Oh no, book review
◊ OK, I guess I'm stealing a page, so to speak, from Dean and his Gleaming Book Reviews of Doom. I am putting up a review I wrote months and months ago for La Voz that never got published.
Here it is. I read the book so you didn't have to.
Palmer Owyoung, Halcyon Daze. Village Market Press.
If you�re going to write a sex scene instead of cutting to the romantic leads smoking in bed after the fact, you must focus. Your characters are doing the nasty. Nothing short of a three-alarm fire or large carnivorous animal bursting into the room is going to stop them. You must remember that the whole point of the scene is sex.
It is not about getting a Madonna song stuck in your head.
The main character, Kalani Smith, is about to get it on with a chick for the first time, when it happens:
"We stripped and made love, and for me it was like being a virgin, making love for the very first time."
All character development, plot, and theme go whoosh down the toilet as I grapple with the TV memory of Madonna in a wedding dress, singing into a mike and humping the stage at a mid-80s MTV Music Awards.
It�s not exactly a Madonna line, but it feels like an eerie clone of one. That clone feeling crept up on me a lot as I read Halcyon Daze, Palmer Owyoung's first novel. It�s all been done before.
The plot is a Julia Roberts movie waiting to happen: Small-town girl abandons her dentist fianc� at the altar so she can head to the big city to find herself. The small-town girl happens to be half-Chinese and got picked on as a kid for being brown, but otherwise she�s all Kansas.
Barely out of her wedding dress and fleeing for San Francisco, she meets a kindly old American Indian woman who lingers just long enough to drag Kalani into a sweat lodge, feed her a psychotropic drug and dispense Patented Injun Spirituality before she disappears. After a pleasant buzz, some neat-o colors and some puking that somehow add up to a vision quest, Kalani�s back on the road, where she picks up a stripper who turns out to be jaded, of course, and working toward a psychology Ph.D. She also just happens to live in San Francisco.
One funky Victorian house and four young roommates later (including a sweet gay man named Michael — shades of Tales of the City!), Kalani is let loose on some mutant fifth-dimension version of San Francisco where everyone is either pierced and tattooed or a dot-com millionaire and you can�t go to a club without some Jim Rose Circus-style freak show taking it over.
After killing a few months with a crap job, a new guy and new breakup, Kalani is dragged to the Burning Man festival, where she wanders around with a bunch of naked people and looks at art. She supposedly learns a lot about herself in the process.
Trouble is, I don�t know what she learned. Kalani is so busy being shuttled from place to place by the empty, stereotyped characters around her that there isn�t much time for her to grow a personality. If something happens to her, we get just a summary, like with this new relationship: "Aside from the sense of excitement that these new challenges brought me they also gave me a better sense of self-respect that I had been lacking."
Who talks like that outside of a job interview? Robots?
The narrative moves strangely, rolling along smoothly enough until Kalani points out for the millionth time the outrageousness of her situation and how unlike Kansas it all is. The vocabulary is clumsy and sometimes ridiculous. I just gave up and stared blankly this sentence, sure that it must be some kind of sick joke: "She continued belting out the rancorous lyrics that were written over twenty-years ago and that seemed somewhat of an anachronism, given the state of unparalleled economic prosperity that we were enjoying at the moment." Huh?!
While Kalani is a mystery, the other characters are two-dimensional caricatures. The dialogue is stilted and is often a vehicle for what I suspect are meant to be outrageously clever ideas. One character will say "I�ve got this theory," and then it�s two straight pages of uninterrupted diatribe or recycled pop culture analysis.
I wanted to abandon the book halfway through, but kept being lured back to it by a sense of duty and occasional glimpses of wit and character that slip in when Owyoung stops worrying about impressing his readers. I loved Kalani mentioning how she�d always wanted to go to Guam, "for no other reason than I enjoy saying the word Guam. Guam, Guam, Guam, Guam, Guam."
But clever moments like this are drowned in text, bad short stories and worse original poetry. Supporting characters are so busy being ironic and outrageous that they never get a chance to develop.
The book isn�t strong enough for 200-odd pages. It would be fun as a novella, better as a long-ish short story and absolutely stunning as a story for Cosmo.