Sunday 14 April 2013

Lost Souls, Poppy Z Brite


I had to read this book for English, one day, and I must say I don’t much like gothic novels or commercial fiction influenced by them.

To begin with, I guess you could say that Poppy Z Brite successfully manages to incorporate the gothic into this novel with its romantic egotism and horrific squeamish aspects.

I guess you could even describe it as poetic.

I must admit that it’s a good composition, but that’s about all the compliments I’m going to give Lost Souls.

When I first picked up the book, I thought it was very pretty. The style is immediately sensory and visceral, primarily visual and gustatory – but there is too much of it. A good word to describe it would be ‘indulgent’, as the writer seems to focus in on beauty and eroticism.  This could be exemplified by the power play – things are always described from the perspective of the perpetrator and never the victim, never the subject of abuse, unless it is self-inflicted, in which case it just appears autoerotic, and the whole thing reads like a sick fantasy.

I think it’s quite accurate to say that the narrator seems to have forgotten the story – Poppy Z Brite has a tendency to name-drop pretty words, to the extent that she forgets her direction, and her ‘fancy mad-lib’, while adding to the surreal, trancelike aura is weak and almost childish in its seeming attempt to impress. For example, in the beginning of the book, in her description of the French Quarter at Mardi Gras, she elaborates that ‘the liquor flows like milk’. She later repeats this epithet in her epilogue fifty years later, but the epic simile is weak and only makes it sound as if she has run out of words. Cheap.

The sense I get from the novel is of whiny, pretentious teenage angst wrapped in layers of purple prose. I find how Poppy Z Brite revels in making all her characters the outsiders, the ‘rejects’, exceptionally cutesy and, naturally, annoying. Half the time, her attempts to add to the atmosphere are simply irritating. For example, once Steve and Ghost see a ‘mysterious’ Cartesian sign on a car wash that serves no purpose.  And then they decide to drive up a hill, to ‘see the stars’. Such trash.

And oh my, the characters are so flat that using them as a slide would only cause negligible friction. I’m sure you understand why it is difficult to sympathise with: a) teenage characters who whine about their parents not understanding them, b) stereotypical bastards who don’t care what havoc they wreak on others’ lives, c) his mindless cronies, and d) girls who live for the attention of guys they barely know – that’s another thing that annoys me about the book: I’m in no way a feminist and I don’t claim to be the best of daughters, but Poppy Z Brite just irritates me with how she puts down women and parents. It just strikes me as childish, which is pretty funny, because I really doubt that it was her intention to sound like a confused child.

Furthermore, I don’t understand why all her characters are gay and paedophilic and incestuous. I was bored, so I looked her up, and in her website I found a question the reply to which made her look extremely childish. In her FAQs someone asked why she wrote about gay characters, and she rebutted this by asking why other people wrote about straight characters, claiming to connect with these gay ones more. Well. I normally wouldn’t see that as a problem, except for the fact that every-fucking-body in your novel is bisexual. I think that’s a little unrealistic. Just a little.

Superficially, it reminds me of Francesca Lia Block in its pretentiousness and shallowness and indulgence, which I think is ironic as Poppy Z Brite is said to find her ‘loathsome’. How does she resemble Francesca Lia Block? Well, firstly you have the pretentious names: Nothing, Weetzie Bat, Ghost, Witch Baby, Zillah, My Secret Agent Lover Man…&c. Exhibit A. You can also see that their writing – let’s say Lost Souls and Weetzie Bat – came from the same place. The tone is trancelike, dreamlike, surreal, spoken in a childish and lost and uncertain voice, and you get the both of them telling you to live in the moment. They’re written in completely different styles though, besides the postmodernism and the fact that neither sound very much like they know what they’re talking about – Francesca Lia Block makes up things as she goes along, trying to sound hip and cool and modern as possible, while Lost Souls is just a jumble of pretty words, arguably more pretentious than Weetzie Bat.

You couldn’t really compare Lost Souls to Interview with the Vampire – it’s like comparing Twilight to Frankenstein: it doesn’t quite work out. But let’s just conclude that none of these mentioned authors have much style or even simply any writing ability and go to sleep, before I get so annoyed by all this crap and end up stabbing someone. 

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