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I love his movies.
I liked his book.
It is a disturbing, technically detailed, visceral read. It manages to check off a range of taboo subjects, I learned about a few fetishes that I added to my mental list of things you never want your mum to google as well as some interesting ideas about consumerism and philosophy. It’s dense, uncomfortable and as I learned yesterday morning, not the book you want to read with your breakfast omelette.
I respected it rather than enjoyed it. Liked it rather than loved it.
It lacked a solid story. The details, the characterisation all were impeccable and he managed the trick of complex, selfish, damaged characters that were actual people rather than a collection of traits like a NPC in a role playing game really well. However, it ended really abruptly as though this were a misprint.
I respect Cronenberg immensely, I love that he’s captured his obsessions on paper and at 71, it saddens me that we won’t realistically get as large a body of work in print as we have in his films but this book is something to respect rather than love. Sure, it’s disturbing but there’s a ton of stuff out there that does that, written by hotel receptionists during quiet hours and gas station attendants at four in the morning. No, it’s David Fucking Cronenberg and he jobbed the ending. It frustrated me because it was damn near perfect at points, a chilly unnerving ride through the cold places in our culture and yet the ride stopped too early to appreciate it properly.
I am open to narrative experiments and the sheer freedom of formats in literature, but you finish what you start. This kind of shut off, like a child called in from playtime to eat. Shame, really as I was enraptured by it at points.
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