Just Awful

Gautam Patel

Carrie Fisher’s The Best Awful is an elliptical work. That’s not a compliment. I mean it literally. She uses ellipses with something bordering on a pathological condition … and it does … nothing … for an already doomed book. That’s not as bad as her use of the em dash. Now that’s really something. Everywhere you go, the em dash lurks, ready to — pounce.

Call me needlessly fussy, but such over-use of punctuation isn’t just an atrocity. It reflects a want of skill and even care. It conveys uncertainty of thought and craft. It’s invariably distracting and frequently superfluous.

One can only hope that this book is not meant to mirror her own life, though certainly the parallels are inescapable. Like her protagonist, Suzanne Vale, Fisher has battled a broken home, several odd relationships and a rainbow of substance abuse. I didn’t like Postcards From the Edge and I like this ‘sequel’ considerably less. Ok, she was sort of cute as the feisty twisted-mouthed Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies, despite the ridiculous Danish pastries clapped to her ears, but the journey from that cinematic puerility to accomplished authorship isn’t easy. Fisher is a singularly poor traveller.

You know you’re in serious trouble the moment you start skimming the book. There is an acknowledgements page. Fine. But hold on. There’s a second acknowledgments page, too, at the end of the book. Neither is remotely comprehensible.

For my brother, Todd — we’ll always have lockup. Remember that time Debbie got pregnant with us and our whole lives happened? … I’m not worthy (my name is Lisa). … For Kim Painter — for the translation, transcribing, train spotting and lap dancing. … For Tracey and Johnny — thank you both so — bullocks — much for your continued — tits tits tits — support. Without the two of you — cockring — these lingering coughs would be more difficult to — wanker — bear.

What on earth is this supposed to mean? More importantly, who cares? And, just by the way, it’s bollocks not bullocks. The latter are draught animals. This is pretty much an indicator of what follows (or even what precedes if you take into account the totally incomprehensible title). Fisher scales great heights in demonstrating just how irritatingly over-precious she can be. Even the ‘About the Author’ isn’t spared: “…[S]he has a daughter, Billie. They want to see the aurora borealis.” Well, golly, gee, isn’t that the sweetest.

The Best Awful brings back Suzanne Vale, she of Postcards From the Edge notoriety. Vale is, very early on, a ‘breadwinner with a very yang personality’. She opens the proceedings with a spin on an old Woody Allen line (“My wife left me for another woman”). Her husband, also the father of her daughter, leaves her for another man. Vale comforts herself with bipolar medication. Vale’s anguish, if you can call it that, arises from her failure to detect her husband’s sexual preferences. This seriously dents her self-esteem. Apparently, this is a must-have skill for all married women. Having discovered her shortcoming in that department, Vale sets out to compensate by engaging in determinedly heterosexual sex and promptly runs through three men including (but of course) one who is several years younger. Unsurprisingly, this does nothing either for Vale or the narrative and Fisher shifts into four-wheel substance-abuse overdrive in (but of course) Tijuana among other places. That can’t be sustained either so it’s back to LA and the location scouts have now zeroed in on a psychiatric clinic. But how to get Vale there? The answer leaps to mind: An overdose (but of course). By now, we’ve reached a total dead end and Fisher, evidently scrabbling for some foothold to drag the book out of this hole, settles for a pseudo-Harlequin Roman finale which I’d love to wreck here but won’t.

Fisher, unfortunately, has very little to say that is truly original. She therefore deploys linguistic camouflage — mostly awkward contrivances. But even that can’t relieve the tedium. Suzanne Vale’s disintegration is so predictable that it’s almost laughable: medication-pointless sex-nervous breakdown-overdose-clinic and, ultimately, resurrection and salvation Hollywood style. You can almost hear the chorus. But even that doesn’t work. Like the rest of the book, it remains arid and ferociously tiresome. This is a book that exhausts you because Fisher just tries too hard for too much. She tries to make her heroine not herself and to make both her heroine and herself likable. It doesn’t work. It’s just words, words, words being flung at you, as I said, over-punctuated and often redundant. This is like being had by Hannibal and his elephants. At the end, frankly, my dears, we really don’t give a damn.

Even apart from the sheer narcissim and self-obsession of the entire narrative, there’s something more fundamentally objectionable about Fisher’s projected take on life and what makes it worth living. Vale’s collapse is triggered by one thing and one thing only — her husband abandoning her for another man. What follows is an odyssey of self-discovery to prove one thing and one thing only — that Vale is actually appealing to the male of the species. This is reinforced by the awkward ending. Vale’s self-image and persona are, according to Fisher, inherently and totally dependent on how she is viewed by the men in her life. Somehow, this is not just silly and plain wrong, but coming from someone like Fisher, quite unacceptable. I don’t buy into the theory that women need men to be ‘fulfilled’ or ‘complete’. At its heart, and despite all the posturing (and that’s all that it is), Fisher’s book is horribly misogynistic.

Unless you’re a real glutton for literary punishment, or you’re seriously starved of good reading matter — and you’ve got to be marooned on some island — don’t bother. Or, as Fisher might say … don’t — bother …

A somewhat gentler and very accomplished review appeared in the Guardian/Observer ^[1].