SHALLOW END

Review by Franklin Bruno
(Our Noise by Jeff Gomez, Simon & Schuster paperback, 1995)

"The world is filled with guys like Jim who resist generational tags for fear of being swept up in a mob that's a tenth of a degree less intelligent than they are." --ibid.

I

Then he had come home, kicked off his Chuck Taylors, and checked his mail, and... Oh, shit, Jeff thought. Now he remembers--there had been a thick letter from Simon and Schuster. Jeff's indie-rock novel, Our Noise, had been accepted for publication from an outline and two sample chapters a few months before. I only submitted it to impress Steph anyway, Jeff thought, and now we're not going out anymore. Sunken in his depression, he had quickly completed the first draft. Now Bob, his editor, was saying that the book needed work.

"...I think we'll need to put a good copy editor to work on some of this, Jeff. Take this sentence, from page 28: 'Scrawl's Velvet Hammer cassette drops in volume like jumping off a step, Marcy May's voice dissipating into the far reaches of the dingy, dirty, off-white Ford Econoline 250 van.' Like what jumping off a step, Jeff? I.A. Richards would have said that the metaphor's tenor fails to match its vehicle. And do we need 'dingy,' 'dirty,' and 'off-white' to describe the van? Also, my assistant Sarah says that it should be Mays' not May's, but I wouldn't know about that."

Jeff gets up, picks a Cool Ranch Dorito crumb out of his thin goatee, and goes to the heavy board set atop bricks that served as his desk. Under the sleeve to "Possum Trot Plan by" No. 1 Cup on Flydaddy (they're no Frances Gumm, he thinks in passing), he finds the letter.

"More generally, I think there's a problem with the use of point of view in the book. Sometimes the narrative proceeds by interior monologue, as if the viewpoint is the subjective impressions of a given character. But you often jump around from character to character within a scene, and then make observations and judgments about the characters to which they themselves couldn't be privy, as if there were an omniscient narrator. I wasn't aware this was supposed to be such an experimental novel.

"Anyway, Jeff, I don't mean to get on your case, but if you could go over some of these changes, we should still be able to get Our Noise into production in time for the fall list. We've already got ads lined up in Swing, Boing Boing, and Might."

Fuck him, thinks Jeff. Didn't the old fart get it? Interior monologue? Omniscient whosis? What was this, an English class? All the characters in the book were supposed to be stupid and contemptible anyway, so Jeff figured that anything clumsy or inane in the descriptions would just add to the effect. Yes, that was it.

Unbeknownst to him, Jeff was merely hiding the shallowness of his own observations by assigning them to wooden characters. The assumption that other people's inner lives were as barren as his own would follow him throughout his unhappy life, only adding to the cynicism that was a hallmark of the disaffected members of his generation.

He balls up the letter, attempts to toss it into the grocery bag that serves as a wastebasket, but it misses, landing instead on a copy of Paper Airpline Pilots. I'm not changing a word, he resolves, lighting the last Marlboro from a crushed pack. It always made him think of that Pavement lyric: Wheeze hack cough, wheeze hack cough.

II

Thinking of the conversation, Bob realizes something he hasn't before: that Jeff actually thinks that his logo-dropping (Teenbeat matchbooks, Merge decals) and whining added up to a novel. Poor kid, he thinks, how could he know I only accepted it to impress Sarah, my young editorial assistant who first came across the unsolicited manuscript. Sarah, a young Columbia grad, had told him that the cultural references were right up to the minute, even if the writing was, well, unpolished. He's a twenty-something author, Bob had thought, just like Douglas Coupland. He had gotten the higher ups to let him offer Jeff a contract to finish the book with promises that it would be a break-even proposition if half the bands that got name-checked in the record-store scenes bought copies to show their parents. It hardly mattered if anyone read the parts in between, the alleged plot.

Still, Bob thinks, Simon and Schuster has some standards, and something had to be done about Our Noise. They had sent out advance copies to several indie-rock journalistic icons, but only one had written back anything remotely blurb-worthy. Not Sprague, not even DiRogatis could be convinced to shill for this one. The book would have to go out with nothing but a limp plot summary on the back. Maybe he'd let Sarah write it; that might get him somewhere.

He opens the manuscript sitting on his desk at random, and shakes his head. The imbecile 'zine editor that is, as far as Bob can discern, meant as comic relief to the, cough, high drama of the rest of the novel, says, "I mean, I don't care if it's grammatically correct, I want it to be cool."

Presumably, these words are put into Chipp's mouth to show how ignorant and contemptible he is. But on the very next page, the author, describing a cap, gives us, "The band stops about a full inch above the top of his ear, the bill sticking comically up." Apparently, Jeff is too cool not to misplace his modifiers. Or, much later, "Chipp...pushes on, knowing that Godfuck is a total waste and so would trying to pick up this girl, who is a few years older and way out of his league." Is parallel construction beyond this guy's writing abilities? wonders Bob.

Sarah walks into the office. "Hey, Bob, I'm going to lunch. Can I bring you back anything?"

"Why yes, Sarah, please get me a double short half-decaf mocha and a Voice. Did you buy that sweater at Urban Outfitters?"

"Yes, but I'm wearing a Knapsack t-shirt underneath it." She turns prettily, like something out of a J. Peterman catalog, and leaves the office. Maybe she'll be different from all the rest, thinks Bob. Unbeknownst to him, Sarah is sleeping with an ex-member of Jennifer Convertible.

Sometimes he feels remorse over the fact that he and his bosses could just as easily be throwing the company's money (not that Jeff's advance was huge) at someone who can write. But his entire industry, as well as several others, had grown fixated on capturing the fancy of some alleged generation, a carefree yet suspicious generation, so eager to consume, yet so afraid to belong, drifting aimlessly down the road of America like a J. Mascis solo, this generation with more home pages than homes. Ah well, at least he could rest easy that the deservedly bad reviews the novel was sure to garner would close the door on this MacInerey-manque's 'literary' career.

Once this indie-rock thing was played out, maybe Bob could get some pacifier-toting kid to do a 'rave' novel. Or maybe something about the burgeoning 'post-rock' movement he had been hearing about. A Stable Reference by Simon Reynolds, perhaps? Suddenly, he remembers that he has to go by the tailor and Standard Brands on the way home. It makes him think of that Pavement song, "Someone took in these pants, someone painted over paint."

III

He rouses himself from bed, one corner of the fitted sheet coming loose from the lumpy twin mattress. On his way to the large brown rectangular high-school art-class desk that held his typewriter and mail from Ivy League undergrads with cassette labels, his foot knocks over a stack of CDs. Arnold Dreyblatt, The Bruces, Cyrus Chestnutt--why bother with rock at all, much less indie-rock, he wonders. He picks up the copy of Jeff Gomez' inept novel that he borrowed from the buyer at No Life, who got it free from Simon and Schuster's press agent, and opens to one of the many stilted monologues delivered by Gomez' characters:

"I think you're being a little harsh, Mark.' Gary stops to take another sip of beer. 'Dave's a good guy, and to bail out on him when we've practically committed to making another album with him would be bullshit. It'd be a dickless thing to do. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just the bass player. You're the leader, Mark, and I know that. Bottlecap's your baby, so I guess the decision is ultimately yours...but I'm against it."

Holy fuck, Franklin thinks, it's hard to imagine anyone talking like this outside a management filmstrip, much less someone thinking that anyone does. There are also the highly implausible interior monologues:

"I've always noticed Jim at the cool shows in town, and now he's doing this. Why? How could he stage-dive onto a bunch of kids one day and shit on them the next? "

And worst of all, the bald editorializing about the characters, sure sign of an author with no faith in his ability to let the narrative do its own work:

"Craig's biggest fear (and this pertains not only to the Unrest CD) is that pretty much everything has a real and special significance but that he can't figure out what it is and so is missing out on quite a lot."

Nice parenthesis, Franklin thinks. He imagines that Jeff, if pressed, would claim that the jarring point-of-view leaps that litter the book are some kind of advanced fictional technique that Franklin is too clouded by tradition to recognize. But Franklin has read enough Acker, Cortazar, and DeLillo to know the difference between a skillful and incompetent use of an indeterminate point of view. What he doesn't know is that Jeff lives just a few blocks from him in the mid-Wilshire district, is going to be at a show he's going to the week this gets printed, and has a mean left hook.

Franklin puts down the book. He feels guilty having given it even this much attention. Now, just a few more of its targeted audience may be aware of it, may even give it a glance in the bookstore. A book this bad, even if it got published, would have been beneath notice if not for the subcultural trappings. Meanwhile, Stewart Home's caustic satires on all manifestations of subcultural identity (Red London, Pure Mania) go without a U.S. publisher, and stacks of review copies of Christopher Sorrentino's surreal rock meta-fiction Sound on Sound, a far more interesting experiment, sit in the Strand like so many Zero Hour releases. It brings to mind that old Art & Language/Red Crayola song: Don't talk to sociologists; don't listen to sociologists. Social practice has no sociological content.