FFWD Weekly
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| Books by David Bright BURNING GIRL I must be in a minority of one. The usual promotional bumf that accompanied my review copy of Ben Niehart's Burning Girl contained many happy comments from early readers of the offending item. After filtering out the excessive exclamation marks ("Hard to put down!"), two common opinions became apparent: (1) those readers viewed Neihart as a literary talent equal to Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho; and (2) they liked the Polaroid of three more-or-less naked bodies that adorns the book's cover. "The cover concept is tremendous!" shouts Mark Church of Massachusetts. Now, American Psycho may be many things (offensive, crap and immature come to mind), but I didn't think it had become a benchmark of American literature just yet. Faint praise indeed, then, for Neihart. And if sticking photos of tits and bums on the cover is all it takes to secure sales, then I guess the CanLit industry need no longer worry about its future. So it was with some skepticism that I opened Burning Girl, Neihart's successor novel to the equally acclaimed Hey, Joe. I was not to be disappointed. This is a truly bad book, and I could quickly understand the allusions to Ellis and the excitement about the cover (the contents pale by comparison). The story revolves around the sex-driven relationship between Drew, Jake and Bahar (the latter's sister), and involves rape, murder, sex, more incriminating photographs, and lots of pop culture references (even Larry King makes a walk-on appearance). I know this sounds rather vague, but it's not so much that saying more here would spoil the plot, rather, it's just that Burning Girl has about as much plot as a reject script from Saved By the Bell. Still, it does seem that those advance readers did enjoy Burning Girl, and perhaps I'm being over-critical. I doubt it, however, for in the hands of someone like J.G. Ballard or even Kenneth J. Harvey, the basic themes of Neihart's book – violence, class and sexuality – might have resulted in a half-decent novel. In the end, I suspect all those over-excited exclamation marks say more about American readers than Burning Girl itself, but I do agree with Lissa Watts from Arizona: "Oh my god! It was absolutely incredible." Quite. |
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