Palo Alto - Book

So dig it … James Franco is a writer among other things. Now I’d always heard about James “Dean” Franco being a bit of a jack of all trades, but after the serious waste of time that was Ethan Hawk’s attempts at writing I sort of gave up on the idea of celebrity literature. I only started paying attention to Franco as an artist after he did the movie “Howl” about the poem of the same name by Allen Ginsberg. In my opinion that film was excellent because of how raw and honest it was as well as the fact that it brought to the forefront perhaps my favorite American poem in a fresh new way via new media. But also I appreciate Franco’s sense of rebellion and transcendence in the form of his social media selfie empire, his shit paintings for painting’s sake, and his self-deprecating sense of humor. He basically trolls the whole world. After all he played Ginsberg with such openness that it almost hard to watch some of the scenes in the film. I’m with you in Rockland! Check that one out if you haven’t.

It wasn’t until he caught shit for hitting on that 17 year old girl however that I took notice of Palo Alto as it was suggested that the whole thing had been a stunt to promote the upcoming (and how timely for this blog) movie version of Palo Alto being released May 9^th. As Franco never acknowledged either way if this had only been a media stunt, my curiosity overcame me so I picked it up and gave it a read.

The film version happens to be directed and co-written by Gia Coppola and should be an interesting jaunt … Franco incidentally will play a minor character – the teacher (Mr. B) who preys on a young high school girl so the dots seemingly connect. Anyway all speculation aside, this novel really got me. I read it (a short 200 pages or so) in two days and damn near couldn’t put it down.

It focuses on a series of loosely connected vignettes told from the perspectives of young men and women in high school in Palo Alto who seem to be exceedingly narcissistic and troublingly violent sexually and otherwise. What really struck me though was the style. It’s not preachy at all. Every character is justified in a strange empty adolescent way. Franco spent a good deal of time at Brooklyn College taking creative writing courses and working with some of the best mentors in the world. It was during this time that the vast amount of what would become Palo Alto was penned.
 
What’s interesting is that in the afterword Franco mentions that the driving force of his narrative happened to be the fact that the classes would read what they were working on to each other and it gave him a particular focus as the subject matter was both personal and explicit. He used his own loose memories of his childhood, as well as the memories of anonymous high school students (requested for his thesis) for source material.

As a child of the 80’s I could appreciate the references strewn throughout. Shit like Ninja Turtles, and Zelda Ocarina of time brought back flashes of my own memories growing up in America. The feel or style of the narrative hits you like some kind Bret Easton Ellis novel; something akin to Less than Zero or Rules of Engagement. There is a nihilistic tendency in all of the characters as if the outrageous acts they do regularly are downplayed as if they happen all the time. The best part is there’s nothing over

the top in the sense that a little pot smoking here or there, or the occasional peach schnapps or gangbang are about as bad as it gets. In other words the real bad stuff is only hinted at or implicit in the descriptions. What’s left unsaid is perhaps the most troubling of all and yet it’s transcendent. It pushes you to refrain from passing judgment. Each vignette relies on a tiny arc that drops you suddenly without much of a resolution. This gives tremendous emotional impact and a sense of nostalgia for those times when even the slightest occurrence could mean extremes of excitement or abject valleys of suicidal depression. Moreover, he deals with issues of race, self-identity, gun violence, misogyny, and drug abuse with equal whimsy.

As I was reading and remembering high school, I’d have strange recollections. Not so much things that occurred but the emotional backdrops of these occurrences.  In other words in my memories, who I was and what I dreamed of were so amplified by hormones, and fear, and lust that every moment seemed to be immortalized for no other reason than it was happening to me. This is the very magic of

Palo Alto. The solipsism of adolescence is a funny thing because it’s capable of such poetic beauty and yet there is this dark side that makes possible egregious acts of ignorant violence (emotionally and physically) that quite often go unanswered or simply rendered irrelevant as you move into adulthood.

One particular moment that really made me love the book happened when a young man was caught drunk driving after a hit and run and made to do community service. He was sent to work in children’s library and being the perfect shit that he was, he ended up wasting his time rereading all the childhood books that his mother had read to him instead of working. There are some great moments where Franco describes books like The Hungry Caterpillar or the Rainbow Goblins, books that I myself have read with my mother, in terms of extreme and hateful adolescent ignorance. For instance the Goblins were clearly gay because they sucked off the rainbow “nothing gayer than that shit” or the fact that when they were betrayed by the flowers and swallowed up by the strange color juices you found out they didn’t wear underwear “because you could see the blue goblin’s butt as he was dying.” Of course

such things are offensive to say but even when dealing with issues of race there is a sensitivity to it that even goes beyond the nihilism in a way that points to some kind of strange salvation for all the characters involved.

An example of this is that after this kid gets booted from the library for drawing dicks and vaginas on all the characters in the children’s books, he is reassigned to an old folks home where he meets an old woman whom he decides to draw “shitty portraits” of because he’s so bored. Incidentally he learns to draw the spirit underneath all the “wrinkles upon wrinkles” and finds that even the most depressing living people, seemingly devoid of a soul, might still have one hiding out underneath the “old dead decaying eyes.”

What’s even more intriguing is how Franco manages to write women. There are a handful of characters that are slutty and/or “mature for their age” that the boys discuss as you can imagine they would, but the moments where these women have internal dialogues are some of the most moving in the book.
They are written as real and valuable and lucid almost more so than the one-dimensional caricatures of the boys. Some of the passages are haunting enough for me to have felt like I was reading my own wife’s or sister’s story as fucked up as that sounds.

All in all I’d almost reluctantly and surprisingly give this one an ULTRA-TIGHT and would encourage anyone who wants a quick read to pick it up. I’m definitely going to read his other work and most likely anything he ever puts out. This one made me James Franco fan. He’s a writer’s writer and in my opinion a damn good one. Hell, it made me want to write and to write truthfully. Usually I don’t bother watching movies about books I’ve read but I’ll check this one out … the Coppolas tend to not let me down and I’ll say without restraint that James Franco might just be a fucking genius. Yeah I said it.

Matt Cowart