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.

* * *

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.