Seconds of Pleasure: Stories
by Neil LaBute
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Book Summary Information
Author: Neil LaButeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-08-23
ISBN: 0802142125
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Seconds of Pleasure: Stories
Book Review: Bad
Summary: 2 Stars
Why did Eugene O'Neill decide to publish a book of his poems? Granted, I could ask the same of, say, Leonard Nimoy, but the famed Star Trek actor never laid claim to caring for the written word the way the great American playwright did. Yet, both published hideous doggerel for the same reason- they could, because of their celebrity. This phenomenon is not limited to writing of course. B actor David Hasselhoff, of Baywatch fame, has released CDs, and many a singer, especially noxious rap stars, has claimed to be an actor. Following in that ignominious tradition, playwright and film director Neil Labute released a collection of `short stories' called Seconds Of Pleasure back in 2004 that, well, as he might say, `suck really, really bad, dude.' This is because they are wholly devoid of insight, of the sort that populate the best Raymond Carver tales- an influence whose touch is all over these pallid echoes which lack any real style. They typically consist of losers who get involved in some absurd or pitiable sexual situation, and then chuckle about their loserhood.
Don't get me wrong, Labute is a good filmmaker (In The Company Of Men, Your Friends And Neighbors), and I've read a couple of his good plays. That is his métier, and he's good at it- sort of a younger David Mamet. But, playwrights have to write character first, and let the characters define themselves, inside out, while fictionists have other options which with to limn their characters; ones Labute either ignored, or was unaware of. Just as poets almost never make good prose writers, and vice versa, Labute's stories, really just pallid posturings- not even full blown `scenes', go dramatically nowhere, and are highly repetitive. Were it not for each succeeding stories' title pages one could hardly know the scene and characters have changed. The actual book, itself, is digest sized, in a pallid attempt to puff the large type on the small pages to 221 pages. In reality, each story is perhaps 2½ normal sized book pages in length; just slightly longer than micro-fiction, or short shorts.
That all said, Labute's familiar world of modern day losers is more well realized than the similar fictive universes of a David Foster Wallace, Rick moody, or Dave Eggers, simply because he can write. Yes, as a whole, these tales, and the book, fail, but there are some moments, now and again, that show a writer of skill, and not one addicted to mere `coolio posturing'. Yet, these are rare, as most of the tales in Seconds Of Pleasure are mere first person confessions of some sexual misdeed, usually by a philandering husband, whose female `victim' somehow deserves what she gets, which even include incest and murder, but Labute loses sight that in order for a reader to be drawn into a tale they need to be able to relate to a character. Too often, Labute is content to be a voyeur, or worse, a zoo watcher. His condescension toward the human element could work in a few selected tales, but in story after story it drones and becomes stale, as well as trite....Of course, these tales almost all devolve into childishness, and are wholly dependent upon shock or twist endings, like all bad melodrama is. Reading these tales was like reading the writing exercises of a nineteen year old fetishist at a Creative Writing 101 workshop. The clichés abound, and the `dark' tales never really scare a reader because Labute's characters are so unrealistic. What works onscreen, when handled by a skilled actor, does not necessarily translate to a purely page-driven product. After the third or fourth story the endings of the tales scream at you from several pages' distance. These are mechanical and ultimately hollow stories.
Perhaps I should be happy, though, for Grove Press, which sought to milk some money from this unadulterated crap, only let Labute get his bad fiction out into the public arena. It could have been worse. It could have been verse. Or is that still forthcoming?
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