Review: Hitting a dead end on the 'L.I.E.'

"L.I.E."
by David Hollander
Villard
Fiction
208 pages

In this story: Denial Incoherent and bleak RELATED SITES

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- Long Island, or "Wrong Island," as its denizens refer to it in "L.I.E.," comes off looking about as cheerful as Chechnya in this debut novel by David Hollander.

Hollander's opus reads like a collection of bad short films by a Literary Criticism class on acid. Spanning the last two years of the '80s amid several dead-end towns in suburban New York City, the novel disjointedly follows the painful maturation of Harlan Kessler, a long-haired, guitar-picking teenager on a desperate search for sex, love, and self-validation. ("L.I.E." is the abbreviation for the Long Island Expressway, the primary highway through -- and off -- the island.)

Beginning with a hilarious sequence depicting yet another failed attempt to lose his virginity (with his whole family staging a walk-in), Harlan's story expands to include his loser friends and their horrifically dysfunctional families. His parents try to escape each other with obvious extramarital affairs remarked on by everyone, even the family dog.

For example, Harlan's friend and drummer, Todd Slatsky, holds wild parties in the family basement where he plays home movies of his father beating up his mother. His father, meanwhile, ruminates on his failed marriage while drinking himself into a stupor upstairs: "He does feel something, but it's only his own sagging jowls, the ridges of his own shame, the proof that time is slow poison ..."

Harlan's eventual lady love, Sarah, is trying to escape her deadbeat mother's new husband, a sleazy coke dealer named Lenny. Lenny, in turn, provides fixes for Harlan's disastrous friend Beedy. After a friend's suicide, Beedy is committed to an institution, where he himself entertains thoughts of suicide. The notion of self-termination as escape becomes uncomfortably clear to several of the characters by the novel's end.

And Lenny, though an extreme representation of a bad addition to any family, ultimately appears not too far removed from the parents of the other young characters throughout the book -- a fact the author highlights in describing the behavior of several sets of parents at Halloween party right at the novel's beginning.

Harlan's reaction to his unreal situation is a rigorous a denial of his own convictions, the creation of an anti-belief system, "the defining characteristic of said system being an inability to believe in the beliefs themselves, because, after all, they come from elsewhere, he's not their author."

The plot careens from one character's tragic story to another with all the predictability of a pinball, inevitably heading downwards, with the voice of the narrative and those of its characters unexpectedly colliding in italicized sentence fragments.

The notion of failed self-determination is hammered home in a series of increasingly surreal episodes which progress from the mundane (Harlan's frustrated sexual bunglings) to the critical (Harlan's near-breakdown after running out of gas driving home from work). And the novel concludes ambiguously, with a solar eclipse, a murder attempt, and the playing-out of Harlan's life on tape.

It all seems to suggest that the only resolution to the uncontrollable metanarrative of Harlan's sad life is escape by literally disappearing, by simply dropping out of the text.

Unfortunately, there's not much to recommend that text. Hollander, a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence Writing Program, has penned a debut which reads more like an exercise in the employment of various literary devices than a coherent novel. It's also set against a backdrop so bleak that it undermines his otherwise formidable talent for ironic humor.

"L.I.E" is more of a term paper for a semiotics course than a novel, with few of the vignettes actually tying together (readers might think of "Trainspotting" set in Long Island), but it will be interesting to see what lessons the author takes from this. The only consistent theme seems to be one of escape, as nearly every character in the book is fleeing their situations, even through suicide. This is suggestive of another Long Island creative persona, filmmaker Hal Hartley, whose movies are populated by characters running away from themselves.

But put into book form, the upshot of this is that readers are likely to try to escape the book by simply not reading it.

Villard Books (Random House)

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