John Carroll Dolan

Pleasant Hell was really good, one of the most psychologically acute books about the Love Generation's preterites written. If you've read something like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao then I would say this is similar in that their protagonists are both completely obtuse dorks, but Dolan's writing style is way better. Not only is he really good at finding clever metaphors (so much so that it was noticeable - he's one of those writers where you find yourself pausing at the end of paragraphs to go "hmm, that's a clever way of putting things"), but this was much more unflinching, with the honesty to admit that ultimately there's nothing noble about being a total loser, even if it did give him an interesting perspective on the world. He grew up in the Bay Area when it was at its peak in the late 60s and early 70s, the most artistically creative and influential part of the whole country, and he ruefully admits that he simply wasn't cool enough for it, and suffered through the kind of lovingly described inner turmoil only true nerds can summon. I thought it was a great look at a side of that scene you don't often see - not everyone was in a psychedelic rock band and scoring drugs like they were scoring women, and what was life like for those preterite losers? He makes the miserable pathos of his nerdhood come alive, hilariously dissecting his own failures with work, women, and the world around him with a sharp eye for all of the minor nuances around him, and a way of summing up people in a few words that you don't find very often. In particular his way of describing his own adolescent fantasies of power and revenge manages to be both funny and disturbing and pathetic and somehow almost lovable.… (mehr)