Monday, November 01, 2010

Combat Camera's Heart of Darkness


Over at Good Reports, Alex good reviews Combat Camera. A taste:

The artist, as Amis lectures, is a warrior against cliché. What makes Zane a truly burned out case is his sense that this is all life has left to offer. Like Justin in Russell Smith's Girl Crazy, he can be described (I am borrowing from Jeet Heer's review of Girl Crazy in Canadian Notes & Queries) as a "chivalric pornographer." Unlike Justin, however, he is not transformed by his relationship with a fallen woman. In fact, one of his last lines is the fatalistic "None of us can change anything." This is the voice of wisdom, which is not the same as saying he is right. With age comes passivity. Justin is, in the end, living a naive player's fantasy - the drugs, the baggy clothes, the ho's - whereas Zane is crippled by self-awareness and trapped inside a story he is no longer the author of. Justin and Zane, who are both fringe cultural workers, represent a tragic response to a fundamental part of the modern cultural environment.

Girl Crazy and Combat Camera are first-rate novels that come, I think, to the same grim conclusion about how to cope with our own personal hearts of darkness. Though the "incidents of the surface" involve sleazy, underworld happenings, both books are finally concerned with a more insidious form of corruption: the seductive power of illusions.

For the full review please go here.

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