I had the opportunity to read a few pages of
David Cross's new book this morning after waking up drunk on the floor of a friend's apartment in a cute, gentrifying neighborhood of hipsters after standing around in dimly-lit bars with said wool-hatted, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing hipsters last night. So: I could not be more squarely in the middle of the bullseye of the target audience for this book.
I have been reading and enjoying books in the genre of 'funny people throwing together one and two page scraps of stuff until it is book length' for awhile now.
Steve Martin's is pretty good.
Harmony Korine's is so bizarre, irony-laden, and purposely offensive that it should go in some sort of time capsule with
Happiness and
Dave Egger's memoir to exhibit how our culture might have died sucking its own dick if 9/11 had never happened (it still might). Al Franken somehow parlayed a series of
such books into a distinguished political career. The sheer stamina and relentlessness of Hodgman's
lists of Hobo names and
recipes for polar bear steak exhibits a unique sort of genius.
But Cross's book could hardly be more disappointing. It is either obvious that he spent a year not working on the book whatsoever and then took a bunch of speed and shit the weekend before it was due and just sort of wrote down whatever was in his head at the time (that he hates most Americans because they are poor and remind him of his shitty childhood), or it is obvious that this guy who is incredibly gifted at writing dialogue doesn't have the attention span necessary to write a decent three-page essay.
In the way that all films need editors, perhaps all book-writing celebrities need ghost writers. I mean, hey, it made
Kirby Puckett's book almost readable when I was young (it is so completely sobering to realize that I must have been 15 and not 11 when I read his hundred-plus page essay about why pro wrestling is not fake that is sprinkled with two or three stories about what Kent Hrbek looks like naked).
