Another Dangerous Book

Give James Franco this: his fiction is better than his non-. Last year, in an essay for the Wall Street Journal, Franco argued that his appearance on General Hospital was a piece of performance art. “Performance art is all about context,” Franco reminded us. “When I wear green makeup and fly across a rooftop in Spider-Man 3, I'm working as an actor, but were I to do the same thing on the subway platform, a host of possibilities would open up. Playing the Green Goblin in the subway would no longer be about creating the illusion that I am flying. It would be about inserting myself in a familiar space in such a way that it becomes stranger than fiction.”

Now that Franco has unleashed an actual work of fiction—this week, Scribner will publish his Palo Alto: Stories—I can't help but wonder: is Franco-the-Author another piece of performance art? Consider this blurb from Ben Marcus, a serious, tough-minded novelist and Franco's former fiction prof at Columbia: “James Franco's chilling stories seem too true for comfort. The characters in Palo Alto navigate off a moral compass so smashed they bruise everything they touch. Franco's intense artistry swarms all over this gripping book. Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker. Or better yet, just think James Franco.” (Now consider Marcus on that other literary J. F., Jonathan Franzen, whom he accuses of “courting and spurning [mainstream readers] in equal flailing measure (I love you, I hate you, I need you, you're stupid), creating a performance that was sometimes more compelling than his own fiction.”)

We'll come back to Marcus. For now, let's note that, even by the specious standards of the literary blurb market, this is nonsense. The best thing I can say about Palo Alto is that it is occasionally competent. As Franco might have predicted (intended?), the context is more interesting than the art.

Palo Alto includes 11 closely linked stories set in Franco's hometown during the early 1990s. Minor characters in one story become narrators in another, but this never feels contrived because it all takes place within the world of teenagers. And these teenagers are all indulging in the same things: pot, beer, acid, heroin and vulgar, unfeeling sex.

Even with these extracurriculars, the biggest problem with Franco's fiction is that it's boring. No one seems interesting, nothing ever happens and Franco fails to establish an authentic sense of place (other than a few random landmarks) or time (other than a few cultural references: Wayne's World, Street Fighter II, GNR, the Gulf War). Franco's style contributes to this. He tries so hard to make his prose terse and direct that it actually becomes distracting. It doesn't feel like Raymond Carver; it feels like technical writing. “Then this guy sat next to me,” one character explains. “Ronny Feldman. He sat right next to me on the couch. He was a bad kid and he was handsome. He had gone to my school but had been kicked out.”

This quotation also gets Palo Alto's lack of imaginative range—its reliance on stock characters and its lazy repetitions. Ten of the stories include at least one male character described as “handsome.” Ronny ends up getting run over by an SUV, and two other stories turn on vehicular violence. The story Franco previously published in Esquire, here retitled “Jack-'O,” feels like one of Palo Alto's better offerings simply because it provides a conceptual and stylistic break. At least Franco's style limits his figurative language. In “American History,” another one of Palo Alto's better stories, a tough black guy tells someone to “break off this motherfucking honky.” Here's Franco's gloss on this: “It came out of his cruel face like a rocky stream.” What does that even mean? Are the words the rocks or the water? And what does that make the face?

There are other examples: “He looked so thick, like hardened tree sap”; “Tom Prince had horrible face acne, which sprouted in small groupings, like piles of bat shit.” (Every Franco villain comes with acne and/or body hair.) But I can forgive a lot of stylistic fumbling if it's done in the service of a larger point. The point of Palo Alto might be described as representing the internal logic of adolescence, along with the emotions and distortions required to maintain it. It's not a bad idea—just like Franco's bleak minimalism isn't a bad aesthetic—but when Franco tries to comment on it, he often comes off as pseudo-profound: “My family always looked ridiculous, but funny because the pictures resembled them, but not enough.” One can't help but recall that Freaks and Geeks, the TV show where Franco got his acting break, explored these same themes in a way that was both less stilted and more empathetic.

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Raymond Carver also lived in Palo Alto for a while. He also launched his writing career with an Esquire short story. But Carver did so only after years of drinking, drifting and custodial work. He's a good example of how literary talent can be tough to quantify—and of why the trappings of the literary profession, the blurbs, the book deals, the magazine bylines, matter.

Much has been made of Franco's polygamist approach to grad school. His enrollment this fall in the Rhode Island School of Design and in Yale's English Ph.D. program (where, full disclosure, I'm a fourth-year student) brings the total to six. But no one should slam Franco for this. First, the world has too many people who attack learning and not enough who engage in it. Second, I'd bet that Franco is paying his own way, which means, far from taking someone else's seat, he's probably creating an extra spot or two.

But Franco's fiction is different because, by publishing it, he has crossed into a professional role. Perhaps Franco's mere presence will energize and legitimize literary fiction, but it does so at some cost. Esquire forfeits one of its few remaining short story slots. Scribner, the house of Fitzgerald and Hemingway—hell, the house of Chuck Klosterman—does so, too.

You could raise the same questions over Franco's entrée into other professional fields. In addition to his fiction writing, he's directing films and debuting them at all the right festivals, opening solo art shows and continuing to act at a more than full-time clip. Franco, in other words, has become a paradox: a professionalized dilettante. It seems like an odd way to create art. (Name me one writer who wouldn't kill for the resources to slow down.) It also suggests that Franco may be most interested in being perceived as an artist. He could be an enabler, a popularizer, a hipster Oprah. But while he's done some of this—appearing, for example, in the “book trailer” for Gary Shteyngart's newest novel—most of the cultural capital is flowing in the other direction. Shteyngart, like Marcus, also graced Palo Alto with a blushing blurb (“Franco's talent is unmistakable, his ambition profound . . .”).

And that's where we find ourselves: Franco leveraging his celebrity, and people like Marcus and Shteyngart serving as his happy fulcrums. It's this warm, open embrace, more than Franco's successes or failures as a writer, that makes me skeptical about Palo Alto. Maybe it's I'm Still Here: Stories from and Inspired by the Motion Picture. Or maybe Franco's real contribution to the world of letters will be exposing, intentionally or not, just how star-fucked it can be.