Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: A harrowing trip through ‘Perv’

Friday, Oct. 15, 1999 | 8:40 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-244m

I committed to reviewing Jerry Stahl's new novel before I was fully aware of its contents, and now I have a slight problem: It's wonderfully packed with depravity and sickness and humid sex, frequently engaged in or at least vividly imagined by the teenage (underage!) narrator.

Now, it's not that I'm squemish. As a books columnist, naturally I've witnessed every form of personality kink and screwy behavior the human race can cook up. My problem is that the points and purposes of the story are so inextricably bound up in acts and thoughts that I can't, in a family newspaper, really get into, you know, in depth, that it will be difficult to discuss.

I should have known this would happen -- it's all there in the book's title: "Perv -- A Love Story" (William Morrow and Co., $24). And in the author's resume. Stahl's last book, the junkie-memoir classic "Permanent Midnight" (Ben Stiller played Stahl in the movie), was likewise full of harrowing/hilarious passages brewed with various recipes of sex, dope, anguish and mortification. You had to read much of it through squinted eyes, but you kept going because it was so damn human and funny.

Stahl has gone clean, respectable even, since the period described in that book, so I figured he was using "perv" (short for pervert, for the lexicographically challenged) in an ironic, metaphorical, not-really- that -perverted way.

Nope. First line: "I was third in line the first time I ever actually 'did it.' " The narrator is Bobby Stark, 16, of Pittsburgh, who will shortly be caught in the act by the irate father of the girl in question.

Bobby comes from the most broken of homes -- his father was a big-hearted liberal lawyer, his mother a shrill harpy. Overcome by the pain of the world and the numbness of his marriage, Bobby's father committed suicide by stepping in front of a streetcar. His mother went crazy. His sister went to Canada (the setting in 1970). "In my family," the boy remembers, "misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages."

The first scene sets up a recurring pattern that structures the book's first half: Caught in the midst of some humiliating, not-exactly-natural act -- the group encounter with the barber's daughter, sniffing an old woman's panties in the laundry room -- Bobby, instead of being thrashed or hauled off to juvi, becomes a weird kind of surrogate confessor to the barber, the old lady, whoever. They blurt their secret unhappiness, their pent-in bitterness to him, as if recognizing in Bobby someone as screwed-up as they are.

But he's not a true perv. He's an essentially good kid who wants to be bad in order to feel something genuine. He unwittingly follows his desires into crazy situations in order to poke through the anesthesia of his life.

Midway through the tale, Bobby runs away with Michelle, a mixed-up hippie chick fleeing a religious cult, who just happens to be a grade-school classmate Bobby had an overpowering, unrequited crush on. They decide to hitchhike to San Francisco. The remainder of the book is largely concerned with their prolonged encounter with two charismatic, pan-sexual hippies, Varnish and Meat -- part Manson Family, part Grateful Dead.

It takes place mostly in a parked Caddy, a cauldron of drugs, sex, violence, sexy violence, all to the accompaniment of Varnish's high-speed rap about free love, religion and how any act, performed in love, can't be perversion. Bobby is alternately sickened, titillated, frightened by and resigned to the things that happen.

As queasy-making as it sounds, this part of "Perv" is, in fact, far more absorbing than the first half, wherein there is much wheel-spinning. Much of the early action is amusing -- Stahl is one of the funniest writers going -- but he seems to be opening and re-opening the same windows into his character's soul.

But as the scenes with Varnish and Meat build, and Stahl eases into fifth gear, a sort of bent lyricism takes over and the story becomes a horrible/fascinating (such dichotomies are necessary in describing this book) picture of Bobby's identity finally gelling under extreme conditions. He learns just what proportions of good boy/bad boy he possesses, as well as mommy's boy/daddy's boy. The kid, of course, is all right. The sweet coda that updates the tale strikes the right notes of sadness and redemption and, yes, love.

Because "Perv" is, after everything and as promised, a love story. Jerry Stahl is a grunge romantic.

Reading list

Vanity Fair, November 1999: Las Vegas' own Dave Hickey (a nationally recognized art critic and UNLV prof) mounts the Vanity Fair podium to deliver a compelling lesson about Norman Rockwell and why he was neither the hack illustrator or conservative agenda-pusher he's frequently portrayed as.

Hickey argues that Rockwell employed sophisticated European compositional techniques and that his subject was not, in fact, small-town Americana, "family values" and all that, but tolerance and democracy. Changed my mind.

Elsewhere, there's a spread on conservative babes and some weird, disturbing photos of cover boy Jim Carrey as a figure from a Francis Bacon painting. They almost blot out the stain "Dumb and Dumber" has left on my brain.

New Yorker, Oct. 18 and 25, 1999: The "Next Generation" double issue has a batch of good stuff, starting with Dave Eggers' memoir of raising his little brother after their parents died, and continuing with an account of one young, urban hipster's journey into abject insolvency. Welcome to my world, sister -- the Shelf Life ain't no good life, but it's my life.