Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Cannibals in Love
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4679434/?ref_=tt_ov_wr * http://us.macmillan.com/cannibalsinlove/mikeroberts/9780374536633/ * http://www.wweek.com/arts/2016/09/21/coming-of-age-novel-cannibals-in-love-induces-gut-panging-nostalgia/ * http://thehumblebookgiant.blogspot.com/2016/10/review-cannibals-in-love-by-mike-roberts.html * http://www.filmjournal.com/content/film-review-king-kelly
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2016009917
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016009917
HEADING:
Roberts, Mike, 1980-
000
00397nz a2200133n 450
001
10091198
005
20160225090507.0
008
160225n| azannaabn |n aaa
010
__ |a n 2016009917
040
__ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
046
__ |f 1980-11-10 |2 edtf
053
_0 |a PS3618.O316795
100
1_ |a Roberts, Mike, |d 1980-
670
__ |a Cannibals in love, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Mike Roberts) data view (birth date: 11/10/1980)
PERSONAL
Born November 10, 1980.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Screenwriter.
AWARDS:Jury’s Choice Award, Puchon Film Festival, for King Kelly.
WRITINGS
Author of the screenplays King Kelly, 2012, and The Kill Chain. Adapted Brad Land’s memoir Goat into a screenplay, 2016.
SIDELIGHTS
Mike Roberts is an American screenwriter. He has written works for stage and the big screen and has had his scripts appear at numerous festivals. Originally from Buffalo, New York, he relocated to Los Angeles to pursue his screenwriting career.
King Kelly
In 2012 Roberts released his first screenplay: King Kelly. New Yorker Kelly is obsessed with celebrity and attempts to make a name for herself initially through performing stripteases and making solo erotic videos on her home webcam. She also acts as a drug mule. But when a large shipment of heroin she is responsible for goes missing, the stakes rise. Kelly enlists the help of a state trooper who follows her online videos to help recover the drugs.
A contributor to Film Journal International remarked that “Roberts’ script absolutely nails this latest generation of slackadaisical, drugs- and sex-obsessed post-adolescents, with archetypes that make you affectionately smile in recognition, even as you’re laughing helplessly at their profound cluelessness. His plotting … is clever in the most bracingly organic way.” The same reviewer called the movie a “funky, breathless pleasure” to watch. In a review in Slant, Diego Semerene lamented: “Too bad the film feels, much like its protagonist’s persona, fake. It isn’t interested in exploring the nuances of her character, her predicaments, or her contradictions.” Writing in the New York Times, Stephen Holden suggested that “if social satire that elicits scornful laughter is your kind of humor, King Kelly will have you doubled over with guilty guffaws.”
Cannibals in Love
Roberts published his first novel, Cannibals in Love, in 2016. Young Mike attempts to find his way in Millennial America, negotiating love, work, and terrorism. He travels the country finding odd jobs to support himself while slowly penning a novel about the Iraq War as portrayed by cows.
Booklist contributor Jonathan Fullmer suggested that “teens will likely identify with Mike’s misadventures and striving and find solace in his wit, candor, and irreverence.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that the author’s “voice is immediately recognizable. Though at times the writing becomes repetitive, there are shining moments.” Writing in the Washington Independent Review of Books Online, Bob Duffy reasoned that “like some among his contemporaries, Roberts’ narrator-hero is a creative nomad. And along the way, the author directs an insightful and sympathetic eye toward culture and custom among this tribe, with richly observed and at times laugh-out-loud glimpses of a generation that some of us, more demographically remote, find difficult to get a handle on. He also guides us with wit and charm among the outliers.”
In a review in Bookforum, John Farley observed that the novel’s narrator “practically offers readers a can of malt liquor, suggesting we get comfortable and encouraging us to gulp down the increasingly complicated storyline, which ranges from pale to murky.” Farley noted that “there There are flaws, however. First of all, Roberts’s musings can be overexplained and exhausting…. He can also be snotty in a way that reads more vengeful than humorous.” Farley remarked that “all the drinking, fighting, and sleeping around are great fun for a while. But eventually, Roberts’s treatment of Mike’s frivolity, simultaneously serious and winking, grows tiresome. For me, this happened around the hundredth page. Here, I began to write off Cannibals in Love as a charming beach read for educated post-punks.” However, Farley proposed “would-be readers persevere another twenty-two pages or so. In the seventh chapter, ‘Self-Portraits in Disguise,’ Roberts sets up his sleight-of-hand trick. An ingenious performance in folding form over content that almost makes up for the novel’s first half.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor lamented that “Mike’s relentlessly self-destructive millennial macho posturing can grow tiring.” The same critic conceded that, “impression by impression, fragment by fragment, Roberts chronicles the low-grade agony of growing up with insight and accuracy.” In a review in Willamette Week, Sophia June observed that “on the one hand, these are coming-of-age clichés. But Roberts doesn’t seem to glamorize them, and that’s part of the reason the book gets away with it. Other sections, however, read like hot takes from Holden Caulfield via Chuck Klosterman.” Still, June found the characters felt “alive,” even after having finished reading the book.
Reviewing the novel in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Amy Silverberg commented that “at his worst, Mike can be narcissistic and whiny. He makes mountains out of molehills and then curses while he climbs them. He is, in a word, self-destructive.” However, Silverberg mentioned that “the vignettes serve as a collage, a watercolor study of growing up in a very particular time, in a very particular world, in which a silent and invisible danger lurks behind every tower. Whether funny, angry, or terrified, Mike has finally found his voice: ‘the voice I actually speak in,’ he tells a friend. ‘The one I use in an email. Or a joke. That’s the way I’m trying to write.'” Silverberg shared: “Personally, I could listen to this voice all day. It’s as if it belongs to a friend I grew up with, or someone I met at a bar, or found counting lampposts in my hometown — strangely familiar and wise beyond his years.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Jonathan Fullmer, review of Cannibals in Love, p. 23.
Film Journal International, November 30, 2012, review of King Kelly.
Kirkus Reviews, September 20, 2016, review of Cannibals in Love.
Los Angeles Review of Books, October 26, 2016, Amy Silverberg, review of Cannibals in Love.
New York Times, November 29, 2012, Stephen Holden, review of King Kelly.
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2016, review of Cannibals in Love, p. 43.
Slant, November 28, 2012, Diego Semerene, review of King Kelly.
Willamette Week, September 21, 2016, Sophia June, review of Cannibals in Love.
ONLINE
Bookforum, http://www.bookforum.com/ (September 23, 2016), John Farley, review of Cannibals in Love.
Culture Trip, https://theculturetrip.com/ (September 7, 2016), Michael Barron, “Coming of Age during the Bush Era: Mike Roberts Talks about His Debut Novel Cannibals In Love.“
Mike Roberts Home Page, http://www.freemikeroberts.com (April 23, 2017).
Washington Independent Review of Books Online, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (December 2, 2016), Bob Duffy, review of Cannibals in Love.
Washington Square Films Web site, http://www.wsfilms.com/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.*
Coming of Age During the Bush Era: Mike Roberts Talks About His Debut Novel 'Cannibals In Love'
Michael Barron
US Literary Editor
Published: 7 September 2016
The author talks about his novel, which is set during the years of the Bush administration, and focuses on an American male who comes of age within it.
In The Style Of: Samuel L. Jackson
Sponsored by Connatix
The years spanning the the George W. Bush administration were a dark time in American history, particularly during the first four which began with a controversial election, truly kicked off after 9/11, and ended in the mire of two wars. Underneath the cloak of these catastrophes was the advent of another era, the one most anticipated just a couple of years earlier and seemingly ushered in by Carson Daily and TRL: the dawn of a new millennia. And no one came to define in more than the generation of people who inherited it: millennials.
To look back at this generation now, is to see it as a skipped or bridged generation, one that could freshly remember the 90s, and had yet to envision the Obama era of change; where the internet was still young and implosive, and relationships friend or intimate was mainly conducted offline. This is the period in which Mike Roberts sets his debut novel Cannibals in Love, a rollicking and tender millennial bildungsroman. Set at first in Washington D.C. and expanding into several US states by the book’s end, Cannibals in Love is a unique document of America crash landing into the 21st century. Its protagonist is also named Mike, a young would-be writer navigating both the timeless travails of love and youth and the very real fears of his time.
Throughout Cannibals in Love, Roberts builds a powerful portrait of the early aughts, made all the more visceral by Roberts’s own experiences, much of which were used as material for the book. “Using my own first name creates an intimacy with the reader,” he says, acknowledging the sleight-of-hand this gives the novel. By connecting fictional Mike with the author, and moving his character through vignette-like experiences—fronting bands, writing a book, and engaging in several romances—Roberts is able to deep in out of what made this period so unique: that it would be the last generation to exist offline and in engage primarily and nakedly in the real world.
We sent Roberts some questions about Cannibals in Love to which he responded generously.
***
When did the idea for this novel come about?
There was a certain kind of post-9/11 novel that I wanted to read that didn’t seem to exist. I was thinking a lot about Washington, DC’s role as the second city of 9/11. I don’t mean that in any kind of inflammatory way. The attacks on the Pentagon were not on the scale of the World Trade Center, obviously. And yet, the city was reeling, just the same. DC went into its own physical and psychic lockdown. But nobody really talks about Washington, DC as a real place. The experience of really living there – in the neighborhoods – is not part of the popular narrative.
Beyond that, I wanted to talk about what happened to young people – this first generation of millennials – during the chaos of the George W. Bush years. They were overeducated and underemployed, and essentially set adrift. It was important to me to begin that story in Washington, DC, and build outward.
Cover design by Na Kim, courtesy of FSG Originals
Cover design by Na Kim, courtesy of FSG Originals
Your character is also named Mike, and I’m curious how much of it is based on events in your life, as in a Ben Lerner way, and how much of it is fictional?
It is an autobiographical novel, definitely. It is built from the raw materials of my life. Calling the character Mike is a direct acknowledgment of those raw materials. But it is also a kind of subversion of the expectation that “it all really happened.” It didn’t, of course. But using my own first name creates an intimacy with the reader. It lets them feel like you are being more direct with them, more honest. And maybe you are. But it’s also a trick. Because on some level the reader has this need to believe that you are the character. The point of foregrounding it in a novel like this is to get it out of the way. Then the story is free to go wherever it wants. I just read a quote by Ann Patchett that said: “None of it happened and all of it’s true.” I don’t know if anyone can say it better than that.
I read Cannibals in Love as a millennial American bildungsroman, specifically during the presidency of George W. Bush. Can you talk a bit about returning to that time in your memory when you wrote this book? What did you find yourself getting nostalgic for? What were you grateful to see remain in history?
For a brief period of time it felt like Washington, DC was at the center of the universe to me. 9/11; the anthrax attacks; the beltway sniper; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and even Hurricane Katrina. These events all happened in a four-year period! It was almost too much to digest. The violence stopped feeling surprising to us. The only thing you could really do, then, was react. It hardens you, but it also activates a kind of fearlessness that only the young have access to.
The politics make for an interesting backdrop, of course, but I was really trying to write a social novel. I was interested in how intensely young people live together in their early twenties. The beautiful thing about being that age is that you fall in love with everyone so easily. With your friends, with music, with art, with the cities that you live in. The surprise is that these people who you spend every waking moment with, when you’re 21, can end up feeling like near-total strangers by the time you’re 25. And that’s not good or bad, it just is. It happens to everybody.
This book is also set before the rise of smart phones and social media. And even though Mike takes a job as an spam emailer, he seems almost unprepared for the internet as it is now. (Bettina later joshes him for this). Do you see him as someone who is constantly having to catch up to the world he lives in? I noticed you still use a Yahoo email account, so maybe you see this quality a bit in yourself?
Mike Roberts | © Molly Purnell, courtesy of FSG
Mike Roberts | © Molly Purnell, courtesy of FSG
The important thing to remember is that technology was not all-consuming in the early years of this novel. September 11th, itself, was a television event, as much as anything. We were not sitting at our computers refreshing the New York Times website. We were watching CNN on a straight loop. The thing that the novel does try to represent is the emergence of Web-2.0, which crash-landed dead center in the middle of the Bush years. This is when things really started to change: Google, Napster, Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist, etc., all gave rise to the user-friendly internet we take for granted now. But it also gave us this mania for content, which has left us unable to decipher actual content from advertising. Worse, it has given us the word “content.” This is all part of the joke of Mike taking a job writing spam emails for money. The absurdity is not lost on him.
I think that everyone was playing catch-up to this new version of the internet, to some extent. Mike more than most, perhaps. If I share anything with him, in this regard, it is his general lack of reverence for the internet. Things will keep changing and we will keep meeting them on our own terms. I honestly think that Mike is more engaged with these shifts than he might seem.
There is a manuscript within a book that matures alongside you, A Cattle, A Crack-Up in which you eventually whittle down a 400-page novel to a 13-page short story. What is the importance of this work to Mike’s own coming of age?
The fact that his novel could be either thirteen pages, or four hundred pages, (or, ultimately, over a thousand pages!), illustrates the fragility and absurdity of his effort. This is the bind that Mike is caught in. He loses his way with this book pretty early on, and yet he can’t let go of it. I don’t actually think that Mike is without talent in the book, either. But his idea for a novel-about-cows as an allegory for the Invasion of Iraq is doomed from the start. And yet, every writer’s novel teeters over that abyss, to some extent. The only way to know if it’s worth anything at all is to write the goddamn thing over and over and over again. And, to his credit, he finishes A Cattle, a Crack-Up three, four, five separate times within the novel. He even succeeds in gaining the attention of a New York literary agent. But all the magic is gone, at that point. He can never get back to that feeling of urgency that forced him to begin the book in the first place. The suffering that he puts himself through is brutal and ridiculous – and obviously I am making some sport of it – but I admire the fact that he is willing to follow it all the way to the end. If he could figure out how to abandon the book earlier, he would do it, I’m sure.
Mike is a peripatetic character, he travels from city to city, whether by love, or restless itch. Characters come and go then occasionally come back again. Near the end, Mike mentions writing a book “assembled like a mixtape,” and seems to imagine what appears to be Cannibals In Love. Do you see this book as a sort of love letter or scrap book?
In a lot of ways these first millennials were liberated from the middle class boredom of the Clinton years. I think that helps to explain their transience. These kids proved to be more flexible and adaptable than almost anyone in this new America. Without the shackles of bourgeois respectability, they had the freedom to keep starting over. On the internet and in real life.
I had an idea of how I wanted to represent these shifts in time and geography in the novel, which is to say that I wanted to keep it all moving. I wanted to drop the reader into each next chapter and let them orient themselves for a second. If the book is working then this is part of the fun. The reader understands that they are moving linearly, and they fill these gaps unconsciously, as they read. The idea of a “mixtape,” to the extent that it relates to Cannibals in Love, has to do with the fact that we understand these transitions between songs/chapters intuitively. The author has laid it all out in advance. First we’re gonna dance; then we’re gonna fuck; then we’re gonna fight; then we’re gonna cry. But hopefully we’re going to feel like we had a good time, when it’s all said and done.
Could you perhaps explain the title?
The title itself is a metaphor for intimacy, in all forms, not just romantic. More specifically, how impossible meaningful intimacy can be for young people. They hurt each other because they don’t know any better. Although, sometimes they hurt each other because they do know better. And that’s the point, too. These relationships are combative. Behaving badly in order to force the other person to engage with you is a kind of perverse rite of passage, among the young. Especially set against a backdrop of an America that was turning increasingly apocalyptic in the Bush years.
Can you talk a bit about your current projects as both a writer and a filmmaker?
Andrew Neel and I are adapting Aziah “Zola” Wells epic Twitter story, that went viral last fall, into a movie for James Franco to direct. Rolling Stone described it as “Spring Breakers meets Pulp Fiction, as told by Nicki Minaj,” which is pretty much dead on. Who knows? I hope it gets made. It’ll be a fun one.
Otherwise, I am working on the next novel, which is set in Buffalo in the fall of 1990 and deals with big institutions: like football, and war, and Catholicism. I’ve been writing a lot of sex scenes, lately. And that’s about all I want to say about it for now.
CANNIBALS IN LOVE
by Mike Roberts
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Originals / 342 pp. / $16.00
Reviews
About the Author
REVIEWS
Praise for Cannibals in Love
"Roberts pinpoints a familiar malaise in his protagonist . . . although like all good characters, Mike contains multitudes . . . I could listen to this voice all day. It’s as if it belongs to a friend I grew up with, or someone I met at a bar, or found counting lampposts in my hometown—strangely familiar and wise beyond his years."
—Amy Silverberg, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The oft-told story of young-man-finds-himself has become a difficult one to write without its becoming completely insufferable, but Roberts, with his Salinger-level attention to the foibles of the human condition, has avoided that trap altogether and written a book that makes you already eager for what he'll write next"
—Keziah Weir, Elle
“Reading Cannibals in Love, the debut novel from Mike Roberts, is like dumping a memory box on the table and feeling the gut-panging nostalgia ooze out from every concert ticket, old photo and letter . . . [reads] like hot takes from Holden Caulfield via Chuck Klosterman.”
—Sophia June, The Willamette Week
“A funny, minutely observed look at the way we live now.” —Men’s Fitness
"Unapologetically political and full of youthful whimsy, Roberts’ debut captures one man’s reluctant search for stability." —Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist
“Roberts' debut captures the anger and tumult of early adulthood in the George W. Bush years . . . impression by impression, fragment by fragment, Roberts chronicles the low-grade agony of growing up with insight and accuracy. A study of young ... More
Reviews from Goodreads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Roberts
Mike Roberts is a writer from Buffalo, New York. His screenplay adaptation of Brad Land's memoir Goat, which was produced by James Franco, will premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. His first screenplay, King Kelly, premiered at the 2012 South by Southwest film festival, was nominated for the Golden Eye at the Zurich Film Festival, and won the Jury's Choice Award at the Puchon Film Festival. His stage play, The Kill Chain, was featured in the 2013 Tongues Reading Series at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Cannibals in Love is his first novel.
MIKE ROBERTS
Mike Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist from Buffalo, New York. His adaptation of Brad Land’s acclaimed memoir, Goat, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. His first produced screenplay, King Kelly, premiered at the 2012 South By Southwest Film Festival. His stage play, The Kill Chain, was featured in the 2013 Tongues Reading Series at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. His debut novel, Cannibals in Love, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2016. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mike Roberts is a novelist and screenwriter from Buffalo, New York. His debut novel, Cannibals in Love, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2016. His screenplay adaptation of Brad Land’s acclaimed memoir, Goat, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. His first produced screenplay, King Kelly, premiered at the 2012 South By Southwest Film Festival. His stage play, The Kill Chain, was featured in the 2013 Tongues Reading Series at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
4/12/17, 2(32 PM
Print Marked Items
Cannibals in Love
Jonathan Fullmer
Booklist.
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p23. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Cannibals in Love. By Mike Roberts. Sept. 2016.352p. Farrar, paper, $16 (9780374536633).
Roberts' enthusiastic collection of linked stories follows Mike, whose muddled post-college aspirations lead him to situations that test his manhood, artistic goals, and sense of place in the adult world. The problem is, he keeps falling in love, and in the wake of 9/11, how can anyone feel secure about anything? Reluctantly returning home to Buffalo for the holidays, Mike struggles to connect with his childhood buddies, who remain stuck in the past. After moving from Washington, D.C., to New York City to hawk his recently completed novel, Mike drunkenly wrecks his bike, which two police officers confiscate. While painting houses and helping his brother get back on track, Mike becomes preoccupied with a sniper in D.C. Having written a novel too big to publish, and worried he's contracted AIDS, Mike takes a job writing spam e-mails targeting sex-crazed, directionless romantics like him. After moving from Pordand to Austin, he befriends new parents and becomes a substitute teacher. Unapologetically political and full of youthful whimsy, Roberts' debut captures one man's reluctant search for stability. --Jonathan Fullmer
YA/M: Teens will likely identify with Mike's misadventures and striving and find solace in his wit, candor, and irreverence. JF.
Fullmer, Jonathan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "Cannibals in Love." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 23. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761621&it=r&asid=963122348deb78217ced51b120bd34ae. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761621
about:blank Page 1 of 4
4/12/17, 2(32 PM
Cannibals in Love
Publishers Weekly.
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Cannibals in Love
Mike Roberts. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-53663-3
In Roberts's debut novel, Mike finds his way through the America of the early aughts, panicking about love, terrorism, and finding and keeping a job. The chapters jump in time and are largely unfocused. Characters come and go as Mike moves around the country finding work counting lampposts in upstate New York, painting apartments in D.C., babysitting in Portland, and writing spam emails, though his passion is working on his novel about cows, which he describes as an allegory about the Iraq War. The narrative momentarily comes together when a romance emerges between Mike and thinly sketched tomboy Lauren. One of the most frustrating aspects of the novel is that whenever Mike finds himself in trouble, it seems as though his only way to resolve issues is to walk away, which always somehow--miraculously--works for him. The world that Roberts creates is familiar, and Mike's voice is immediately recognizable. Though at times the writing becomes repetitive, there are shining moments where Roberts's novel moves seamlessly from humor to heartbreak and back again. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cannibals in Love." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 43+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285452&it=r&asid=580e24be15ad55929a0fff28ef834879. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285452
about:blank Page 2 of 4
4/12/17, 2(32 PM
Your can't-miss fall reads
Men's Fitness.
32.8 (Oct. 2016): p50. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Weider Publications http://www.mensfitness.com
Full Text:
A long-awaited memoir from the Boss, an entertaining story of millennial angst, and a true-science thriller featuring- among other curiosities-a fungus that creates zombies out of ants. Dig in!
Cannibals in Love
BY MIKE ROBERTS [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* This debut novel starts post-9/11 and blends several vignettes of a millennial dealing with dead-end jobs, last-call nights, and the knowledge that, thanks to their predecessors, this lost generation will never attain true happiness. "How do you live in a world that won't live up to its promise?" the narrator asks. But the book is no self-pitying lament for thwarted ambition. It's a funny, minutely observed look at the way we live now.
The Wasp that Brainwashed the Caterpillar BY MATT SIMON
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* It's been 150-plus years since Darwin introduced the theory of evolution. Some animals, though, evolved in ways that would've surprised even him. Simon, who writes about evolutionary oddities for Wired, dives into nature's most extreme examples, like salamanders that can regenerate parts of their brains and pint-size shrimp with claws powerful enough to break glass.
Born to Run
BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* Fans of the Boss have waited four decades for this memoir, and the famed musician doesn't disappoint, delivering on his promise "to show the reader his mind." With never-been-told anecdotes about his childhood in Freehold. NJ. his beginnings in a bar band, and the personal demons that inspired "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road." this riveting memoir will thrill anyone who blasts "Rosalita" out on the back roads or hums "I'm on Fire" in the dark.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Your can't-miss fall reads." Men's Fitness, Oct. 2016, p. 50. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464448711&it=r&asid=d89223506bb0a8c83eae91b4168ae911. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464448711
about:blank Page 3 of 4
4/12/17, 2(32 PM
about:blank Page 4 of 4
Cannibals in Love: A Novel
By Mike Roberts FSG Originals 352 pp.
Reviewed by Bob Duffy
December 2, 2016
Whether it’s really a novel or a collection of short stories, this work serves up insight, wit, and a sympathetic rendering of the millennial tribe.
These days, you see them everywhere, these metropolitan millennials: on the subway, at Metrobus stops, commuting on their ubiquitous bicycles. They seem to dwell in colonies and cluster at neighborhood Starbucks. Then, after dark, they chill where the trendy local bar bands play. They’re the “in-betweeners” of our major cities, finished with college, under-employed, and biding their time until their real careers kick in.
This is the community Mike Roberts depicts, and quite impressively so, in Cannibals In Love, a fictional amalgam of interlocking episodes in the life of a 20-something aspiring writer in the first decade of our present century. For the most part, the book meanders through the more artsy-craftsy precincts of the Gen Y demographic, trailing its clever and eminently likeable narrator-hero along the well-worn creative axis that links DC with Brooklyn and Boston, and then on to Austin and Portland.
Like some among his contemporaries, Roberts’ narrator-hero is a creative nomad. And along the way, the author directs an insightful and sympathetic eye toward culture and custom among this tribe, with richly observed and at times laugh-out-loud glimpses of a generation that some of us, more demographically remote, find difficult to get a handle on. He also guides us with wit and charm among the outliers — parents, siblings, employers, cops — who, in a way, unwittingly cushion his millennials along their rutty byways and detours.
If we appreciate how very well he writes, Mike Roberts rates as more than just a clever chronicler of 20-something mores. He’s an author from whom we should expect important work in years to come.
Cannibals cruises through 18 “vignettes” that take place between September 11, 2001, and the late aughts, as its hero alternately drifts and struggles through the circumstances of his young life, working at temp jobs that include apartment painter, municipal lamppost counter, Xeroxer-shredder, and copywriter for a global purveyor of online spam. (In this last role, as our hero ruminates on the audience reach of the internet, he rightly calculates that his work ranks him among the most widely read writers of any generation in the history of the planet.)
And in one chillingly evocative episode, Washington-area readers will be carried back to the dread-sodden days of the so-called Beltway Sniper, where few of us were bold enough to linger long in the open air.
In a strangely reflexive touch, Roberts names his narrator-hero “Mike,” with no surname indicated. So it’s not out of order to assume the book is semi-autobiographical and the stories within are based on real events in Roberts’ life. Is this important to know? Certainly not from this reviewer’s point of view, but the publisher might be intervening here to protect its marketing stake by encouraging this perception of 20-something “authenticity,” as if this really is a thing to be concerned about.
So, too, with calling the book a novel, when it could more accurately have hit the market as a collection of short stories. But, as Roberts’ hero reflects — and publisher FSG rightly reckons, I guess — “No one reads short stories.” And so what we hold in our hands becomes a novel. Marketing magic.
But on this very question, Roberts’ writer hero seems to view his book-within-a-book more as a mix-tape, and Roberts the author, hard upon confessing that “every narrator is an unreliable narrator,” does seem to be yanking our collective chain a bit with his character’s pretentious take on this mix-tape metaphor:
“The tenuous state of [the narrator’s] relationships, and the limitless discoveries of self. And suddenly you would find yourself internalizing the passage of time in each next image…And, almost without realizing it, you would begin to see the narrator right there in front of you. You would finally take his voice into your head. Because it is this transfer of consciousness that is your one and only constant in the novel.”
Okay, Mike, we get it. You’re having us on. And we smile in anticipation of your next effort, no matter what your publisher chooses to call it.
Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts
John Farley
web exclusive
From the first line in his debut novel, “My father said I was living in his house persona non grata and that I needed to find myself a job,” Mike Roberts casually dissolves into myth—a kind of millennial Charon come to guide his reader through a post-9/11 white-American-male version of the River Styx. The book, broken into eighteen parts, is an episodic tour of contemporary America, characterized by random violence, terrible jobs, and madness. It certainly seems like hell. Still, the narrator, our Virgil (although in this case our guide is named Mike, like the author), practically offers readers a can of malt liquor, suggesting we get comfortable and encouraging us to gulp down the increasingly complicated storyline, which ranges from pale to murky.
The stories are set during the narrator’s twenties in various cities. Occasionally a news event will help date the story. In the first chapter, a college-age Mike has landed a summer temp gig counting lampposts in his native Lockport, NY (Cannibals often presents its nonsensical situations with comic nonchalance). His older co-worker, Don, convinces him to play hooky one day at the OTB parlour. Here, the otherwise lowly Don holds a position of considerable esteem among the daytime gambling community. For Mike, the event morphs from innocent hijinks to a Munchian scream in the course of a few beers.
By the second chapter, Mike has moved to Washington DC, away from all that. He later finds new employment as a house painter, working beneath the October sun during the infamous Beltway sniper attacks. He begins dating an idealized tomboy, Lauren, who dumps him to focus on her friendship with their mutual friend, Cokie.
Mike moves to New York, gets in a traumatic drunken bicycle accident, then ends up back in DC. Eccentric friends and girlfriends come and go and come back. Mike forms a ridiculous experimental band with his next door neighbor, Lane, but they break up right before they’re signed by the legendary real-life musician and record label owner Ian Mackaye. Mike and Lauren continue to break up and reconcile. A lot. And through all their drama, Roberts catalogues her distinctive qualities with the insight only time can offer. He is good at writing women, at least from a man’s perspective.
We were out at a bar one night when she put her arms around my neck sweetly. “I want you to kiss me,” she said mischievously.
“Why?”
“See that guy over my shoulder, watching us? He comes into my coffee shop every morning and stalks me there for hours. He needs a bigger hint. I want him to see you kiss me.”
I smiled at her and leaned away slightly. “No,” I said.
Lauren laughed. Rebuffed. She squeezed my hand and danced away, into the crowd. She knew that I was watching her, terrified that she would go in search of Lane.
Like his relationship with Lauren, Mike’s parties, jobs, and personal projects keep boiling toward bacchanalian catharsis, only to wash out on the final paragraph of each chapter, when suddenly all that’s left is the skeleton of failure, and maybe with it a half understood lesson. The post-9/11 era is bleak for a sensitive and creative (Mike wants to write, duh) yet directionless young adult. Expectations of a successful artistic future have been dashed by political and economic conspiracy.
One solution to this problem is to try to have as much fun as possible. Hedonism is the apparent philosophy of Cannibals in Love in its first six chapters. Mike is a gifted beery storyteller. After Lane’s house is burgled, Mike regales us with a discovery: Lane’s mattress has mysteriously ended up in the backyard. This is how the criminal escaped, they realize. After dragging the mattress back upstairs and basking in mutual astonishment, Mike turns to his friend: “‘Should we try it?’ I asked. Lane nodded solemnly. ‘We have to.’”
There are also points, typically reserved for final paragraphs a la Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, where Mike staggers briefly into worlds of genuine transcendence, revealing in his wounded palms some objective treasure pilfered from the drunken tombs. In the funniest chapter of the book, he’s hired as a nanny to the sociopathic thirteen-year-old Avi, son of well-meaning but inept liberal parents in Portland, Oregon. His plan to treat the friendless brat with total indifference inevitably backfires. Avi attempts an escape and the reader is left with this glowing ember: “Avi skittered blindly into the street, between parked cars, desperately trying to join the crowd of walkers. He was pretending he was on his own out here. Pretending he was set loose in the city. Pretending he was free.”
There are flaws, however. First of all, Roberts’s musings can be overexplained and exhausting:
There was a killer on the loose. These are the plots of horror films. Or crime thrillers. Or just some bad buddy-cop movie. We didn’t know what was going on, which is different than being surprised by it. We had grown accustomed to a world of sudden, randomized death. Literally anything might happen next.
He can also be snotty in a way that reads more vengeful than humorous. Here’s his description of an encounter with a TSA agent, shortly after the Twin Towers fell: “I barely protested when she moved to throw the wrench away. I stood still as she waved her magnetic wand over me one more time. And finally, when she was satisfied, she nodded, and I thanked her for letting me fly in spite of my crimes against National Security.”
This kind of thing reminded me of the worst aspects of Noah Cicero’s The Human War, another book I much enjoyed but occasionally found annoying, and which was also written from the perspective of a smart working-class white male meandering the early aughts. Cicero was writing that book in present tense when he really was in his early twenties. The impact felt more genuine, thus forgivable, from a twenty-two-year-old in 2003 than it does coming from Roberts, who’s had more than a decade to reflect.
All the drinking, fighting, and sleeping around are great fun for a while. But eventually, Roberts’s treatment of Mike’s frivolity, simultaneously serious and winking, grows tiresome. For me, this happened around the hundredth page. Here, I began to write off Cannibals in Love as a charming beach read for educated post-punks.
But I suggest would-be readers persevere another twenty-two pages or so. In the seventh chapter, “Self-Portraits in Disguise,” Roberts sets up his sleight-of-hand trick. An ingenious performance in folding form over content that almost makes up for the novel’s first half.
Mike and Lauren are in New York. He has to deal with an ambulance fee from the previously mentioned bicycle accident. We’re not sure how many years have passed since the crash, but it’s obviously been several. The couple are staying with Lauren’s truly awful sister, whose presence creates both solidarity and tension between them. The sisters get in a fight. The couple takes MDMA for the first time on the bus back to DC and Mike realizes he’s in love with Lauren, for real. It’s a hard thing for him to articulate because of the synthetic love synergizing with the authentic feeling.
Then they are in Paris. It’s New Years Eve, under the Eiffel Tower.A fight breaks out between a mass of drunken men and the police. The cops fire tear gas. In a push to flee the crowd, the couple encounters a frightened young Israeli woman on holiday. Lauren wants to ignore her. Mike wants to help her but loses her in the crowd. By the end of the chapter, he and Lauren have fought and made up via insults hurled toward a buffoonish Australian backpacker. “We held each other up in the street, just laughing. Everything would be all right if I could just keep Lauren laughing, I thought.” Alas, the suffering is still there once the laughter subsides. For the first time the reader really feels the pain. Feels it because Mike feels it. The old wounds have reopened. They are becoming infected.
Over the second half of the novel, he attempts to flee trouble after trouble by moving to new cities, getting new jobs, drinks, drugs, friends, and girlfriends. It’s just not cute anymore. He’s getting older and his past is catching up with him. Lauren has a baby with someone else now. Lane has become a dad with the only woman who could possibly tolerate his shenanigans. Meanwhile, Mike bides his time on their living-room sofa. He sees himself in a twenty-six-year-old acquaintance who winds up dead after a night of heavy drinking.
Here it is in deft expression: When liberation is inverted and all those roads less traveled start to look the same. As I know from personal experience, this is a fairly universal moment of reckoning for sensitive but aimless white American men in their twenties. That’s obvious enough. White male writers in particular have been feeding off this kind of thing since Kerouac. Hemingway. Dostoyevsky. Hell...Saint Augustine. Since whenever it started and whoever started it, there’s been a long line of giants playing this game, and like each of them, Roberts must navigate Mike’s escape from it. This Hades of cliché.
Early in Cannibals in Love, there is a meta novel. Mike refers to A Cattle, a Crack-Up for the first time on page 88, from the back of an ambulance. The narrative, we’re told, concerns the dairy farmer August Caffrey, whose cows cause him to suffer a strange psychosomatic illness. It does not sound like a great book.
Throughout his twenties, the reader comes to understand, Mike devoted considerable time to researching the nuances of Midwestern animal husbandry whilst scrawling away at what he seriously believed would be the next Great American Novel. By the end of Cannibals in Love, all of his half-learned lessons have congealed, forcing him to see the truth. A Cattle, a Crack-Up is not a brilliant four hundred-page book, but it makes a pretty good short story. Fortunately, the time he has wasted on it was not entirely in vain. Once the short story is complete, he can finally begin writing his real novel and embrace his future. With that, the myth evaporates. Mike reemerges, a much realer version of himself.
CANNIBALS IN LOVE
by Mike Roberts
BUY NOW FROM
AMAZON
BARNES & NOBLE
LOCAL BOOKSELLER
GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Email Address Subscribe
Email this review
KIRKUS REVIEW
An angst-y all-American coming-of-age tale in 18 linked vignettes, Roberts’ debut captures the anger and tumult of early adulthood in the George W. Bush years.
Graduating from college shortly after 9/11, Mike spends his 20s butting up against a world of broken promises. (“The Baby Boomers have fucked us,” he announces at family Christmas dinner.) He drifts into and out of cities and jobs: D.C., New York, Portland, and Austin; counting lampposts, writing spam emails, painting houses, substitute teaching. He's at work on a novel, a tragedy about a farmer and his cows that is “a kind of allegory about the Invasion of Iraq.” Friendships and lovers fade in and out, coming into focus and flitting away again. At the center is a girl, of course, and their on-again, off-again relationship is big and destructive and passionate and mean. “I had come to understand,” Mike reflects, not unromantically, “that Lauren would eventually kill me in the way that many coupling insects go.” In one vignette, a washed-up co-worker introduces Mike to the depressing world of off-track betting. In another—the title story—he and Lauren are tearing each other apart in a house in D.C. He’s sitting in the waiting room of a Portland Planned Parenthood reflecting on the art of email spam; he’s in Austin, watching a once-wild friend raise a baby son. Much as in real life, Mike’s relentlessly self-destructive millennial macho posturing can grow tiring, and Roberts’ telling of it sometimes feels just a touch too invested in its own edginess. Still, impression by impression, fragment by fragment, Roberts chronicles the low-grade agony of growing up with insight and accuracy.
A study of young masculinity: atmospheric, quietly aggressive, and unexpectedly hopeful.
Coming-of-Age Novel "Cannibals in Love" Induces Gut-Panging Nostalgia
Reading "Cannibals in Love" is like dumping a memory box on the table and feeling the gut-panging nostalgia ooze out from every concert ticket, old photo and letter.
By Sophia June | September 21, 2016
Reading Cannibals in Love, the debut novel from Mike Roberts (FSG Originals, 352 pages, $16), is like dumping a memory box on the table and feeling the gut-panging nostalgia ooze out from every concert ticket, old photo and letter.
In 18 vignettes, Roberts takes us through the life of a guy in his 20s, also named Mike, as he ping-pongs between Buffalo, New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland and Austin. He counts lamp posts for a summer, pens spam emails and, in Portland, baby-sits a rich, 13-year-old compulsive liar—all while working on his novel, an allegory about the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq set on a dairy farm. But through it all, one thing remains the same. His love for a woman named Lauren Pinkerton.
The book is structured as a series of snapshots. In one, Mike comes out of a blackout in Manhattan to find himself puking in the street while two cops watch. In another, he watches three "long-haired kids" snort coke off the white piano from "Imagine" at Sean Lennon's house. On the one hand, these are coming-of-age clichés. But Roberts doesn't seem to glamorize them, and that's part of the reason the book gets away with it.
Other sections, however, read like hot takes from Holden Caulfield via Chuck Klosterman. "In three days, I'd argued with my brother that 9/11 proved Buffalo was in the Midwest," Roberts writes. "I'd ruined a perfectly nice dinner by explaining some revolting fact I'd read about turkey farms. And I cited widespread pederasty in the Catholic Church as the reason I would not attend Midnight mass (or any church service) with the family."
These bits fade as the character becomes more self-critical and develops a more adult vulnerability I've seen portrayed so accurately by very few authors—especially in the sections about Lauren. "Part of the charm of our relationship was the fact that we engaged these parts of each other's personalities that no one wanted to touch…parts that are small and petty and drive normal people away," he writes.
The relationship is compelling enough that I wanted to find the reality behind the novel, which Roberts himself has said is semi-autobiographical. I even went so far as to tweet the author with my guess as to the real Lauren Pinkerton.
He wouldn't say.
But the mystery still swirled in my mind that night as I went to sleep. I knew the book was fiction, but Roberts' characters were so alive I refused to let them stay on the page.
Why Does Mike the Millennial Meander?
By Amy Silverberg
64 0 1
OCTOBER 26, 2016
MILLENNIAL is a loaded term, meant to encapsulate the generation born between 1982 and 2004. Think pieces abound on millennial behavior — our narcissism and attention deficit disorders — how to explain our devotion to social media, or why so many college grads still live with their parents. I am 28, and I fit (age-wise, at least) into the millennial category, for better or worse. Regardless, I cringe at the sight of the word; I cringed just typing it! Like most of my peers, I find the stereotypes of my generation to be just that: some true, some false. For instance, I am relatively inept when it comes to technology, and I have never once taken a selfie. And yet, as a kid, I did receive trophies just for participating in sports, regardless of how infrequently I touched the ball. I, too, was released into a professional world in which the options seemed limitless — if only you’d agree to be a professional intern. Most important, I understand the free-range anxiety inherent to growing up in the shadow of the most monumental terrorist attack the United States has ever seen — a feeling which Mike Roberts’s debut novel, Cannibals in Love, deftly interrogates.
Roberts’s protagonist, also named Mike, is fresh out of college, and struggling to find a place in the adult world. In 18 short vignettes, we see Mike work a series of odd and often humiliating temp jobs and date a variety of women — one more seriously than the rest. He bounces around from his hometown in upstate New York to Washington, DC, to Portland, to Paris, to Kansas.
The novel opens with him isolated in a sea of traffic, counting lampposts for the city of Lockport in upstate New York, where he grew up. Frustrated with the mind-numbing monotony of the job (marking the location of every burned out lamppost in need of attention), Mike is unable to connect with his elderly co-worker, Don. While Mike is just passing a little time before the next best thing, Don seems to have resigned himself to the bleakness of this job and the little effort it entails. Eventually, Don’s depression becomes too much for Mike to bear:
I sat down in a bus shelter and gave all four lampposts a single GPS location. And then I didn’t move. I didn’t know where to go, really. I stared out across the buzzing traffic, feeling shipwrecked. I didn’t care about Don’s suffering. I was thinking about myself, which is the only thing you know how to do when you’re young.
This is a fitting beginning, with Don as a harbinger of what might happen to Mike if he never gets his shit together. In these instances, Mike-the-millennial is like an experiment in a petri dish, unsure of how to react to stimuli. He tries a little booze here, a dash of violence there, and waits to see where the one or the other might lead. He’s a person learning how to navigate the world. And this world is utterly confusing. “Terrorism was not some abstraction on the television,” reflects Mike-the-narrator:
It was the promise of endless war. It was the fear of people and buildings. It was the suspicion of strangers and foreigners. It was the avoidance of crowds and public transportation. It was the brand-new paranoid connections that bloomed inside our heads with no clues for how they got there, or what to do next.
After all, how should someone respond to a stimulus that may or may not be there? The dangers in Mike and his friends’ lives are nebulous and widespread. Their pulses race as though they’re hiding, but they’re not sure what they’re hiding from. They’re often angry, but don’t know where to direct the anger. They’re at a loss as to how a person should be: “It made sense to behave erratically now,” Mike says, after hearing his favorite disc jockey on the radio break character and dedicate David Bowie’s “Heroes” to all the brave women and men of law enforcement. Mostly, Mike grapples with his anxiety in predictable ways — he whittles away the time in bars and tries to meet girls.
There is one woman in particular, Lauren Pinkerton, who becomes his on-again, off-again girlfriend through most of the novel. Upon their first meeting, he says, “Lauren radiated something bigger than confidence, bigger than sex.” Be that as it may, after their initial sexual encounter, Mike is often at the mercy of Lauren’s flightiness, the ebbs and flows of her moods, which are usually a mystery to him. Later, things between them get complicated; rather, they complicate their lives with constant fighting. They fight because they’re bored. They fight because they’re dissatisfied with their lives and jobs and economic status. They fight often for the sake of fighting. Needless to say, the relationship is tumultuous. And yet, this also seems indicative of a generational attitude. Roberts pinpoints a familiar malaise in his protagonist (caused, perhaps, by a surplus of romantic options and access to these options through technology — but this is only my theory), although like all good characters, Mike contains multitudes: he’s a romantic, yet he doesn’t necessarily want to untangle his own romantic discontent; he’s not quite sure what he wants — but he definitely wants. This is what makes the book so compelling: watching Mike attempt to channel his anxiety-ridden longing toward something that actually matters.
At his worst, Mike can be narcissistic and whiny. He makes mountains out of molehills and then curses while he climbs them. He is, in a word, self-destructive. “We were the children of privilege,” Mike-the-narrator explains, “insulated; overeducated; underemployed. Eternally running away from home and playing at being adults.” He has grown up with upper-middle-class privilege, and he’s able to articulate this privilege clearly, especially when describing the way in which he and his friends create their own problems. For example, when Mike drinks too much and crashes his bike, he must trick (or convince? charm?) the police into letting him get away unscathed. Much of the novel is like this — a series of events in which the protagonist outruns any real consequences. Perhaps it’s the irrepressible confidence of the young; they believe any bad decision can be undone. Then, too, there’s the underlying knowledge that Mike is not alone in the world. He has a safety net: parents he can count on, who will save him from any situation that becomes dire. It’s Roberts’s gimlet-eyed attention to Mike’s selfishness that allows the character to become fully realized, the kind of guy who might careen drunkenly off the pages and into your bushes on his bike. You might bump into this bleary-eyed person in a bar, or at your own temp job — he’s the antihero and the everyman; he knows what not to do, but does it anyway.
Eventually, Mike does channel his longing into something positive. You’ve probably guessed: he becomes a writer, or rather, he gives in to his long time desire to write. But though I did see this career path coming, it felt inevitable in a pleasurable way. From the beginning, Mike has all the requisite trappings: he’s an astute observer of his surroundings; he is ruthlessly self-aware and often self-deprecating; he drinks too much and then laments how much he drinks. Most important, he’s trying to make sense of the world and of himself. In a postmodern move, Mike-the-character blends with Mike-the-narrator until they are one in the same. In this way, the author Mike Roberts embeds his own definition of writing in his novel about a guy named Mike who becomes a writer: “I was interested in the gaps and discordances of experienced time,” he writes. “I was working through the role of memory and imagination as it functions in its fullest capacity, to fill those empty spaces with meaning. Because what was this construction, after all, if not fiction?”
During most of the novel, Mike talks about a swollen book project, previously written, that he knows will never come to fruition. He goes on to explain that his next novel will be “assembled like a mixtape, with all of the emotional modulations of an object that is constructed with an order and intention.” The outcome? Cannibals in Love. The vignettes serve as a collage, a watercolor study of growing up in a very particular time, in a very particular world, in which a silent and invisible danger lurks behind every tower. Whether funny, angry, or terrified, Mike has finally found his voice: “the voice I actually speak in,” he tells a friend. “The one I use in an email. Or a joke. That’s the way I’m trying to write.”
Personally, I could listen to this voice all day. It’s as if it belongs to a friend I grew up with, or someone I met at a bar, or found counting lampposts in my hometown — strangely familiar and wise beyond his years.
¤
Amy Silverberg is a Doctoral fellow in Fiction at USC. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, Joyland, Hobart, The Tin House Open Bar, and elsewhere. She also performs standup and sketch comedy around Los Angeles. You can follow her on Twitter @AmySilverberg.
Film Review: King Kelly
One of the cleverest, funniest and most appallingly true films of the year.
Nov 30, 2012
Reviews
1367888-King_Kelly_Md.jpg
Movies don’t start much higher than Andrew Neel’s King Kelly, which very convincingly has his title character (Louisa Krause) cavorting sexually for the subscribers of her online webcam sex site. Incidentally, Kelly is a teenager, living at home, in the suburbs.
Supposedly assembled from cell-phone video footage, this ingenious, riotously funny romp through the attention-deficit-disordered minds of our 21st-century youth makes Marshall McLuhan’s famous “medium is the message” statement beyond literal in ways even he could never have known. The completely self-centered, ultra-shallow and narcissistic Kelly is one of the most obnoxious protagonists you’ll ever encounter and, also, like similar cinematic cuties such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Melanie Griffith in Something Wild and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, one of the most captivating. She’s also one of the truest, as anyone should be able to attest if they’ve spent a fair amount of time with the under-25 set lately. It’s funny how, on film, people you couldn’t stand to be around for five minutes can be so entertaining when written right.
Mike Roberts’ script absolutely nails this latest generation of slackadaisical, drugs- and sex-obsessed post-adolescents, with archetypes that make you affectionately smile in recognition, even as you’re laughing helplessly at their profound cluelessness. His plotting, involving as it does a stash of contraband in the trunk of a car connected to Kelly’s burned-too-often ex-boyfriend; her BFF, the numb-nut acolyte Jordan (Libby Woodbridge); a highway trooper (Roderick Hill) who happens to be one of Kelly’s most abject online fans, and various woozily hilarious stoners, is clever in the most bracingly organic way. This is one wild night that’s a funky, breathless pleasure to be a part of, and blast all the nay-saying critics who can’t get beyond Kelly’s abrasiveness to enjoy it and realize what Neel is truly trying to say. (I have friends who, to this day, cannot watch Bringing Up Baby because “Hepburn is so obnoxious in it.”) To Neel’s credit, in time-honored cinematic Cecil B. DeMille tradition, the wages of sin must be paid at the end, and he brings off the final sobering moment of retribution for Kelly with a poignant tact that is the perfect audience send-out.
The entire cast, from lead roles to Kelly’s frustrated family members, trying—unsuccessfully, with her present—to have a glorious Fourth of July, perform with unerring ease and wit. Krause tackles her role in the way James Agee once described Lucille Ball doing in The Big Street, “like it was sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking,” and with her slack-jawed Val Girl-speak and eternal air of outraged drama queen, she is utterly uproarious and utterly appalling. Woodbridge does well as her eternal dupe, and Hill, with that hangdog moustache which cops traditionally love for some unfathomable reason, brings sexiness and even more manic energy to this wonderfully on-target, delirious confection.
A Rowdy Tale, Told by Cellphone Cameras
‘King Kelly,’ a Satire of Lust for Internet Fame
KING KELLY Directed by Andrew Neel Drama 1h 24m
By STEPHEN HOLDENNOV. 29, 2012
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Libby Woodbridge, left, and Louisa Krause in “King Kelly.” Credit Ethan Palmer/See Think Films.
From its opening scene, in which a potty-mouthed young stripper masturbates for a paying audience through her bedroom webcam, “King Kelly,” Andrew Neel’s furious satire of fame lust in the Internet age, made me chortle with contempt.
Not for the movie, which is grimly moralistic, but for the unholy intersection of narcissism and amateur pornography via cellphone camera that has turned the Internet into a platform for trashy, do-it-yourself reality marathons of self-exhibition.
The cinematic coup of “King Kelly” is that it was filmed almost entirely on cellphone cameras. Its visual perspective is so narrow that it traps you inside the consciousness of characters who can’t see outside themselves and their self-images. What is it about low-tech video that lends it a frisson of documentary truth, so that — however bogus it may be — your impulse is to trust it? Maybe its very crudeness makes the content feel more authentic.
Conceptually, “King Kelly” flaunts the same audacity as “The Blair Witch Project,” now more than a decade old, which was cleverly marketed as a collection of “found footage.” After all the developments in the media landscape since that movie was released in 1999 — YouTube and Facebook leading the list — 1999 might as well be 1899. A decade hence, “King Kelly” will probably seem just as quaint.
The movie’s other master stroke is the artfully unhinged lead performance of Louisa Krause as the despicable King Kelly, a character who would have been ready-made for Tuesday Weld. This overgrown Lolita is old enough to purchase liquor but behaves like a 13-year-old brat. Without her parents’ knowledge, she films herself in her bedroom in their suburban New York home. The next step in her hellbent pursuit of fame, she announces, will be her own Web site.
The story follows Kelly and her sidekick, Jordan (Libby Woodbridge), over 24 hours during which they try to retrieve a package of drugs stashed in the trunk of a maroon Toyota Camry jointly owned by Kelly and her former boyfriend, Ryan (Will Brill), who makes off with the vehicle. Kelly, an occasional drug mule, panics after she is warned that the package contains heroin and not prescription medications. It is the Fourth of July, and Kelly’s search lands her at a wild party on Staten Island, where the sheer grossness rivals the teenage bacchanal in “Project X.”
The trip is a worsening nightmare fueled by cocaine, booze and ketamine, in which the friends, in stoned, drunken confusion, run the car off the road, all the while recording their adventures. In desperation, Kelly summons one of her bedroom chat mates, a state trooper (Roderick Hill) who goes by the screen name Poo Bare. Rushing to her rescue, he is quickly lured to run wild by her cocaine and her promise of sex. Before long he is as dangerously out of control as Harvey Keitel’s “Bad Lieutenant.”
If social satire that elicits scornful laughter is your kind of humor, “King Kelly” will have you doubled over with guilty guffaws.
King Kelly
Director Andrew Neel Writers Andrew Neel, Mike Roberts Stars Louisa Krause, Libby Woodbridge, Roderick Hill, Will Brill, Jonny Orsini Running Time 1h 24m Genre Drama
Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Last updated: Mar 30, 2016
King Kelly 1.0 out of 5 1.0 out of 5 1.0 out of 5 1.0 out of 5 Comments COMMENTS (29)
BY DIEGO SEMERENE
NOVEMBER 28, 2012
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
E-mail
In King Kelly, Louisa Krause plays a very familiar figure of digital-age alienation. She’s that young woman so insecure about herself, so devoid of prospects that go beyond the body, she’s always performing some caricatural version of femininity, begging for anybody’s gaze. King Kelly is her nom de guerre for making some cash stripping and masturbating in front of her webcam in the bedroom of her parents’ suburban home. And while she constantly films her life (the movie employs the very annoying faux found-footage aesthetic), she’d likely be posing even if she weren’t being digitally captured, such is her internalized demand to feel watched.
That’s the 21st-century hysteric, the kind of obnoxious white chick who speaks like a cartooned Valley Girl, uses terms such as “that’s gay,” is often drunk or high, too self-consumed to differentiate between Sikhs and terrorists, and sees drama where there isn’t any—just so she can overreact to it. Kelly is also a particularly American product of privilege, a girl whose material needs are guaranteed, but whose emotional knots, and all the things that aren’t easily visible, are never acknowledged. Her desperate attempts to make her body perfectly visible at all times obviously denounce her need to make something else, something less desirable, noticeable.
Too bad the film feels, much like its protagonist’s persona, fake. It isn’t interested in exploring the nuances of her character, her predicaments, or her contradictions. It decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce her to a one-dimensional narcissist. It then exposes her need for validation in the most literal ways, as when Kelly reads the comments on her erotic video (“LAME,” “epic slut,” and “Kelly, it’s called weight watchers”) and sheds a tear, then promptly binges on several cheeseburgers. There’s no gravitas, no seriousness. It’s a gimmick, an affectation. Unlike Sean Baker’s recent Starlet, another film about a girl’s surrendering to complete objectification as a strategy for survival, King Kelly never gives its main character a chance to go beyond what we expect her to be. Kelly is so high on her ceaseless need to perform, she’s never allowed to become something other than a buzzing piñata, spinning out of control around its own axis, waiting for us to punish her—as though we weren’t just as invested and implicated in her survival strategies as she is.