Entertaining comedy of excess. Cons
Not recommended for minors.
Full Review
The conception of the alienated boho artist may be an outdated one in our culture. After all, the Internet has given millions of alienated weirdos the semblance of belonging, of "community." Psychos post their deranged art online, self-publishing largely has become as light as posting a blog.
This makes the curiousness of a word like PERMANENT OBSCURITY stand out still more. This farcical novel by Richard Perez, featuring out-of-touch, isolated "artists," reads like a reversion to a pre-Internet era. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.In all fairness, the time frame of the word is during the mid-00s, during what might be one the most obscure and paranoid times in American history. Hatred for everything American was at an all time high and we were paranoid (paranoia accurately reflected in mainstream movies like HOSTEL). George W. Bush was in the White House riding this peak of fear, with Dick Chaney, a military contractor, as war consultant VP. The mind of general health maintenance and policy was then an impossibility; according to George Bush something that was "available" yet out of hand to 45 million Americans. There were cell phones then, but smart phones replete with obligatory Facebook apps and Internet access hadn't yet arrived. In this mood of care and self-loathing and isolationism, PERMANENT OBSCURITY tells the seedy yarn of Dolores and Serena, two East Village archetypes, who puff and snort their way to infamy after committing an act of Abu Ghraib-style one-upsmanship with a perverted twist.Isolating the independent narrative thread in PERMANENT OBSCURITY, it's generally a comedy of supernumerary or a "cautionary tale" farce. Dolores Santana, writing as the author, tells the history of her rise from obscurity to freak infamy, which begins with her meeting Serena Moon, a would-be rock-and-roll goddess at age 19. Together they make a rebellious alliance while indulging in drugs and drink and more drugs. Serena has been taking out Craigslist ads as a dominatrix as a way of acquiring by; then lucks out as a fetish model with Dolores as her primary photographer. Soon, amid puffing and snorting binges, the two concoct a fancy of fashioning a strand of fetish movies. But, in the degenerated drug-addled condition they're in, just shooting the foremost turns into an epic nightmare neither one of them could have imagined. (The caption of this novel gives some hint of the way the tale is headed-minus the irony.PERMANENT OBSCURITY is emphatically not a book recommended for minors, with its shocking story of F bombs and fetishistic pornographic situations, many unheard of by most readers. The dominatrix scenes with Serena are more about testing male/female psychological boundaries, but no less soiled and disturbing. In the end, the lowest real bohemian mentioned may not be Dolores Santana or Serena Moon, the would-be arty Thelma & Louise of this novel, but the alienated character of Dick, the self-reflexive, self-sabotaging author of this drug-demented descent, who crashes and burns in outstanding fashion, even forecasting his own unsettling fate with surreal accuracy. For the surprising, twisted ending alone, PERMANENT OBSCURITY may be worth seeking out. In Closing
A sheer and darkly funny book worth reading.
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