Synopsis
A novel inspired by the deaths of Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, written by the director of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho". The narrator, a gay infomercial director named Spunky Davis, is writing a science fiction screenplay when two friends introduce him to an alternate reality called Pink, and claim that they are actually the alternate realities of Blake--a rock star friend of Davis's who killed himself.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-12-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 272 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Gus Van Sant goes from auteur to author in an brilliant, inventive, and endlessly entertaining first novel that reads like a Warholian mix of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins.In the town of Sasquatch, Oregon, Spunky Davis, middle-aged maker of infomercials, is trying to find his next assignment, finish the screenplay that he hopes will bring him Hollywood glory, and deal with the death of his friend and favorite infomercial presenter, teen idol Felix Arroyo. Enter two young aspiring filmmakers, Jack and Matt, whom Spunky finds strangely familiar--especially as Jack bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Felix. But Jack and Matt are not what they appear to be; they are messengers from a dimension beyond time known as Pink, and they invite Spunky to join them on their voyage of transcendence and recovery.Using a delirious array of voices signified by different typefaces, a flip cartoon that animates the novels action, footnotes and line drawings, Gus Van Sant turns the novel into an explosively visual experience, a captivating combination of texture and text. As original and involving as any of Van Sant's films, Pink is both a hip, comic deconstruction of our image-obsessed culture and a genuinely tender story on the classic themes of love, time, and loss.
In the town of Sasquatch, Oregon, Spunky Davis, middle-aged maker of infomercials, is trying to find his next assignment, finish the screenplay that he hopes will bring him Hollywood glory, and deal with the death of his friend and favorite infomercial presenter, the teen idol Felix Arroyo. Enter two young aspiring filmmakers, Jack and Matt, whom Spunky finds strangely familiar - especially as Jack bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Felix. But Jack and Matt are not what they appear to be; they are messengers from a dimension beyond time known as Pink, and they invite Spunky to join them on their voyage of transcendence and recovery. Using every means the printed page offers to tell his tale - a delirious array of voices signified by different typefaces, a flip cartoon that animates the novel's action, footnotes, and drawings - Gus Van Sant turns the novel into an explosively visual experience, a captivating combination of texture and text.
Industry Reviews
Filmmaker Van Sant's (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) fictional debut is a tepid tale of a director of TV infomercials and his adventures with a pair of would-be film types, perhaps from another dimension, one of whom resembles his dead lover; they are all surrounded by other slackers in places like Las Vegas and Sasquatch, Oregon. Whatever its small merits, the novel is made harrowingly pretentious by Van Sant's noodling of the medium he employs footnotes, different typefaces, flip drawings, and the like. (It's not so much Tristram Shandy as just a shanty.) However compelling one finds the author's images on film and video, in print they're pretty flat. David Bartholomew, NYPL
Moore
On the bottom left corner of every even-numbered page of this hip, self-indulgent novel is a crude line drawing, each slightly different from the one that precedes it. Riffled together, the drawings make a flip-book not the only evidence that first-time novelist Van Sant (director of Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho and other films) misses the screen. Narrator Spunky Davis, a successful "informmercial" director, spends much of the novel mourning the fatal overdose of one of his stars, Felix Arroyo (who bears more than a passing resemblance to River Phoenix), while suicidal rock star Blake (read Kurt Cobain) isolates himself from his rock star wife and their new triplets and devotes himself to collecting heavy farm equipment. Meanwhile, two of Spunky's young filmmaker friends turn out to be aliens, or "Nemos." None of this is especially easy to untangle, even with the help of Van Sant's illustrations (Bob Dylan-quality knockoffs of Quentin Blake) and wryly omniscient footnotes ("Sue is Felix's old girlfriend. She has long blond hair and wears a beret a lot of the time. She, like Spike, works in a coffee shop, except the one she works in is in San Francisco"). The book's disparate voices and tones never harmonize, however. Van Sant's allegory, by turns elegiac and satirical, of today's movie business (films as infomercials, Hollywood as Las Vegas) is the novelistic equivalent of hand-held camera work jittery and compelling in short bursts but hard to watch for long. (Oct.) FYI: Van Sant's Good Will Hunting will be released this winter.
Lopate
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