Too Much of Nothing, Michael Scott Moore's first book is an accomplished and stunningly inspiring work. When I wrote to Mike with my initial thoughts about Too Much of Nothing, I was on the bullet train on my way to Yokohama from Osaka. It seems appropriate that as I sit down to form further, publicly consumable thoughts about the book, that I am again on a train, this time returning from Yokohama to Osaka.
Too Much of Nothing is an oddly detached, but somehow warm recounting of the narrator, Eric Sperling's, last few months alive. The story is told by his ghost, shade, or as the Eric is convinced, his "nefesh" which still haunts the small and nominally fictional town of Calaveras Beach some 15 years after his death. The awful truth behind Eric's passing has not come out, over which Eric is still fretting, wondering, and occasionally angry or melancholy. Eric's parents, his ex-best-friend, and the town itself have entered a holding pattern as well; they are stuck in the era of Eric's death, making no forward progress; it is as if their time is also defined by Erik's truncated life.
Since finishing the book, it has been in my thoughts frequently; it is a gauge against which I compare my own experiences growing up with the characters Moore has created. The author and I grew up in the same area, only a couple of years apart; we attended the same highschool for a couple of overlapping years, and a number of the locations he has so successfully described in the abstract are readily identifiable as "real" locations in our hometown. The imagery that he manages to pull up elicits a gut level comprehension of the Los Angeles climate. Los Angeles is constantly buzzing with activity, a proof of the converse of the adage "still waters run deep." The surface buzz of Los Angeles is sizable, its populace constantly vibrating on the edge of the now and the next, but with limited consideration for what comes after "next," or the past. Los Angeles isn't so much "sunny" as in a state of constant "glare." The sky isn't blue, nor is it often brown with smog; it's usually a matte silver tone -- a color that tends to simply amplify the sun's natural brightness to a dizzying shine that makes things stand out intensely. But over time that glare damages that which it shines upon, simply by its own intensity. Moore's novel is like that as well. As clearly as it depicts the world we lived in, it also has worn some of the polish from it.
The three main characters essentially form a romantic, or at least sexual, triangle. Two boys who are best friends, more from circumstance than choice, and the girl in whom they are both interested. They party. They fuck. They break shit. And as Eric narrates he is worried about it, and his best friend is reveling in it. So much of the book's delinquency, casual vandalism, and easy drug use has me wondering how much was going on around me that I never noticed. Though Moore's high school kids occasionally speak in manner more intelligent than their age dictates, their responses and decision making bear all the accuracy of the of facing problems with too little experience, too much passion, and a highly overdeveloped sense of invulnerability. While the scenes involving drug use are nerve-wracking as the living room scene from Boogie Nights, there isn't really a climax to that portion of the story. There is a lot of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop on them, it does, eventually.
There are a number of circumstances where I became aware that I was reading a novel. Generally speaking, I stick to speculative fiction, crime/pulp novels, and enough nonfiction to circumvent a perception of being socially backward. The most literature-like items I have recently read would probably be Palahniuk (arguable to some), a random sampling of Elmore Leonard's work, and Mike's book. It was singularly odd to see so much of my childhood environment re-framed and put on display in a light in which I'd never seen it. Further strange still to have it wrapped in such eloquent prose. It's one thing to find a blog or livejournal from someone who shares common experience, but it's strange to find such evocative, competent prose making my synapses fire. To put this in a phrasing that would cause my senior-year English teacher, Ms. Wadhams, to silently fume, Mike knows how to finish. Several points during the reading, I was keenly swept up by the finishing sentence of a passage, or the final paragraph in a chapter. Such clever turns of phrase that I was left grinning, rolling the words over in my head. I have a tendency to do this with some phrasing from William Gibson's works; it feels natural to pull myself in and out of immersion in his speculative fiction worlds. In Too Much of Nothing, where so much was based on the philosophies, values, and landmarks of my adolescence, it was distracting but still very pleasant.
Mike is currently at work on his second novel, and writing for a San Francisco newspaper's theater column. I am very much looking forward to his next work.
Too Much of Nothing is an oddly detached, but somehow warm recounting of the narrator, Eric Sperling's, last few months alive. The story is told by his ghost, shade, or as the Eric is convinced, his "nefesh" which still haunts the small and nominally fictional town of Calaveras Beach some 15 years after his death. The awful truth behind Eric's passing has not come out, over which Eric is still fretting, wondering, and occasionally angry or melancholy. Eric's parents, his ex-best-friend, and the town itself have entered a holding pattern as well; they are stuck in the era of Eric's death, making no forward progress; it is as if their time is also defined by Erik's truncated life.
Since finishing the book, it has been in my thoughts frequently; it is a gauge against which I compare my own experiences growing up with the characters Moore has created. The author and I grew up in the same area, only a couple of years apart; we attended the same highschool for a couple of overlapping years, and a number of the locations he has so successfully described in the abstract are readily identifiable as "real" locations in our hometown. The imagery that he manages to pull up elicits a gut level comprehension of the Los Angeles climate. Los Angeles is constantly buzzing with activity, a proof of the converse of the adage "still waters run deep." The surface buzz of Los Angeles is sizable, its populace constantly vibrating on the edge of the now and the next, but with limited consideration for what comes after "next," or the past. Los Angeles isn't so much "sunny" as in a state of constant "glare." The sky isn't blue, nor is it often brown with smog; it's usually a matte silver tone -- a color that tends to simply amplify the sun's natural brightness to a dizzying shine that makes things stand out intensely. But over time that glare damages that which it shines upon, simply by its own intensity. Moore's novel is like that as well. As clearly as it depicts the world we lived in, it also has worn some of the polish from it.
The three main characters essentially form a romantic, or at least sexual, triangle. Two boys who are best friends, more from circumstance than choice, and the girl in whom they are both interested. They party. They fuck. They break shit. And as Eric narrates he is worried about it, and his best friend is reveling in it. So much of the book's delinquency, casual vandalism, and easy drug use has me wondering how much was going on around me that I never noticed. Though Moore's high school kids occasionally speak in manner more intelligent than their age dictates, their responses and decision making bear all the accuracy of the of facing problems with too little experience, too much passion, and a highly overdeveloped sense of invulnerability. While the scenes involving drug use are nerve-wracking as the living room scene from Boogie Nights, there isn't really a climax to that portion of the story. There is a lot of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop on them, it does, eventually.
There are a number of circumstances where I became aware that I was reading a novel. Generally speaking, I stick to speculative fiction, crime/pulp novels, and enough nonfiction to circumvent a perception of being socially backward. The most literature-like items I have recently read would probably be Palahniuk (arguable to some), a random sampling of Elmore Leonard's work, and Mike's book. It was singularly odd to see so much of my childhood environment re-framed and put on display in a light in which I'd never seen it. Further strange still to have it wrapped in such eloquent prose. It's one thing to find a blog or livejournal from someone who shares common experience, but it's strange to find such evocative, competent prose making my synapses fire. To put this in a phrasing that would cause my senior-year English teacher, Ms. Wadhams, to silently fume, Mike knows how to finish. Several points during the reading, I was keenly swept up by the finishing sentence of a passage, or the final paragraph in a chapter. Such clever turns of phrase that I was left grinning, rolling the words over in my head. I have a tendency to do this with some phrasing from William Gibson's works; it feels natural to pull myself in and out of immersion in his speculative fiction worlds. In Too Much of Nothing, where so much was based on the philosophies, values, and landmarks of my adolescence, it was distracting but still very pleasant.
Mike is currently at work on his second novel, and writing for a San Francisco newspaper's theater column. I am very much looking forward to his next work.
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