Usurper

This review is about a book.

Addiction memoirs fascinate me only because they are almost entirely about action and almost nothing about feeling. Bill Clegg's "Portrait Of An Addict As A Young Man," was interesting for about five minutes until I realized that his play on the title of James Joyce's first novel was simply an appropriation, and not actually relevant. Of course I finished the book, if that's what you could call it --- there is only one book that I have ever not finished and maybe someday I'll tell you --- but it's nothing but a single note, and only reinforces the fact that publishing is an insular dead party staffed full of pretty boys and girls who are, literally, going outside to smoke crack.

I used the title Usurper for this blog utterance because when I got to the end of the first chapter of Ulysses, I realized that I had been a very lazy reader all my life, and had to look up the definition of a word that I should have known. This is a lazy book and should have been called Usurper.

There is nothing in this book that warrants "borrowing" from James Joyce. Stealing that title is just another form of drug use. But he's not a writer and this is a memoir, so I guess you're allowed to.

Oh my, he spent seventy grand on crack. Who cares? We're supposed to be fascinated because he was a successful literary agent and had a Manhattan friends and so on. I have Manhattan friends, but I'm not successful. Yet if I told the same story it wouldn't be interesting, thanks to Warhol and our obsession with fame. That is all this book is about, is fame, so it's another entry into the anus, I mean annals, of American literature.

He basically paid no price for any of his doings. He was re-hired back into the industry after he got clean, and is apparently making money off of it (and his retelling of it). That 70,000 dollars he blew on crack was nothing compared to the money he has already gotten from the movie rights. You get page after page of monotonous drug taking and then finally, once he finally gets his boyfriend (Ira Sachs, left in the photo above, with his new partner) to leave him, by attempting suicide and failing, he turns things around. This memoir once again, like all addiction memoirs, (I haven't read Mary's yet), shows that addiction is simply a format, and offers no insight into the mysteries of human behavior.

I was very disappointed.