murasaki's Full Review: Richard Perez - The Losers' Club
I am of two minds about Richard Perez’s The Loser’s Club, recently published by the small but spunky Ludlow Press. Part of me wonders if this novel is just thinly veiled dreck, while the other part of me thinks I’ve been reading lit-rah-ture for so long I no longer have an appreciation for the grittiness of books like The Loser’s Club. Quite the dilemma.
The Plot
Martin Sierra is a would-be poet living in the East Village section of New York City. During the day he works in a mindless job for a Japanese shipping company, using company time and supplies for copying his poems for submission to magazines. In his studio apartment, Martin has a huge pile of rejection letters that he cannot seem to get rid of. Martin also has a predilection for personal ads--he compulsively checks his personal add voicemail box and his answering machine at home, just in case a woman calls him. He also browses others’ personal ads and occasionally leaves a message.
Martin is not just looking for love, he’s looking for a life. “Loser” is just the beginning.
Enter Nikki, a bisexual woman in an on-again-off-again situation with another woman. And then there’s Lola, another artsy type who lives with her schizophrenic mother and goes to art school but doesn’t seem to paint that much. Let’s not forget Amaris, a goth-would-be-vampire, with a young son and a soon-to-be-ex-husband to complicate matters. And I would be remiss to not mention Anna, Martin’s deceased mother who had personal problems of her own. At some moments, I thought Anna was abusive; at others, I wondered if she and Martin had an incestuous relationship, but the text remains ambiguous on that point.
Elements of Style
The dialogue and the narration had an edgy feel to it. Perez’s descriptions of various Village nightclubs and bars had depth and a real quality about them. I would be willing to wager that all of the places depicted were actual hot spots in the 90s.
Unfortunately, my praise for The Loser’s Club ends there. Perez seems overly fond of using italics in dialogue—could that be any more annoying? I mean, do people actually talk like that? I’d rather the writer left emphasis up to my imagination to fill in. At times, I felt like I was locked in a room with Chandler Bing.
Edginess and reality aside, the characters, particularly Martin seemed rather shallow and underdeveloped. I suppose Martin had no more than surface knowledge of some of the women and they would seem shallow to him as well, but Martin himself wasn’t very cleanly developed. For a poet, he didn’t seem to write that often; Martin was busier with checking his voicemail and getting drunk at various bars and clubs every night. Or maybe Perez was so successful drawing Martin as such a loser that I didn’t really care about the character at all.
I predicted the entire outcome of the book within the first three chapters--11 pages.
Overall
I suppose this novel would be adequate for beach reading; there’s not a lot going on under the surface. And, I tend to think men would like this novel better than I did, or maybe people who live in the Village or other parts of New York City. Although I liked Perez’s use of language in and of itself, the plot that he fashioned with it just did not do anything for me.
Set in downtown New York City, The Losers Club tells the story of Martin Sierra, an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. His journey brings us in...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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