Sensationalist bullshit.

I can’t take it anymore, and I feel bad because the prose is beautiful, but the plot is too meandering for me right now. Like what’s the point of the story?

I get that Jesse’s bisexual boyfriend left her and she’s found a new obsession in Madison, but who cares?

I think that’s my problem with this book: I don’t care.

And anytime my interest is piqued, it doesn’t last but three pages. I can’t make it through a whole chapter without forcing myself to sift through unnecessary details (granted, they do paint a pretty picture).

I can hardly decide how to rate this book. This dilemma is my own fault for picking up an erotic literature and then whining about the abundance of sexual content, but the cover is too enticing to pass up.

None of the characters in this novel are in the right headspace. They are a bunch of flawed people with complicated views on life who obviously need serious counseling. When I say complicated, I mean someone who is addicted to indifference and longs to be with a homosexual partner or someone who wants to escape her own consciousness by being a self-destructive whore. It's so blunt that it slaps the reader in the face with the sad reality that some people are trapped in a well-developed sense of doom and believe they'll never escape the trauma in the bubble they're in. There's way too much brooding and chaos going on, and IT'S DAMN DEVASTATING.

After some drastic and life-destroying actions, there's this line: 'I have done the thing I was most afraid of.. what will happen now?' for a little while, it fills my existence with emptiness and triggers memories of my own self-inflicted suffering.

There's a strong feminist approach to it, but in a very sensual way, so it takes a lot of patience not to cringe internally with all the weird sex thing.

I hope when you read this, you look at it closely enough because it can be easily misread. There's beauty in the shattered bits of these broken people and I won't forget how it made me feel.

Hmmm

Last few chapters made the book.

X

an ehhh book imo

pros: set in SF in the 90s & actually feels like it, very vivid, short & snappy

cons: everything else

got a bonus star bc, “I decided that all this was my fault because I was the worst kind of person; a pretty girl with high expectations who wanted more, but couldn't define more and prayed it wasn't just a matter of marrying money.” is perhaps the cruelest & most honest thing i’ve ever heard.

There were moments of bravura writing here; lots of well expressed thoughts about life, love, mortality. The sum of the parts definitely is greater than the whole. For some reason the book's meandering arc undercut the sustenance of the mood, at least for me. I did learn a little about the psychology of women who hang on with dreamy loser men. The sensationalistic, seedy aspects of the book that have been so touted did not strike me as being really that shocking or original. Like better books before it (eg., The Day of the Locust) it is yet another attempt to capture the seediness of sunny California and its broken dreamers and human detritis. In the end, I wished the book had been more about Madison. I wanted to know more about her, but the necessary limitations of Jesse's perspective in regard to her prevents this. Oddly, even though it is written smoothly, I found myself wearied by this story and could only take it in 10-page chunks. It took me days to read when it should only have taken a few hours.
I would give this a moderate thumbs up.

I think I'd like to give Steinke another go, particularly her "Jesus Saves," which seems to be even more acclaimed. (Interjection: As I am slightly revising this review, I have since read Jesus Saves and it was wonderful.)

--------
EARLIER THOUGHTS as I was reading:

SEE FINAL THOUGHTS AT BOTTOM:

INITIAL:
Dark side, sexuality, quick read. Think this might suit me right now. But, really, the girl on the cover renders me a complete simpleton. I fell for it, like a horse after a carrot. I freely admit.

She writes well. Good scene setting. Main character seems like a fish out of water, straddling the hetero and gay milieu in San Fran. Sometimes she overreaches metaphorically, the author. Bothered me a bit that the editors failed to catch the word rhythms spelled with an extra y. The Grove Press is no fly-by-night... Whatever.

QUARTER:
Far enough in now to remark. A solid read. Some cool observations about love. Learning more about the female mind. Hits a roadblock for me, though, with the character of Madame Pig. I feel like I've walked into someone else's novel. The eccentric pathetic fat woman fag hag. Is she Miss Havesham or the woman from Gilbert Grape or something from Flannery O'Connor or JK Toole or Armistead Maupin or that John Behrendt book? The fact that I'm thinking all that does not bode well. Hopefully we can get back to more self brooding and sex.

HALFWAY:
It still hasn't quite shifted into high gear year, but the Jesse/Madison dynamic is heating up a little, with not-so-subtle hints of Persona-like doubling between them: each dying their hair the opposite color of their natural shade; the similarity in looks and body type; the accidental mutual connections, etc. So far this book strikes me as uneven; there are passages of confidence and great thoughtfulness from the author alternating with some less sure, sophomoric prose.

3,5 ☆

Steinke’s prose was absolutely stunning, You could tell that it was written with a lot of care because every single word seemed to be chosen for a very specific reason, no other word could have replaced it.

‘Suicide blonde’ explores questions of female sexuality and the meaning of being loved. However, its execution was not satisfactory for me. I understand why Jesse is the way she is, the novel gives us every single motive why she has those behaviors, but to be honest I’m so over female characters that are so naive and can’t seem to have the bare minimal critical thinking — or they have but never act according to it. You’re 29 for the love of God stop saying yes to anyone and everything. I’m also a bit tired of stories that delve into female characters exploring their sexual fantasies and desires leading up (to some extent) to prostitution. Like I’m sorry but authors/ other creative artists make it seem like making contact with that world is super natural and common, which I despise.

My biggest problem with this novel were the characters tho. They didn’t feel real somehow. Very stereotypical and acting accordingly to what the author wanted them to say in order to explore some themes without any previous build up (don’t know if what I wrote here made any sense). At certain times this book felt rather dystopian, the ambience and the characters, than an exploration of life in the 90’s — the reality at the time of publication.

Either ways, I think it was a good book that discussed interesting themes without overanalyzing them for the reader. The streams of consciousness from Jesse were interesting to follow and had a lot to discuss.

The biggest piece of advice I got from this was: never date a bisexual man.

It's been a while since I had the dubious honor of reading precious MFa "literature." The sort of literature where Everything means Something, where everything's articulate, where all is symbol, where nothing has air to breath. Where perfectly orchestrated set-pieces march tiredly across the page in such a formation to make them easier for you to underline for your life-suffocating English class.

But what did I expect from a book that gets its title from an INXS song?

Now a new man, I would have normally stopped reading this after Chapter 1, but I've had this book for such a long time (published in 1992, it was probably no more than 5 years old when I bought it at a yard sale. Ah, how time flies!) I suffered through its pretentious prose, its overly-analyzing, cloyingly cynical processing of artificial situations, all to my own undoing.

When characters talk (when they do talk, after pages of glossy glossing-over dull thoughts) it is like no person has ever talked in the whole history of talking:

"You're not one of those people who consider seeing your parents argue intense?"

"I think seeing a seagull with a broken wing on the side of the road can be just as horrible as-"

"As what?" Madison asked. "Getting raped?"

There are no truths, no wisdom, nothing to be found in this book, just a smear of common MFA cliches tiredly and randomly presented in mediocre "literary" writing for which we are supposed to pat the author on the back:

"The fat woman ran her vacuum and I was reminded intensely of the abortion I had had in college. The suck of the vacuum, the rich smell of blood, and how afterward I stayed in my room with the blinds closed and the lights off for several days. I had the sensation of being completely empty, like standing in your old room the minute after the last box has been carried out. I remember going outside in my nightgown to a bench in the sunlight. Nothing that came before that moment seemed real. As if I woke, not just from three days, but from a whole lifetime of sleep."

Um, okay.

Even though he is dead on the page, the narrator's boyfriend is still an insufferable, mopey douchebag, as played by Ethan Hakwe if there ever was a movie. In fact, all the characters are dead on the page, dull, lifeless husks in which the narrator/author projects whatever mindless pretty prose fancies her at the moment:

"And Bell was gay, or at least ambivalent enough to make the idea of marriage ridiculous. But even if I were a man, as I often used to wish, I couldn't stop him from going down. It was what he wanted. I could tell the way he held his cigarette, how when he spoke he looked coldly through my head and into the next world."

There is so much tell with the characters, so much projection of philosophies and insights which are never felt because they are never shown. They are not real people, they are personifications.

Nothing in this book seems like it is real. It feels like the writings of a first-time author self-consciously writing a book of perfectly neat, smoetheringly beuatiful words.

Oh, how it reminds me of my own words! How it reminds me of my own first-time authorship. The comparison is hurtful and startling and embarassing. But if this can get published, than so I suppose can I.

How easy it was to gloss boredly, angrily, frustratingly over every over-packaged, suffocating paragraph. You can tell the talent is there, it just needs room to grow. A story worth telling. Some truth, some life rather than pretty, MFA-approved lettering.

Perhaps I am tired of MFA "Literature" because I have been reading so much pulpy genre novels lately? Perhaps self-indulgent whiny literature bores me now because I have become so accustomed to gritty, exciting sleaze?

No, rubbish: this book is rubbish.

Ugh, to think this is the book I read as I turned 30! Although the character, being 29, and wallowing in over-intellectualized self-pity makes it a good addition to my Gen X/Slack lit collection, of which my interest in is quickly dying.

(As an aside, no less than three men told me the book's maxim-pin-up-like cover made them interested in the book. Sex sells!)

Bizarre, but I enjoyed the author's candor. Plus, it takes place mostly in San Francisco, which is my favorite city, so that adds a lot to its enjoyable flavor. Hesitant recommendation, since it's so out there, but if you can stomach a little bluntness, it's well worth the read.

“She wonders if it might be true even now, that women were made for the pleasure of others.”

Extremely hopeless. If you want to feel like nothing matters and that men were created to destroy your life, then I recommend. Otherwise maybe skip it.

sinestésico e cheio de impressões. fui ler quase sem sinopse, mas com alguma expectativa. adoro livros sobre mulheres (decadentes), ainda mais meio lúgubres e situados numa atmosfera particular mulheresca. as alegorias e analogias são ótimas e quase vívidas.
me admirei com a descrição das personagens, já que mulheres descritas por mulheres sempre são mais interessantes, inteligentes e o caramba, mas até os homens da história me deixaram interessada, embora (graças a deus) fossem poucos.
só o que me deixou meio apartada foi o falocentrismo, e embora seja bem essa a experiência do patriarcado infiltrado nos nossos cérebros, esperava um pouco mais de… libertação? autonomia? algo assim, mas não exatamente. fosse menos falocêntrico, seria bem mais brilhante. como sempre.

While I didn’t love the book, this book contains one of my all time favorite quotes, “You can’t save someone from themselves.”