Helvetica
I just finished Arthur Nersesian’s Dogrun, which he wrote after The Fuck-Up. I think it’s the first bad book I’ve read in a while.
Although it’s speckled with trademark Nersesian wordplay—he calls kids who work in corporate retail “the disenfranchised”—I found the story boring and didn’t really care for the protagonist.
Aside: some genius at Pocket Books decided to set the print in Helvetica. It’s pretty much unreadable. Apparently it has more attitude or something.
Anyway, this is only notable for a couple reasons. One, I consume so few books (maybe one every few weeks, compared to music: a few albums per week) that I can afford to mostly only read what’s personally recommended to me by others.
Second, The Fuck-Up is incredible. I remember finishing it in December, and I was dumbstruck. I just sat there staring for a couple hours.
It’s a story about an East Village kid who goes through one loss after another, until he loses everything, including the boundaries of his value system. As the narrator is, well, fucking up, I was jealous. I wanted to feel that raw, to sleep on the streets of New York, faced with the sum of the modern world’s production, and owning none of it. I guess that’s suicidally irrational.
As always, the problem is that we always want what we can’t have. It destroys whole civilizations as easily as relationships, and right then, it was destroying me. #