize with, dryly humorous situations, a roadtrip, and music criticism; how much more can you ask for? Pick this up. *** ½
Okay, I admit it. I fail. I have been trying (actively trying, not putting it on the shelf and not looking at it) to write a review of Confederates for almost six months now. I had a really kick-ass first paragraph, and for the life of me I couldn't come up with anything to follow it. So this may end up being a five-hundred-word whine about how hard it is to be a reviewer rather than anything at all having to do with the damn book. I apologize in advance.
You see, I know Wilson Smith. Not personal-like, over the Internet. But still. We have some friends-of-friends I do know IRL (including at least one who's in this book). And that makes my job reviewing this book ten times tougher, because I have a base idea of what's fiction and what's not. And like a Charles Bukowski novel, you know “fiction” is a very slippery line when reading. (It's quite probable there's more actual truth—as in “stuff that really happened”—in Confederates than there is in any of those hotly-disputed million-selling memoirs you've been hearing about.) The Bukowski comparison is not thrown lightly, by the by. Wilson Smith is a good, solid writer, as previously demonstrated in the memoir Just Dirt, and Confederates, lest I forget to say this at the end, is well worth your time. Smith isn't quite as obsessed with booze as Buk was, and that's a good thing, but the sort of meandering, lazy plot that has more to do with examining life than trying to shoehorn it into a series of events? That's Smith all the way, just as it was in, say, Factotum.
And now I'm reading back over that paragraph and feel the need to add that this isn't a bargain-basement Henry Chinaski knockoff. And hopefully that's all I need to say about that.
Because of that lazy, meandering plot thing, I'm not even going to attempt a synopsis. You need to know this is a book about a guy, and that he's kind of paranoid (though honestly I don't think he's as crazy as he thinks; don't we all feel people are out to get us?), and that his paranoia is a stumbling block in his ability to form meaningful relationships with people, though he's enough of an optimist to not stop trying, even when the person he's trying with is, in his mind, a member of the Evil Empire that's after him. Which is pretty awesome, if you think about it.
All this leads to the question: how much of Jay is actually Wilson Smith? I remember some of these events. I know some is. But I don't know how much. How much of Post Office was Bukowski? Or, from the other end of the spectrum (and Smith being a memoirist, this is germane), how much of Running with Scissors was Augusten Burroughs? There's a point, and to me it's far more forgivable in fiction than in memoir, where you have to just stop asking the question and roll with it. That's what makes Henry Chinaski such an enduring character in American letters. Does Jay deserve the same notoriety? I'll leave that to the individual reader to decide, but I liked this one a bunch. A main character one can empathize with, dryly humorous situations, a roadtrip, and music criticism; how much more can you ask for? Pick this up. *** ½
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