In general, though, even with my
newfound semi-appreciation for fruit, I still categorically dislike it based on
principle. The thing about fruit is,
it’s so hard to get a really good piece.
There’s no good way to gage the quality.
Jerry Seinfeld put it best in the season two episode “The Ex-Girlfriend”
when he said “I don’t return fruit.
Fruit’s a gamble. I know that
going in.” You can’t tell the quality
just by looking at it, that’s for sure. The
fruit with the prettiest peel is often flavorless and gross. The best example of this is the red delicious
apples we all used to get in our school lunches – a gorgeous deep ruby red on
the outside, uncooked mealy potato texture and no taste inside.
Until today, I thought “God Told Me
To” by C.K. Chandler, based on the screenplay by Larry Cohen, was the red
delicious apple of Rumpus Room Reads.
The cover seems created specifically to draw me, Abigail Isaacoff, into
taking this book home. First of all,
we’ve got a no-pupils Lady Gaga in a man’s nightshirt gazing up at an
unspecified deity with orgasmic terror and devotion. The tagline – “A child is born. A wave of murder has begun. Is it the final warning?” promises all my
favorite things – reproduction, slaughter, and holy apocalypse. Next to Gaga – “Now an awesome motion picture
experience” from a time (1976) before “awesome” was totally bleached of meaning
by a generation of overzealous teenagers.
Awesome in this context most likely literally was meant to convey that
the viewer was filled with a sense of divine awe.
I had some pretty high expectations
for this book. And then I cracked open
the skin and the insides were . . . mealy.
The writing – C.K. Chandler, I believe your copy of the screenplay must
have somehow gotten lost in the extra-thick shag carpeting you bought with the
book advance, and you only found it again 48 hours before the manuscript was
due. This thing reads like a
script. The scenes sound like shot
descriptions interspersed with lines.
It’s very visual, very surface level.
Scripts for movies and television have to be like that, they can’t have
a bunch of internal monologue and pondering that can’t be shot and translated
on the screen. Also, the movie upon
which this book was based was from 1976.
As someone born in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s, seventies
movies are, for the most part, like a slow form of torture. They seem to meander avocado-and-brownly
through dull vague wandering plots that my Oregon Trail Generation mind has
trouble following. Every scene is three
years long and goes nowhere, and everybody has yellow teeth because they smoked
constantly and SAG didn’t have regular teeth whitening as a requirement of membership
yet.
I was so put off by the writing
style that I only got two chapters in before giving up. The first chapter was a cinematic description
of this blandly religious detective watching news coverage of himself and his
colleagues after he unsuccessfully tried to get a teenage sniper on top of a
skyscraper in NYC to surrender. Then
there was this whole offputtingly misogynistic thing where he had this young
hot girlfriend waiting on him. In the
second chapter he goes out to the suburbs to visit his wife at their old rundown
(because a man doesn’t live there anymore, duh) marital home. She’s still his wife because he doesn’t want
to get divorced because Catholicism?
They had no kids so since her life is clearly empty she just drinks all
day and waits for him to come hang out.
It was all just so gross that when I found this cool book
at one of the
many cute little free libraries you see all over town here, I found it
hard to return to “God Told Me To.” In
my defense, my sister recently got into a graduate program in Copenhagen and is
moving to Denmark next year, so I was very excited by this random free library score.
After several failed attempts to get
back into this book (thwarted by library books, actual homework, and a mountain
of magazines at jury duty), I decided to write about just how impossible it was
to get into this book instead. For
curiosity’s sake, I looked up what actually happens in the movie, and hence
also the book. To my extreme shock and
horror, this is what I missed out on: “As Nicholas pries
deeper into the mysterious crimes, what he uncovers is a secret cabal of
corporate bigwigs working at the behest of a glowing hermaphroditic deity named
Bernard who seems to have been the product of an artificially inseminated
virgin birth orchestrated by space invaders – an origin shared by none other
than Nicholas himself!” What the
holy alien murder messiah?! I feel like
I just discovered the flavorless mealy apple had a winning Powerball ticket
embedded in its core. I am now resolved
to power through the rest of this garbage tome for at least a few more chapters,
and will post a brief epilogue review in the comments section here. It just goes to show you, though – bad
writing can make even the most appealing concepts so offputting as to turn into
the literary equivalent of banana hands.
See what I did there?
Appealing? Peel? Wait, where are you going? Put down that magazine! Read meeeeee!!!!
2 comments:
Fruit IS a gamble. My grandma would return fruit, though. Old lady things.
Some books don't stand the test of time.
Awesome blog post for so many reasons.
I absolutely love this post for a variety of reasons but let's not peel then entire apple at one time! I keep coming back to it because it makes me laugh, pause, and check amazon for availability. The title alone is worthy, I majored in God, and look where it's taken me? I really enjoy your writing style, looking forward to your next post Abigail.
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