Allison Burnett's Blog
October 15, 2014
The Escape of Malcolm Poe
NOVELIST RICHARD KRAMER WRITES:
"Meet Malcolm Poe. He has decided, at a turning point in his life, to keep a journal in which he intends to confront his present, his past, his choices, and -- most of all -- his ghosts, which have all come back to haunt him, in a way that anyone who's reached fifty will identify with all too well. He tells us, as the book opens on New Year's Eve, that "this year my only resolution is to escape." Whether he does or doesn't is the tension of Allison Burnett's marvelous new novel, The Escape of Malcolm Poe.
Malcolm is soon to be fifty. He hates his job. He is or isn't very ill. And he's been married for twenty-five years to a gracious and loving woman with whom he feels hopelessly trapped. The book opens with the announcement to his readers that he's gone off his anti-depressants, and now, all that he's been numb to for so long breaks through -- his fears, his ideas about himself and the choices he's made, and his alternately scabrous and loving feelings toward those who love him. He can no longer hide from the truth and no longer wants to, and we accompany him as he tumbles back and forth through time, to those moments half a life earlier when he believes it all could have gone differently. Malcolm is mean-spirited, self-deceiving, hurtful to others, and foolish. He is also hilarious and deeply sympathetic, despite his considerable efforts not to be. He infuriated me, and he broke my heart, and I was with him every step of the way.
The Escape of Malcolm Poe is haunting, elegant, and wise. Burnett knows Malcolm well and clearly loves him, and because of this, I felt for his prickly hero from the first pages and realized how he'd gotten to me when, in the course of my day, I found myself seeing things as he might. I read it straight through, as I didn't want to leave his company. He has much to say, and a reason to say it all right now, as authentically as he can. He knows that time is running out, because that's what time does, and not much more. Sometimes we're lucky enough to see this. When we do, we realize we have to try to know ourselves and let others know us; that it is now or never. Malcolm Poe chooses now. We choose it with him. The way he faces it is a triumph, as is this book."
-- Richard Kramer is the author of the novel These Things Happen, as well as the Emmy and multiple Peabody award winning writer, director and producer of numerous TV series.
"Meet Malcolm Poe. He has decided, at a turning point in his life, to keep a journal in which he intends to confront his present, his past, his choices, and -- most of all -- his ghosts, which have all come back to haunt him, in a way that anyone who's reached fifty will identify with all too well. He tells us, as the book opens on New Year's Eve, that "this year my only resolution is to escape." Whether he does or doesn't is the tension of Allison Burnett's marvelous new novel, The Escape of Malcolm Poe.
Malcolm is soon to be fifty. He hates his job. He is or isn't very ill. And he's been married for twenty-five years to a gracious and loving woman with whom he feels hopelessly trapped. The book opens with the announcement to his readers that he's gone off his anti-depressants, and now, all that he's been numb to for so long breaks through -- his fears, his ideas about himself and the choices he's made, and his alternately scabrous and loving feelings toward those who love him. He can no longer hide from the truth and no longer wants to, and we accompany him as he tumbles back and forth through time, to those moments half a life earlier when he believes it all could have gone differently. Malcolm is mean-spirited, self-deceiving, hurtful to others, and foolish. He is also hilarious and deeply sympathetic, despite his considerable efforts not to be. He infuriated me, and he broke my heart, and I was with him every step of the way.
The Escape of Malcolm Poe is haunting, elegant, and wise. Burnett knows Malcolm well and clearly loves him, and because of this, I felt for his prickly hero from the first pages and realized how he'd gotten to me when, in the course of my day, I found myself seeing things as he might. I read it straight through, as I didn't want to leave his company. He has much to say, and a reason to say it all right now, as authentically as he can. He knows that time is running out, because that's what time does, and not much more. Sometimes we're lucky enough to see this. When we do, we realize we have to try to know ourselves and let others know us; that it is now or never. Malcolm Poe chooses now. We choose it with him. The way he faces it is a triumph, as is this book."
-- Richard Kramer is the author of the novel These Things Happen, as well as the Emmy and multiple Peabody award winning writer, director and producer of numerous TV series.
April 4, 2012
Best Review I Will Ever Get
There is almost no chance a book of mine will ever receive a better review than this one. It appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a couple of months ago. If you do not know the LA Review, check it out, because it's the best book site in Los Angeles, read by even the east coast elite, who usually ignore everything west of the Hudson.
ROBIN RUSSIN
Support Our Troop
Allison Burnett
Death by Sunshine
Writers Tribe Books, October 2011. 260 pp.
Death by Sunshine marks the welcome return of Allison Burnett’s deliciously
vainglorious and perverse protagonist B. K. Troop, familiar to those who
have read Burnett’s previous Troop novels, Christopher (2003) and its sequel,
The House Beautiful (2006). Troop is a true original: an aging, alcoholic,
pretentious, gay memoirist, an impoverished wine snob and would-be
Lothario who fixates on all the wrong targets for his amorous advances. A
roiling brew of hormones, Troop is prone to fits of vanity, self-pity, cranky
erudition, and sudden moments of improbably, impetuous bravery. He is at
once impatient with a world that refuses to acknowledge his brilliance and
given to drunken wallowing in the realization that he is a failure and an
object of contempt to almost everyone he meets. Troop is haunted by an
abusive childhood — “memories of midnight whispers, strange rashes,
painful bruises, waking from nightmares to something far worse” — and yet,
he is still randy and delighted by literature and life’s small pleasures. In
short, he’s one of the great comic characters in recent literature, on a par
with Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Both his earlier books (yes, Burnett is a he; Allison was also his father’s name)
were set in Troop’s beloved New York City and framed as memoirs:
Christopher recounts Troop’s tortuous stratagems to seduce the eponymous
straight university student with whom he’s fallen in love. In The House
Beautiful, Troop lucks into inheriting a brownstone that he turns into a little
artists colony to pay the rent and fill the loneliness in his life, and where he
once again becomes frustratingly fixated on a shy young student, Adrian.
Death by Sunshine is again in memoir form, but takes the writer out of his
comfort zone (if such a thing is possible) recounting his quixotic odyssey to
the City of Angels. Apparently offered a chance to have his first book
(Christopher) made into a movie, Troop self-consciously and self-loathingly
follows the tradition of prior literati who migrated west to sell their souls to
the industry, itching to at last be rich and famous, while at the same time
bemoaning their devil’s bargain.
Burnett — also a screenwriter, producer and director with more than a dozen
feature credits, including Fame and Autumn in New York — skillfully weaves
in a number of genres appropriate to the adventure: The book begins as a
comic road trip (or rather a rail trip, as Troop can neither drive a car nor
abide air travel), evolves into a Hollywood cautionary tale, and then takes a
turn to become a noir murder mystery. On the cross-country train-ride,
Troop throws himself at the first available target, a handsome, sullen
drunkard who may or may not be the scion of a Mafia family. But this is a
short-lived obsession. Arriving in the Southland, Troop encounters a
menagerie of indigenous types and tropes: the carnivorous and enhanced
would-be starlet; the fraudulent producer; the D-girl; the mysterious acting
coach; the desperate screenwriter; the seedy motel near the glamor of Beverly
Hills and the romance of the Pacific, and yet worlds away from both. There’s
also the subplot of a predatory stage mother and her abused little girl. These
are the kinds of elements familiar in Hollywood literature from The Day of
The Locust to Get Shorty, but Burnett gives them fresh energy by routing them
through Troop’s comic misapprehensions and distinctive voice. Here’s how
Troop describes a past-his-prime screenwriter he encounters at a Hollywood
whodunit party: “His high dudgeon would have been more impressive if it
had not been painfully obvious that he would have given his right leg for the
privilege of having a movie star destroy one of his scripts. He was like the
stripper who grouses about her customers not two minutes before showing
them her ovarian walls. Either quit screenwriting or shut the hell up.” But the
description, as Troop is painfully aware, applies equally to himself.
Troop’s sad-sack first encounter with the film industry gives way to more
pressing concerns. Through the sex ads of a free paper, he contacts a male
prostitute with whom he hopes to pass a few hours of casual lust. The young
man who arrives, and who bears little resemblance to the hunk in the ad, is
Calvin. Unlike Troop’s lust objects in the two prior novels, Calvin is neither
beautiful nor excessively young. Pushing thirty, he is a tall, ungainly, balding
stork, but Troop senses in him another victim of abuse and, in spite of
Calvin’s lack of education or any other apparent redeeming quality, a kindred
soul. Instead of enjoying the bout of sweaty sex he’d imagined, Troop finds
himself simply cuddling the young man, and then attending his pathetic
birthday party. When Calvin disappears, Troop sets off on the ill-conceived
sleuthing mission that comprises the remainder of his Los Angeles
adventure, which is at first hilarious, but finally tragic and unanticipated in
ways that resonate with Troop on a deeply personal level.
Burnett is a dazzling stylist, and the astonishing verbal agility with which he
informs Troop’s first-person narrative is one of the novel’s great pleasures.
Troop’s voice in the previous volumes carried echoes of Waugh and Capote.
Here, there are suggestions of S.J. Perelman’s witty logophilia, especially as
found in his many pieces devoted to life’s comic mortifications and the
dangers of Hollywood’s siren song. Burnett (through Troop’s jaundiced eyes)
is precise and inventive in his observations, from pudendal (“I looked down
and saw that, through a gap in my fuzzy robe, my privates dangled like fruit
bats”; “Her cut-off denims were tiny. A tuft of pubic hair clawed out from one
side like the hand of a buried miner”) to those surrounding Troop’s abortive
attempt at a Hollywood career (“If the French have taught us anything …
besides the value of rich sauces on rotten meat, it’s the upside of surrender”)
to his horrified astonishment at Los Angeles traffic (“It was a Saturday
afternoon, for heaven’s sake and we were heading away from the metropolis
not toward it! Surely this was the greatest urban exodus since the epic flight
of the Jews from Brooklyn to Long Island”).
In the end, as with its predecessors, Death by Sunshine is a showcase for the
irrepressible Troop, full of naughty humor, absurd misadventures, and
playful allusions to everyone from Laurence Sterne to Henry James. But the
story has real depth as well, in the end serving as a moving, tragicomic
meditation on how being open to the possibility of love can redeem even the
worst humiliations and failures.
¤
Robin Russin is a Professor of Screenwriting at the University of California,
Riverside, where he serves as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and
Writing for the Performing Arts. He has written, produced and directed for
film, TV, and the theater, as well as publishing stories, articles and reviews.
A Rhodes Scholar, he received his A.B. from Harvard, and graduate degrees
from Oxford University, Rhode Island School of Design, and UCLA.
ROBIN RUSSIN
Support Our Troop
Allison Burnett
Death by Sunshine
Writers Tribe Books, October 2011. 260 pp.
Death by Sunshine marks the welcome return of Allison Burnett’s deliciously
vainglorious and perverse protagonist B. K. Troop, familiar to those who
have read Burnett’s previous Troop novels, Christopher (2003) and its sequel,
The House Beautiful (2006). Troop is a true original: an aging, alcoholic,
pretentious, gay memoirist, an impoverished wine snob and would-be
Lothario who fixates on all the wrong targets for his amorous advances. A
roiling brew of hormones, Troop is prone to fits of vanity, self-pity, cranky
erudition, and sudden moments of improbably, impetuous bravery. He is at
once impatient with a world that refuses to acknowledge his brilliance and
given to drunken wallowing in the realization that he is a failure and an
object of contempt to almost everyone he meets. Troop is haunted by an
abusive childhood — “memories of midnight whispers, strange rashes,
painful bruises, waking from nightmares to something far worse” — and yet,
he is still randy and delighted by literature and life’s small pleasures. In
short, he’s one of the great comic characters in recent literature, on a par
with Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
Both his earlier books (yes, Burnett is a he; Allison was also his father’s name)
were set in Troop’s beloved New York City and framed as memoirs:
Christopher recounts Troop’s tortuous stratagems to seduce the eponymous
straight university student with whom he’s fallen in love. In The House
Beautiful, Troop lucks into inheriting a brownstone that he turns into a little
artists colony to pay the rent and fill the loneliness in his life, and where he
once again becomes frustratingly fixated on a shy young student, Adrian.
Death by Sunshine is again in memoir form, but takes the writer out of his
comfort zone (if such a thing is possible) recounting his quixotic odyssey to
the City of Angels. Apparently offered a chance to have his first book
(Christopher) made into a movie, Troop self-consciously and self-loathingly
follows the tradition of prior literati who migrated west to sell their souls to
the industry, itching to at last be rich and famous, while at the same time
bemoaning their devil’s bargain.
Burnett — also a screenwriter, producer and director with more than a dozen
feature credits, including Fame and Autumn in New York — skillfully weaves
in a number of genres appropriate to the adventure: The book begins as a
comic road trip (or rather a rail trip, as Troop can neither drive a car nor
abide air travel), evolves into a Hollywood cautionary tale, and then takes a
turn to become a noir murder mystery. On the cross-country train-ride,
Troop throws himself at the first available target, a handsome, sullen
drunkard who may or may not be the scion of a Mafia family. But this is a
short-lived obsession. Arriving in the Southland, Troop encounters a
menagerie of indigenous types and tropes: the carnivorous and enhanced
would-be starlet; the fraudulent producer; the D-girl; the mysterious acting
coach; the desperate screenwriter; the seedy motel near the glamor of Beverly
Hills and the romance of the Pacific, and yet worlds away from both. There’s
also the subplot of a predatory stage mother and her abused little girl. These
are the kinds of elements familiar in Hollywood literature from The Day of
The Locust to Get Shorty, but Burnett gives them fresh energy by routing them
through Troop’s comic misapprehensions and distinctive voice. Here’s how
Troop describes a past-his-prime screenwriter he encounters at a Hollywood
whodunit party: “His high dudgeon would have been more impressive if it
had not been painfully obvious that he would have given his right leg for the
privilege of having a movie star destroy one of his scripts. He was like the
stripper who grouses about her customers not two minutes before showing
them her ovarian walls. Either quit screenwriting or shut the hell up.” But the
description, as Troop is painfully aware, applies equally to himself.
Troop’s sad-sack first encounter with the film industry gives way to more
pressing concerns. Through the sex ads of a free paper, he contacts a male
prostitute with whom he hopes to pass a few hours of casual lust. The young
man who arrives, and who bears little resemblance to the hunk in the ad, is
Calvin. Unlike Troop’s lust objects in the two prior novels, Calvin is neither
beautiful nor excessively young. Pushing thirty, he is a tall, ungainly, balding
stork, but Troop senses in him another victim of abuse and, in spite of
Calvin’s lack of education or any other apparent redeeming quality, a kindred
soul. Instead of enjoying the bout of sweaty sex he’d imagined, Troop finds
himself simply cuddling the young man, and then attending his pathetic
birthday party. When Calvin disappears, Troop sets off on the ill-conceived
sleuthing mission that comprises the remainder of his Los Angeles
adventure, which is at first hilarious, but finally tragic and unanticipated in
ways that resonate with Troop on a deeply personal level.
Burnett is a dazzling stylist, and the astonishing verbal agility with which he
informs Troop’s first-person narrative is one of the novel’s great pleasures.
Troop’s voice in the previous volumes carried echoes of Waugh and Capote.
Here, there are suggestions of S.J. Perelman’s witty logophilia, especially as
found in his many pieces devoted to life’s comic mortifications and the
dangers of Hollywood’s siren song. Burnett (through Troop’s jaundiced eyes)
is precise and inventive in his observations, from pudendal (“I looked down
and saw that, through a gap in my fuzzy robe, my privates dangled like fruit
bats”; “Her cut-off denims were tiny. A tuft of pubic hair clawed out from one
side like the hand of a buried miner”) to those surrounding Troop’s abortive
attempt at a Hollywood career (“If the French have taught us anything …
besides the value of rich sauces on rotten meat, it’s the upside of surrender”)
to his horrified astonishment at Los Angeles traffic (“It was a Saturday
afternoon, for heaven’s sake and we were heading away from the metropolis
not toward it! Surely this was the greatest urban exodus since the epic flight
of the Jews from Brooklyn to Long Island”).
In the end, as with its predecessors, Death by Sunshine is a showcase for the
irrepressible Troop, full of naughty humor, absurd misadventures, and
playful allusions to everyone from Laurence Sterne to Henry James. But the
story has real depth as well, in the end serving as a moving, tragicomic
meditation on how being open to the possibility of love can redeem even the
worst humiliations and failures.
¤
Robin Russin is a Professor of Screenwriting at the University of California,
Riverside, where he serves as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and
Writing for the Performing Arts. He has written, produced and directed for
film, TV, and the theater, as well as publishing stories, articles and reviews.
A Rhodes Scholar, he received his A.B. from Harvard, and graduate degrees
from Oxford University, Rhode Island School of Design, and UCLA.
