K-PAX
November 14, 2011 - 11pmI just finished reading K-PAX. It was one of the most insipid, pathetically bad books I’ve ever read. It was so bad, in fact, that I immediately threw it in the trash the moment I finished it. My only regret (besides that I read it at all) was that I made the shot from across the room and didn’t have the opportunity to throw it away twice.
Here’s the plot: A guy shows up in a mental institution, claiming to be from another planet. Another guy treats him. Guy A says he’s going to go back to his planet. Then he does. This takes more than two hundred pages. There’s an attempt at ambiguity as to whether Guy A is crazy or not, but it’s done with the sort of delicacy and subtlety most closely associated with professional wrestling.
Where to start? The “characters?” Cereal box mascots have more believable motivations and are more interesting. The main character, in a pathetic example of wish fulfillment for the author, is named Gene Brewer. Oh, didn’t I mention that the book was written by Gene Brewer? He couldn’t even be bothered to change the name of his Mary Sue. It’s possible that he was going for some sort of verisimilitude, and gave his protagonist his own name to pretend the work of fiction was the real-life case study of a patient… but I hesitate to give him that much credit.
Each character is introduced solely for the sake of having a different type of mental problem, being an example of how Guy B is a father, how Guy B is married, or how Guy B is a doctor. These characters are as one dimensional as masturbation fantasies. Take Ernie, the only supporting character whose name I can remember: he has OCD, or possibly intrusive thoughts. That’s it. That is Ernie’s character. He has no personality outside of that one trait. This is exacerbated by the fact that almost no one but Guys A and B speak for the duration of the book. There is almost no dialog, just the near-continuous, dry-as-toast narration of Guy B.
There’s also the SUDDEN and unnecessary CAPITALIZATION of words, or lack thereof. In an attempt to be e. e. cummings, Brewer decided that the names of planets should be entirely capitalized and proper names shouldn’t be. The result of this unnecessary affectation is to make an already unpleasant book OCCASIONALLY SHOUT for no reason and make it more difficult to parse who is talking. I’ve been reading for a little while now (picked it up a few weeks ago), and I’ve become used to the convention that when I see a capitalized word, it designates something like a person, or a country, or that the writer passed the first grade. How this chunk of idiocy got past an editor is beyond me. How it was published, then made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey (who was fresh off an Oscar win!) is baffling.
Brewer seems to have picked up a psychology 101 textbook, flipped to the glossary, picked out a big word he thought we wouldn’t know, and then threw it in whenever he needed to science it up a bit. The result is insulting to the intelligence of the reader. Sybil-style multiple personalities abound, every psychopath is of the serial killer variety, and every diagnosis is as simple as Brewer himself. Treatments consist of cats, stage hypnosis, or simply letting patients minister to each other. I’m not kidding.
At the end of the book, Guy A goes back to his home planet, leaving behind the catatonic zombie that he had been inhabiting. Immediately afterward, there is an Animal House-esque epilogue where we find out that everything worked out great for everyone, forever. I had been hoping that everyone would die horribly, but I guess we can’t have everything.
Yes, I ruined the ending for you. Yes, you’re welcome. If I hadn’t, you might have been tempted to read for yourself to see just how bad it really was, and then you would have had to kill me. I did this for both of us. You’ll thank me someday.
I’m rarely in support of burning books, but sometimes you just have to admit that Hitler was right.
Protected: The Best Christmas Ever
June 26, 2010 - 5pmNovember 30, 2009
November 30, 2009 - 9pmI am depressed. I have no idea what I’m doing in Seattle, or in general. When I made the plans to come here, I was half-mad with grief after Megan moved out. I’d been planning to restart our relationship once I got here, but things haven’t worked out that way.
For reasons I don’t really understand, Megan volunteered to fly out to Madison, then help me drive to Seattle. The night I went to pick her up, I was physically crushed by stress and weariness. I was so exhausted that the only joy I felt in waiting for her arrival came in the form of gratitude for any excuse to stop packing.
When she walked out of the terminal, bag in hand, she looked as haggard as I felt. Probably selfishly, I had expected that she’d have done her makeup, or her hair, or something to make herself look good. She was wearing the shapeless brown polo required for her massage clinic hours and no makeup. As she walked towards my car, not smiling, I felt only a vague worry that I was too dangerously exhausted to drive back to the empty apartment we used to share. Looking back now, it was in that moment that I realized that our romantic relationship was gone forever.
We made the drive together, which was uneventful and extremely expensive. I’ve been here for nearly a month now. I have a storage locker, a borrowed bedroom, no job, and very little else. I spent two hours on Monster today without finding a single job I was qualified for, or hadn’t already applied to. The rest of the day was spent obsessively searching for an SD card reader I’ve lost, sharing a joyless meal with my roommates/hosts where the only brief topic of conversation was the lunatic who murdered some cops yesterday, and lying on the floor staring at the ceiling fan blades.
At the moment, I’m listening to Elliott Smith’s Needle in the Hay. It’s part of my oh-so-pleasant depression mix. I’ve been working on perfecting it tonight.
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© Marc Teale 2012.