David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

Hecuba’s claim seems unassailable until right before the Best Boxcover Concept category, when suddenly a piano is wheeled out for a chinless middle-aged man in the same sort of undersize porkpie that Art Carney always wore in The Honeymooners . This entertainer, who is introduced as “Doctor Dirty — the Dirtiest Musician in the History of Music,” proceeds to belt out obscene parodies of popular ditties that put Table 189 in mind of Mad magazine if everyone at Mad somehow all lost their mind at the same time. “Just got home from prison./My asshole is fizzin’./Goo goo goo drippin’ out my back door” is the only snatch of actual lyrics that persists in memory, though titles like “Sit on a Happy Face” and “It’s a Small Dick After All” have proved maddeningly hard to forget. Nobody at or around our table has ever heard of Doctor Dirty before, but almost everyone agrees that he’s the ’98 gala’s low point and a credible rival for Scotty Schwartz’s 1997 seminude rendition of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” as the most repellent AVNA interlude in modern memory. There’s also the ’98 ceremony’s climax, in which Midori 53 and two other starlets take the stage as “the Spicy Girls” and do a rappish 4/4 number that ends with pretty much every female porn performer in the crowd 54 up on stage dancing lasciviously and blowing kisses at the AVN cameras. This climactic distaff shindig apparently caps the Awards every year.

Something else happens every year. It’s never part of AVN’ s videotape of the gala, but it’s a tradition that finally explains why the ballroom’s poor waiters are willing to spend five hours enduring beverage abuse and scuttling around to find change. After the Awards Show is over and the lights go up, some of the starlets always pose for obscene snapshots with the Forum’s waiters. A lot of this year’s picture-taking happens at the back, right near our table. One waiter stands with his arm around the shoulders of Leanna Hart, who pulls down the starboard side of her strapless taffeta and allows the waiter to cup her right breast while Table 189’s own personal waiter 55 snaps the photo. Another waiter goes around behind Ms. Ann Amoré—a very personable black lady with a 50-inch bust and gang tattoos all down both arms — and hunches over behind her as she bends forward and releases her breasts from confinement, and the waiter paws them and tries to look like he’s having intercourse with her from behind as his friend’s flash goes off. What the waiters are going to do with these photos is unguessable, but they’re visibly thrilled, and the starlets are patient and obliging with them in the same blank, distant way that they were with the mooks at the Adult CES.

Trying to leave after the AAVNAs gala is another slow process, because the broad hallway outside the ballroom is again filled with industry people with Caesar-cameo’d glasses they’ve somehow forgotten to leave at their tables, all standing in clumps and congratulating one another and making plans for various Insider parties later. But the slowest, scariest egressive part is traversing the long glass vestibule to the hotel’s side exit. A mass of fans and Caesars Palace custodians and assorted other civilians are there, and the crowd parts slightly to allow a narrow passage for the Awards’ attendees, who must run this gauntlet nearly single file. It’s late, and everyone’s tired, and this crowd has none of the awestruck reticence of the cabstand’s spectators earlier. Now it’s like every mook has his own special high-volume comment for the passing stars, and there’s a weird mix of adulation and derision:

“Love you, Brittany!”

“How’d you get that dress on, baby?”

“Look over here!”

“Does your mother know where you’re at right now?”

One florid 30ish man holding a plastic cup of beer now reaches out from the crowd and very deliberately pinches the breast of the B-girl walking just in front of us. She slaps his hand away without breaking stride. Because we cannot see her face, we don’t know whether there is any reaction there at all. We have an informed guess, though.

Mr. Dick Filth is behind us with one hand on each of yr. corresps.’ shoulders (we’re basically supporting him out). Everyone’s ears are still ringing, and Filth knows enough to almost shout:

“You know,” he says, “we’ve also got the XRCO Awards in February. X-Rated Critics Organization Awards — you get me? They’re not in Vegas, and they’re not rigged. And yet they manage to be just as ridiculous.”

1998

MAILER, UPDIKE, ROTH — the Great Male Narcissists * who’ve dominated postwar American fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no US novelist has mapped the inner terrain of the solipsist better than John Updike, whose rise in the 1960s and ’70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV. As were Freud’s, Updike’s big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that his books’ mood has gotten more wintry in recent years is understandable — Updike has always written mainly about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he’s been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an extremely erudite, successful, narcissistic, and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. Toward the End of Time is also, of the let’s say two dozen Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot, and most of the remainder here will consist simply of presenting evidence/justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting spittle-spattering Updike haters one often encounters among literary readers under forty. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of the very few actual subforty Updike fans . Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since ’81’s Rabbit Is Rich —as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent — I’ve continued to read Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.

Most of the literary readers I know personally are under forty, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar GMNs. But it’s John Updike in particular that a lot of them seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason — mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”