PERMANENT OBSCURITY: Or A Cautionary Tale to Two Girls and Their Misadventures with Drugs, Pornography and Death by Dolores Santana (as told to Richard Perez)
As the long, sardonic title of this novel implicates, goofball comedy / satire, both seedy and sad, involving two young, foul-mouthed women with artistic dreams, and a crazy, almost hallucinatory caper steeped in the making of a BDSM "femdom" movie to pay off some low-level gangsters / drug dealers.
And both protagonists, Dolores and Serena, blithely out of control, both in it 's obscene and lurid piece of work, even sickening in parts, sure to alienate the Oprah Book crowd with its flagrant disregarded for mainstream American values; terms of behavior and substance abuse.
Without ever taking self seriously, this novel by Richard Perez actually covers a lot of serious ground (especially in the first part of the book), involving real life issues facing a lot of young Americans, especially those struggling in the arts: sustaining employment ( and having to pay back staggering debt (as in student loans, which calls up make), health care (or the lack of health insurance), one's the protagonists as pregnant; how complicit Universities are in contributing to the American idea of living in debt).
The narrative style of PERMANENT OBSCURITY is loose and spontaneous, somewhere between Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski. The rawness of the writing is often jarring and Bukowski-like and unsucooled in a way that underscores the world of the Lower East Side (and the East Village ) and the circumstances of the protagonists.
Told in three big acts, the final part of the novel is probably the most conventional and movie-like, with the ladies (shades of Almodovar 's VOLVER) having to dispose of a little "accident." The climax also involves a wild car chase by hardcore drug dealers, a gun battle, and a final high-speed pursuit by the police, finally redemption - at least in the case of our narrator, Dolores.
PERMANENT OBSCURITY is a perversely engaging read, cautionary tale or not, but it might be appealing to those in the know: meaning those in the arts who have suffered the slings and arrows outrageous humiliation. Some might say this is a book about losers ; of course, anyone in the arts saying that might happen looking at a mirror.
If you 're living (or considered living) the artist & # 39; s life of desperation and poverty and helplessness and absolute indifference, then let this nail stand as an ironic warning.
