Garden State by Rick Moody
Simultaneously published on Instagram.
Hi y’all!
Book Notes is back, baby! If you’re confused about how you found me, you prolly came from my IG.
Housekeeping note: I’m now doing affiliate links. Full explanation of what the fuck that means is in the footnotes,1 as well as in this blog post. Affiliate links… does this mean I’m a for-real influencer now? I feel like I should get some sort of badge, like in Girl Scouts— “Successfully Monetized That Which She Finds Most Sacred: Reading.”
There’s nothing that makes me more stubbornly hopeful than reading a totally hopeless book. As seasoned readers of Book Notes are probably now well aware, I’m at a point in my life where I have little patience for the nihilistic little novelas I thought were profound ten years ago. I couldn’t even bring myself to review My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
So, even though it’s a gorgeous lil work of prose, I’m annoyed to have to review Garden State by Rick Moody. It’s my own fault: I thought it would be the book that the movie Garden State is based on. It’s not. I’m a moron. I’ve never even seen the movie Garden State, but I knew it was a romcom with Zach Braff, so I assumed this book would be a little bittersweet but ultimately golden.2 I wanted something a little light on the palate. Not indulgent, but easy reading. Like This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper.
Uh, not this Garden State. Not at all.
Garden State pub’d in ‘92, and it’s set in the 80’s. It follows a few twenty-somethings in New Jersey. They’re living with their parents, working menial jobs, and thinking about the good old days: the year or two after high school, when it seemed like their rock band was going somewhere. They’re all doing a lot of drugs. They’re all depressed. New Jersey is a suburban wasteland, full of car crashes and ketamine and cement. New York City is impossibly far away. The City is almost this strange void in the narrative; while the reader brings so much mythic importance (and a certain sense of hope for the future) to their conception of New York (or at least, I do), for the characters it’s a place that has never held any sort of potential. This lack of interest in NYC is somehow punishingly bleak to read. A character might go to the City, but they’re quickly shown to be fundamentally incompatible with it. New Jersey, and their town Haledon, is inevitable.
Max Crick was perishing for what he loved. The seduction of fecal muck in the Garden State’s redolent swamplands, the seduction of lovingly pronounced abbreviations of chemical contaminants, the seduction of of the fabulous desolation of the Jersey City landfills—blocks of mashed appliances piled like the stepping stones of the great pyramids, swirling tornadoes of airborne scavengers—this seduction has replaced his regular instincts and he was perishing. And he didn’t know it.
Garden State deals with a lot of the same themes other novels about the suburbs have covered—the broken promises and failures of the “American Dream,” the nuclear family, the middle class. As Moody succinctly puts it, “The good life wasn’t good enough and that was it.” There’s an undercurrent of violence that reminds me of Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis (which pub’d just a few years earlier in ‘85). Many characters in Garden State are morbidly fascinated by Mike Maas, a man who died by self-immolation a few years prior to the events of the novel. Characters casually reflect on other gruesome and improbable deaths—like a guy who “had had his head blown off tapping a keg.” But all of this violence is emotionless, remote.
It’s probably telling that I’ve written this whole review without naming a single character or plot point: Jersey itself is the most important character in this book. Do with that what you will.
I can’t help but think as I read this how clear it is that this is a debut. There’s a certain youthfulness to this type of nihilism, maybe exacerbated by how young the characters in question are. It brings this melodramatic quality to writing that is otherwise very detached. There are only a few writers whose bodies of work I’ve read entirely (or nearly entirely).3 I’m curious to read Moody’s other work, to see if (and how) his vision and voice hav evolved. And I’m curious, if they did, how Moody reflects on the book now.
Okay: time for the truth. I often start writing reviews before I finish the book in question. Usually, once I finish reading, I go back and edit what I’ve written to be in sync with my final take-aways—but this time I wanted to leave the first half of my review as it stood, to better showcase the masterful work that Moody achieves in the second half of the book.
I wrote the first half of this review on Sunday, when I was almost literally half-way through the book—page 102 of 212. On Monday, I read the next 50 pages and instantly knew everything in my review would have to radically change. And today, Tuesday,4 I finished the book and will humbly eat my words.
Because unlike many of the “nihilistic little novelas” I dismissed just a few paragraphs above, unlike Less Than Zero, Garden State has a turn.
Shortly after the middle of the novel, one of the characters, Lane, has a brush with death and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. And Lane and the other characters, in their guilt and shock, are jolted into the first fumbling steps of adulthood.
It was just a chuckle but Alice didn’t take it well. Suddenly, she felt really bad, really irredeemably bad, worse than she had in weeks.
You know a book is grim when a line like seems like a hopeful line, because it’s one of the first times any characters has felt much of anything at all.
The young people in Garden State aren’t scared of death, they’re scared of middle age. Death, after all, is something their peers have experienced. Death is fast. Life looms.
But even the guy who set himself on fire had a mother, best friends, a haunted ex-girlfriend. And eventually your mom makes good on her promise to kick you out. That job at the mall that once seemed so degrading, might actually allow a quiet, stable dignity.
They were both embarrassed. Some days just came and went. They were mustering hope and courage, but it wasn’t all there yet.
The reader only sees the characters take a first hesitant step into adulthood. Some of these steps are bigger than others, and some feel more “earned” by the narrative than others. But nonetheless, I’d still characterize the end as hopeful.
And as for New York City, its mythic importance, and everything it represents—a sense of potential, dreams for the future—it was only a bus ride away, after all.
But then they got up on some rough outcropping there, and you could see the whole fucking megalopolis over there. That river was bigger than any city, bigger than any temporary riverside development. Dennis felt how rivers commanded so much myth, so many stories. It was the kind of expanse that could not help but be dignified.
I know this isn’t exactly what one would call a glowing review, but if you want to pick it up, you can purchase Garden State here.5 It’s currently backordered, but I think that just means they’re waiting for someone to buy it before they stock it.
Yours forever, with unrelenting, often contrarian, and occasionally spiteful cheer,
xoxo
Book Notes
PS. Here’s a playlist of songs that the characters in Garden State would never, ever listen to, but nonetheless, I’ve put together for the book. Yes, I included “New Slang” because of the Garden State movie. Sue me!
I recently joined “BookShop.” Essentially, BookShop allows you to support local bookstores with your online book purchases. I’m now an affiliate, and I’ll be posting links through which you can purchase the books I review. I get a 10% commission on any sales made through my links, and independent bookstores will get a matching 10% commission. You also get a 20% discount on pretty much every purchase. You can read more about the program here.
If you prefer, you can also see if your local indie bookstore is a member, and purchase through them—that bookstore will then receive the full 30% of sales price (ie, all the profits from the sale of the book). If you’re looking for indie bookstores to support, here are a few of my favorites (who are on BookShop) in the various cities I’ve lived in: Blue Cypress in New Orleans, Topos in Queens, and Red Emma’s in Baltimore. If you don’t buy through my links, buy through theirs!
But if you do purchase through my links, rest assured commissions will fund my next book purchase (and my next review). I’ve also created curated lists of past books I’ve rec’d and my all-time-favorite books. You can find both here. And I’ll also note anytime a link you follow will lead to a commission for me :)
I just read a plot summary, and it seems that the movie Garden State is also actually pretty grim.
Calvino, Woolf, Tana French, and, interestingly enough, Zadie Smith. (I’m not including writers who have only published two books.) I say “interestingly” because while I’ve read Calvino, Woolf, and French’s oeuvre very purposefully, I read almost all of Smith’s novels because they were assigned in high school or college. In fact, Smith and Woolf were the only two female novelists I was ever assigned to read in college. Wild! I do really like Smith though.
It is Tuesday as I write this, but I’m publishing it tomorrow (Wednesday) because I’m not so psycho as to send out newsletters at 10pm on a weeknight.
This is the aforementioned affiliate link.