Paul Feig: You Had Me At Page One

Kick Me:
Adventures in Adolescence
by Paul Feig
p. 2002

Needing a mood turnaround after the stark writing of Richard Yates, I quickly picked up a book I knew would cheer me up—because I’d read it already. I haven’t picked up Paul Feig’s creative non-fiction style memoirs, Kick Me, since a copy was loaned to me by a friend in high school, but large parts of it came back to me as I read it for the second time—and even though it wasn’t my first time absorbing his hilarious style of reminiscing, I still found myself having to put the book down by the fourth page in because I was laughing too hard.

The first chapter of Paul Feig’s memoirs, dealing with his early childhood into adolescence and rounding out with his teenage years, focuses on the cruel nicknames bestowed upon Feig as a boy, the first being “Fig Newton” which gradually evolved into a harsher, more obvious twist on his unfortunate surname a few years later. Grade school notoriety aside, Paul Feig’s is a name largely unknown still, but it shouldn’t be. I’ve been following Feig for a few years after discovering he hailed from my very own hometown, Royal Oak, Michigan, but he’s since moved on to bigger things, boasting writing credits for the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” “Arrested Development,” “The Office,” and 2011’s box office hit, “Bridesmaids,” among other things. He even has a few acting credits under his belt, and though none of them are really ‘breakout roles’, my high school self was shocked and amused to find out he portrayed token skinny camp counselor Tim from one of my favorite childhood movies, “Heavyweights.”

Paul Feig may not be a household name, but he should be, because his honest, self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor is very catching. He’s more than two decades my senior, of the opposite gender, and much more outgoing than I ever was, but his cringe-worthy stories of adolescent awkwardness are startlingly accessible no matter who you are. And Feig relates the details of his anecdotes with such clarity that you can easily picture them... which often sends you into another bout of hysterical giggling at poor Feig’s expense. All in his plan, though, I’m sure. Everyone loves a joker, and if you can’t laugh at yourself then you’re all the poorer for it.

When I read Kick Me the first time, I wasn’t familiar with the term, but upon retrospection, Feig’s first book definitely falls under the category of “creative nonfiction” an emerging genre that appeals to me, as it offers up a literary spin on the memoir genre. Kick Me isn’t a straight up set of memoirs detailing Feig’s life from birth to present, it is a story, or rather a collection of short stories that sum up the universal experience of youth. If it can be said that Kick Me has overarching themes that guide it to its logical conclusion, it would be that kids can be cruel, because they don’t understand, but that as you grow and look back, all those things you stressed over when you were ten don’t seem so bad when you’re thirty, so relax, let go of your angst, and just learn to enjoy the roller coaster of adolescence.

I had another motive for finally picking up Kick Me, aside from the fact that it had been collecting dust on my shelf for years. Feig wrote a follow up to his first novel, Superstud: Or How I Became A 24-Year-Old Virgin, which I can only assume follows the same format, and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since I found out about it, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I will be trying out Superstud in a much more timely fashion than it took me to reread Kick Me, I am sure.

I urge anybody to pick up this book and dive in headfirst. Paul Feig is just too funny to pass up, and someone you’d very much like to befriend after his tour of his gawky youth. That he took that showy awkwardness and turned it into a lucrative career is as admirable as it is fitting.

Eleven Reasons to Take a Valium

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
by Richard Yates
p. 1962 (Stories written between 1951 and 1961)

It was the title that snagged me; I had never heard of Richard Yates, though I realized later, I’d heard of at least one of his novels, if only because it had been made into a movie a few years back—Revolutionary Road (which famously reunited Titanic costars DiCaprio and Winslet in a much different setting). This collection of short stories, released one year after the aforementioned novel, is a simple yet introspective reflection on the mundane life of 1950s Americans, and in my subsequent research on Yates’ legacy, I’ve come to understand that it not only embodies the spirit of what is known as the “Age of Anxiety,” but that Yates is generally regarded as the type of author that authors love... and one who is criminally under-read.

I’ll talk about this Age of Anxiety thing first, as that is a concept that was unfamiliar to me, and it guides a lot of my views on Yates’ collection. The term comes from a W.H. Auden poem (and later the Leonard Bernstein symphony upon which it was based). From what I understand, it refers to an era from the 1940s on when American society was unsettled, tense, trying to find their footing but feeling displaced in an increasingly industrialized world.

Well, I suppose there were a lot of things to feel tense about in the 1950s. Fresh off of one war and finding ourselves in another, the implementation of nuclear technology and the subsequent Cold War atmosphere, McCarthyism and Red Scare, and the wave of technology designed to bring us closer but irrevocably driving us further apart.

Unlike my beloved pulp sci-fi novels, which capitalize on Cold War fear and technological advances to create tension and intrigue, Yates’ work focuses more on the domestic—the subtle ways in which these changes affect our every day lives. The recurring theme in these eleven stark tales is, of course, loneliness, but not so much of the literal kind as the alone-in-a-crowd kind. I found that often times the central figure to each story (and almost all of the stories were told from a perspective outside of the subject) was someone with ‘vision,’ someone who possesses unique if unpopular traits that Yates believed should be more widely appreciated. It is a retrospective on the American Dream—not on the bright, shining possibilities and Land of Opportunity dogma you always hear about—but on what comes after, when you realize that perhaps that American Dream was not all it was cracked up to be and you must now struggle to find your place in a changing world that doesn’t care about your dreams.

If that sounds depressing then I’m doing it right, because these were eleven ridiculously depressing tales with very little relief. Seriously, I couldn’t read more than one in a single sitting because I needed to take a break for something lighter.

What makes it so much worse is that reading about the Age of Anxiety—fear of constant war, of religious fundamentalism, of out of touch politicians running things, of degradation of society, of a crumbling environment, of technology isolating us even while it ‘unites’ us—you realize that all of these things are as alarmingly applicable to today’s society as they were then. Sure, some of the details have changed, but the loneliness prevails. I need only look at my friends and family struggling with unemployment and displacement after decades of hard work—or at myself even, 26 and working a job unsuited to my own ‘dreams’ and aspirations—and I realize that we’re still deeply embedded in our own version of the Age of Anxiety. Perhaps reading Yates’ eleven tales of lonely people in a lonely world is so very depressing because it hits all too close to home.

I can’t say that Richard Yates’ writing style resonated with me—the prose is spartan and not very poetic, and he relies a bit too heavily on the cliched Italian-American ‘New Yawkah’ dialect but in spite of this the characters are deeply drawn and for the first time since this project of mine began, I can say I’ve encountered the first example of a story written in the 1950s that presented women as complex characters, perhaps not quite equal to men, but nonetheless relatively positive in their representation. The pulp sci-fi authors who think they’re doing women a favor by including them in the action could have learned a lesson or two from Yates about giving them a soul and a voice, but sadly, as I’ve come to find out, Yates wasn’t appreciated in his own time. He never sold more than 12,000 copies of any of his first editions and wasn’t recognized until after his death. He’s still not widely recognized today, which is a shame, because while his writing is simplistic, his ideas are far from such.

The Destiny You're Dealt

I Am the Messenger
by Markus Zusak
p. 2002

My sole impetus for picking this book up was that it was written by the same author who wrote The Book Thief, Markus Zusak. While I could find a lot of similarities stylistically, I Am the Messenger is, on the whole, a vastly different kind of story than The Book Thief. While I preferred the latter, this story is not without its merits, and this tale of slacker cab driver Ed Kennedy and his playing cards certainly boasts a much happier ending than that of Liesel Meminger and her books.

At 19, Ed is an underage cab driver in an unspecified city (but given the slang used and the fact that Zusak lives there, one can assume it’s a large city in Australia), getting by with his equally directionless friends in the months following his father’s death. They work, they drink, they play cards, they make fun of his buddy's broken down car or Ed's smelly old dog Doorman, and generally avoid serious things. Lather, rinse, repeat. That is, until a bank holdup which Ed inadvertently foils interrupts their day to day lives. At first, nothing seems different, but shortly after, Ed begins to receive playing cards that have clues on them, clues that lead him to people with lives more complicated than his, people he must help. On his own, Ed decides he must follow this odd twist of fate and change these people’s lives by delivering the messages he must decipher by observing them, and in the process, Ed learns a lot about himself and what he is truly capable of.

As I’ve said, stylistically, a lot of comparisons can be found to Zusak’s most prolific work, The Book Thief. Both are written in a sparse, dreamy style, with sentences broken up and thoughts passed out haphazardly in an almost stream-of-consciousness style. This is because both stories are narrated by characters who are also players in the book—in this case, Ed, in the case of The Book Thief, Death. Thematically, both stories emphasize the beauty in little acts of kindness and the power in humanity. I found both of these comparisons to be a bit more jarring in I Am the Messenger. Perhaps this is because it is my second outing with Zusak and recognizing the patterns takes me out of the story. Or perhaps it is because the writing style—while minimalistic, makes the whole thing feel a bit melodramatic at times, like Ed/Zusak is delivering the Greatest Story Ever Told and wants us to know it. Plenty of times in I Am the Messenger I found myself wishing he would just tone it down a little bit and stop making every sentence feel like the revealing twist at the end of a thrilling movie.

[Speaking of movies, both of the books I’ve read of Zusak’s would translate very well to screen, and I’m a little shocked that none of them have been commissioned yet. The quirkiness of I Am the Messenger in particular could be very fun if presented visually. Ed Kennedy is a great character, but the effort to present him as a down-to-earth, average teenager dumbs down the poetry of his actions. To see them from an outside perspective might be nice.]

When we arrive at the actual twist to I Am the Messenger—that is, who is sending the cards and why—it’s not really a big surprise, or if it is, then it’s not a very satisfying one. I almost wish Zusak had just ignored the impulse to include a twist, as I feel it detracted from the ending. Also, by this point in the book I was so frustrated with Ed’s random logic and leaps to conclusions that did not readily present themselves that I didn’t even care about the person behind it all. That is the only thing that really bothered me about this book—Ed’s reasons for following the cards doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s one thing to try to better yourself and hope for destiny, but the way in which Ed so accurately interpreted his cause—not to mention some of his dubious methods of fulfilling them—seemed wrong to me, like Ed had privileged knowledge the reader was not made aware of, which we know he did not. It just seemed like a lazy way to move from plot point to plot point. Also, there is no way the guiding force behind the novel’s events is anything but supernatural, and if that is the case, why bother having a ‘logical’ explanation behind it at all?

I am being harsh on this book. Perhaps I expected more because of how good The Book Thief was. The truth is, if you can stomach the style choices made by Zusak, I Am the Messenger is a delightful read—full of beauty and charm and benevolence that can move you if you let it. I’m definitely in for more by this author if all his stories can make you feel this good.

Taking Suspension of Disbelief to New Heights

Roofworld
by Christopher Fowler
p. 1988

High above the city streets of London there exists a culture of young people who live among the rooftops, swinging from metal cables and living off the grid, unseen and largely forgotten by the world below... that is, until a couple of hapless twenty-somethings stumble upon their niche society and get thrown in the middle of an urban gang war fought right over our heads. That is the general idea behind Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld—a dark, at times absurdly comical, at times distinctly horrific thriller novel—that introduces the reader to a different kind of ‘high society,’ and one that exists entirely in secret.

As a part of his boring job finding books to translate to the big screen, 24-year-old Robert Linden must track down Sarah Endsleigh, the elusive daughter of a recently murdered author, as she holds the rights to her mother’s only novel. In doing so, Robert meets Rose, the author’s feisty, independent landlord, and the two of them stumble upon Sarah’s alternative lifestyle—as one of the inhabitants of ‘Roofworld,’ a community of young people who live on the rooftops and travel among a long-existing series of cable wires in order to escape the drudge of everyday society. There are two warring factions, Sarah’s people, led by her enigmatic boyfriend (who later turns out to be a dud), Nathaniel Zalian, and a much larger, Nazi-esque lot of screw-ups, skinheads and drug addicts who bumble around under the guidance of their cult leader, who calls himself Chymes. It’s got something to do with occult mumbo jumbo—something about the sun and the moon and zodiac signs or whatever and there’s a lot of cult-ish yammering going on amongst Chymes and his disciples, but it’s all very boring and eye-roll-inducing and really only there to amp up the danger element.

I had a funny moment early on, when it struck me how similar Roofworld felt to Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which Iread a few weeks back, except that Roofworld was published 8 years prior to Gaiman’s book.

It’s pretty striking: a boring, young man in a dead-end job (even their names are similar—Richard/Robert) meets a mysterious girl and is thrust into an alternative London society that ‘normal’ people completely overlook in their day to day lives—only while Neverwhere implores you to look below, Roofworld has you looking at what’s above. When his life is threatened, the unwitting hero must summon  unnatural courage to save the day. There are dubious allies, lots of murders going on thanks to a villain with a God complex, and, although Roofworld is mostly grounded in ‘reality,’ there is still a distinct magical feel to it reminiscent of Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

All of this is not to say that Gaiman stole his idea from this lesser known author. I fully believe that it’s possible that two authors can come up with the same idea independent of one another, or that even if one did inspire the other, the interpretation of the idea can vary and the author’s can have different things to say. Besides, Neverwhere is supposedly based on the book Free Live Free, by Gene Wolfe, and that was published four years before Roofworld. Having not read that one, I can’t claim any similarities but it does illustrate the point I’m getting to here, which is that this journey—the unwitting hero who is thrust into a world parallel to our own—is quite a popular one in fantasy/science fiction. And it’s not hard to see why—the idea that there is an escape to the mundane, that we are destined for something greater, that it’s waiting for us just outside the door if only we would look, it’s the stuff urban adventure tales are made of, and it’s applied here to great effect.

Though I found Fowler’s book hard to put down, I still had some complaints about it. The focus shifts around too much, like Fowler couldn’t decide what kind of a story he wanted to write. There are the chapters focusing on the Roofworlders and their battles, there are the chapters about Robert and Rose—the newcomers and outsiders—and there is a third thread about headstrong, sexist Detective Ian Hargreave, his coworker/lover Janice, and the commissioner’s puny son, Butterworth, a young constable needing to prove himself and whom Hargreave constantly picks on. And littered in between all of this are a smattering of tedious chapters wherein Chymes predictably offs another dumb disciple. Fowler tried to go in too many directions at once and the whole thing is just kind of a mess. Though occasionally entertaining, Hargreave and Butterworth’s side adventures were totally unnecessary and detracted from what should have been the main focus—the state of Roofworld and the people who inhabit it.

Set in 1988, Roofworld has a style that is—at times painfully—reflective of its time. This is a deviation where I appreciate Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere over Roofworld, because the former painted a decent comparison to our tendency to overlook the disenfranchised, while the latter focused on people who chose to be disenfranchised, and spent a lot of time ragging predictably on big corporations and ‘the man,’ though not in so many words. I believe Fowler had some big ideas but not enough follow through for it to mean anything. Roofworld, though it is swinging away towards its inevitable dissolution, is presented as a sort of utopia, but I felt no compulsion to join them. Perhaps it was in part due to my inability to fully picture Fowler’s strange world. Having never lived in an urban landscape, I have a hard time picturing how such a thing would even be possible.

But mostly, I just found the Roofworlders obnoxious and pretentious ‘kids’ who don’t want to grow up.

Roofworld is not a bad book, and it certainly gives you some things to think about, but I’m going to need more than a few cables and wires attached to buildings to suspend my disbelief for that long.

(And let's talk about that byline on the back page for a minute... "You won't see them unless you know where to look"? Well that just sort of invalidates the entire plot of the book you're about to read. Shame on you, publishers!)