Originally published in Verbicide issue #15

Manic D Press, 192 pages, paperback, $11.95

Has anyone ever seen Boogie Nights? You know, that movie with Marky Mark? That movie was like three hours. Don’t you think it would’ve have been better if it were less than two, especially since it had so many pretentious, unnecessary scenes in it? (Like that pompous head shot of Dirk Diggler listening to “Jessie’s Girl” for, what? Two minutes? Unreal.) This is what reading this book was like: goodness ruined by excessiveness. This book is a perfect case study of what happens when a good writer doesn’t cut out irrelevant characters, paragraphs, and even entire chapters.

Two apparent faults of this book are that there’s too much focus on characterization without a meaningful context and over-characterization of irrelevant characters. There’s no focus at all on plot and story. (Therefore, I can’t tell you what this book is about.) The first few characters we’re introduced to—Dada Trash, Roth Forjic, and T2000—are characterized well. Longhi has a talent for shaping a character through his or her quirks. The sad part is that Longhi only goes halfway: he fails to further develop the characters by having them interact meaningfully with each other or even place them within the confines of a plot. As the “novel” progresses, we’re introduced to characters that don’t even contribute to the plot—assuming that there is one. I just laughed at a funny little quirk or the anecdote that they were involved in and then forgot about them, moving onto the next eccentric, whom I had also forgotten. Oftentimes, there were paragraphs that came out of nowhere. The novel then suddenly went onto something else. It left me jarred, wondering, “Okay, what was the point of that?” This book all seems like a collection of anecdotes that Longhi decided to transform into a novel, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this book was derived from scribblings of quirky people Longhi had met or funny stories he had heard and then had later decided to throw together in the guise of a novel. If that’s the case, this endeavor would’ve worked much better as a sketchbook. But even if it is or isn’t, this is still the sloppiest book I’ve ever read.

Another complaint I have is about all the drugs I had to read about. There’s just so much I can take with yet another book with characters doing drugs, dope, and depressants. It’s so lame and bush league when a book namedrops drugs I’ve never heard of. It makes me feel like I’m the “square” because I’m not “in the know.” (Sorry that I’m not hip on the lingo, guys. I didn’t go to Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.) At times, I felt like I needed a damn pharmacist’s handbook to understand what the hell was going on. It’s gimmicks like this that render literature inaccessible and question a writer’s intent. It’s not fair to the reader who is being asked by a writer to devote time and imagination into reading his or her book. (A good writer should always bear this in mind: a reader is being asked to sacrifice a lot of effort by the writer and must therefore be respected. Good writers don’t produce beer commercials or third-rate sitcoms.)

This is all too bad too because Longhi is definitely a talented writer. The characterization of the narrator’s grandmother and how he related to her is superb writing: “…Each of us is filled with a great rising up of generations. The lives and loves of all those who have gone before are encoded in us right down to the level of our chromosomes. So in a sense, Grandma was not yet gone, she lived on in all of us gathered there for her funeral. She would always exist in our blood and memories. If lives were judged by what flowed through them then we had just seen the passing of a great and radiant light.” And this: “He never did find the light at the end of the tunnel but he and his companion did eventually find sleep. It came as a blissful nothingness. A healing silence. Like the snuffing out of a candle.”

As I write this, I’m stunned that these lines (there are lots more of them) came from the same book that I’m giving a bad review for. All this excellent writing gets choked up in the sludge of excessive writing and just plain stupid characters, and any sharpness the good writing could possibly have is dulled by the careless editing. Case in point: the narrator goes into contemplative states throughout the “novel,” one of them being this: “That year aged me. For the first time I felt the rot in my flesh, the erosion of moving through so many years.” After reading reams of chapters slopped together randomly that any responsible writer would’ve cut out, I just didn’t give a shit. This book will make you laugh, but it won’t make you care.