PERFORATED HEART may be the most bitter book you will ever read.
It begins at a posh literary award ceremony where the narrator, the
aging author Richard Morris (who long ago achieved fame with a
successful film adaptation of a novel), proceeds to dissect and
spit upon every literary sycophant and poseur in the room with a
delightfully gravelly sense of self-satisfaction --- and disdain.
Get used to this bitterness: the thoroughness of his disgust for
others and himself is a driving force throughout the book.

When not recounting his litany of disappointments in himself,
his money-grubbing editor, or the unappreciative public, he looks
through old journals of his life as a twentysomething underground
artist in 1970s New York City. You know the type: the young
literati so enamored with the intensity of their
lifestyles (drink, get high, write) that they’re willing to
sacrifice any amount of material comfort for their art --- provided
they still get to look cool. The character and his travails are
positively groan-worthy to Morris and a good snarky read for us. So
eager to be the urban Kerouac of his day, young Morris shows all
the passions and pains of endless desire bound by limited
experience and capabilities.

Eric Bogosian is a trained actor, so it’s not surprising
that he has a seemingly effortless command of natural speech. Both
the aging Morris and his youthful counterpart appear like real,
vibrant characters against the backdrop of enveloping landscapes,
be they the dimming world of a former gold lion or the land of
endless opportunity. His side characters --- while obviously bit
players compared to his main stars --- interact with the scenes and
settings perfectly to draw the reader in to the emotional highs and
lows of the protagonist.

That being said, PERFORATED HEART can get tiring, especially if
you feel like you’ve encountered these characters before and
didn’t like them. Bogosian will do nothing to make them more
likable, just more viscerally realistic. Older Morris can sound
like a whiny snob who doesn’t know what to do with himself,
and it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for the guy because,
oh no, he isn’t the Great American Novelist. As for
young Morris, more than a few times I desperately wanted to tell
him he doesn’t need drugs to write well, and I tired of
hearing about who he did drugs with and who he fantasizes about
(and notably, not what he’s writing about). These
characters, while entirely convincing, are cliché to the point
of caricature.

However, there is definitely merit beyond compelling description
in this book. The insight into older Morris’s ruminations and
regrets goes beyond the psychological and manages some fairly heady
stuff. In one short entry, Morris muses on the postmodern literary
condition and wonders if in a world where “all ideas will be
equal: comic books, classical theater, advertising,
nineteenth-century novels, movies, gum wrappers, the Bible,”
there can be such a thing as great art. His grisly tone places some
serious doubt on this artistic worldview, but more importantly, we
as removed readers (who see Morris’s faults where he so
clearly doesn’t) can identify how he entirely misses the
point of what postmodernism is and what it can do for us.
Intellectual princes are a romantic notion --- and, in
Morris’s case, tragic for his failure to achieve that status
--- but as we see through their human faults, a notion we may be
grateful to postmodernism for taking us away from.

In the end, we can appreciate Bogosian’s rendering of this
engrossing worldview, but it may be that we only get our fullest
appreciation for it by condemning its principal advocate.