BY MOLLY TEMPLETON
Wild, West
Two debut novels depict radically different worlds
T
he absurd fun of Jonathan
Selwood’s debut novel, The
Pinball Theory of Apocalypse
(Harper Perennial, $13.95), is pretty well
encapsulated in the artwork of its heroine,
Isabel Raven. She paints masterpieces
with celebrities’ faces: Tom and Katie in
American Gothic, Cher as Mona Lisa.
Isabel’s paintings are beginning to get
noticed; a newspaper feature is forthcom-
ing, and some dot-com billionaire is buy-
ing a bunch of them. But her art dealer
wants her to
model in an ad
campaign for
vaginal reju-
venation sur-
gery, and her
boyfriend is
rumored to be
screwing “the
Latina Britney
Spears.” It’s a
busy life.
Selwood’s
novel, which
is like the hyperactive kid sister of
Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet
in its depiction of an off-kilter, arty Los
Angeles, takes its name from a theory
Isabel’s physicist father developed about
the end of the world. It plays out, though,
as the apocalyptic implosion of Isabel’s
own life, as the often-tipsy artist whirls
around L.A., bouncing off her parents,
their super-fit neighbor, her agent, her ex,
the billionaire and Cordelia, said billion-
aire’s 13-year-old daughter, who thinks
Isabel is the next Andy Warhol. Cordelia is
well beyond wise beyond her years; she’s a
drug-dealing, art-appreciating, chain-
smoking, museum-robbing caricature of all
wise-beyond-their-years 13-year-olds, and
her appearance kicks Pinball Theory into a
manic gear. Between raging wildfires and
slightly psycho pop princesses, Isabel’s
wild rise to semi-fame is getting extremely
complicated — or maybe it’s just another
day in L.A. With its sleek and slightly bit-
ter sense of humor, Selwood’s speedy read
is a chipper send-up of art, love and a city
that is most definitely not full of angels.
While Selwood’s novel is madcap and
decadent, Willy Vlautin’s first novel, The
Motel Life (Harper Perennial, $13.95), is
entirely the opposite. Originally published
in the U.K. in 1999, The Motel Life is a
dark, beer-soaked story of two brothers,
Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan, living a
down-and-out life in Reno. The Flannigan
brothers come from nothing and have
nothing; the title refers to the young men’s
homes, here and there in different motels.
Jerry Lee is missing a leg from a train-
jumping accident, and Frank drinks him-
self to the point of vomiting with alarming
regularity. Their day-to-day existence is
fractured the night Jerry Lee hits a kid on
a bike in the middle of the night. Without
any idea what to do, the two dump the
body at the local hospital and leave town,
only to wind up back in Reno before long,
even more broke and battered than before.
The Motel Life is not a story in which
you root for the underdog chracters to
make good and come out ahead; it’s a
story where you can only hope they make
it to the end less battered, less beaten
down, than you expect. Yet it’s not aim-
lessly or artily bleak; it’s told in Frank’s
voice, and Frank is a storyteller, though an
unpolished one. He carries Jerry Lee and
himself through the days on wild adven-
ture yarns and romantic tales the likes of
which they never experience in reality, and
the honest, hopeful, sometimes illogical
leaps his stories take are moments of
brightness among the bleak reality of lives
spent in and out of bars, hospitals, used-
car lots, motels and diners. Vlautin (who is
also the singer-songwriter for Portland
band Richmond Fontaine) writes without
judgement, his story like a spare, dusty
film that you saw once and barely want to
remember, even though, in its strange way,
it was beautiful.
ew
Jonathan Selwood and Willy Vlautin read at 5:30 pm
Thursday, Aug. 23, at the Ace Hotel in Portland.
BOOK NOTES : Christine Harold reads from OurSpace: Resisting the
Corporate Control of Culture, 7:30 pm 8/16, Powell’s on Burnside, Portland. Writers’
Fair: Bart King (The Big Book of Boy Stuff), Linda Swanson-Davies (Glimmer
Train) and Joe Blakely (Lifting Oregon Out of the Mud) offer info and advice, 1 pm-
4 pm 8/19, Downtown Library. Stuart Cowan discusses the 10th anniversary edi-
tion of Ecological Design, 7 pm 8/20, Powell’s Technical Books, Portland. Jeff Parker
reads from Ovenman, 6 pm 8/30, Mississippi Pizza Pub, Portland. Kate Schtaz
reads from Rid of Me: A Story, 7:30 pm 8/30, Powell’s on Hawthorne, Portland.
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AUGUST 16, 2007
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