Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: A cynical take on a confirmed ‘Cynic’s‘ latest work

Friday, Jan. 28, 2000 | 10:05 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Author Joe Queenan once told me he hates to finish a workday until he feels he's made some money. For a writer, such entrepreneurial zippiness is double-edged: It's a useful survival trait in the brutal Darwinian circus of the free-lance life, where every untyped word is a penny lost. Yet, obeyed too stringently, it leads inevitably to hack work.

Which sets up our discussion of Queenan's latest, "My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood" (Hyperion, $21.95). Queenan has been justly celebrated and reviled as a journalistic hatchet man; in fact, Queenan celebrates and reviles himself in the first line of his book.

"Since I started out as a writer many years ago, I have built a reputation as an acerbic, mean-spirited observer of the human condition," he purrs, before admitting, "It has not made me a happy person." He's lying, of course.

Queenan has made a career of gleeful dyspepsia, always the reliable curmudgeon, the guy a magazine editor can count on to let the air out of any subject -- Don Rickles with a laptop. He'll write a piece about Barbra Streisand titled "Sacred Cow," blowing smoke from his gun barrel when he's done. Some celebrities, burned once or just wised up, refuse to talk to him, prompting the title of an earlier collection of poison penmanship, "If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble."

But here's the rub: He wants to be a good guy! "In late 1998, I began to succumb to the cumulative effects of a lifetime spent being clinically unpleasant," he tells us in "My Goodness." That sentiment snowballs, and by Page 5, he's ready to ditch his big-meanie ways. "Being good was going to be the biggest challenge of my life," he sighs.

He starts by cataloging, at great length, all the evil he's done. Sixty-five articles that were mean to people who didn't deserve it, 60 stories where he'd been mean, but nonetheless right, and so on. Then he studies the history of ostentatious goodness (he has no patience for good deeds that don't call attention to themselves) from the Catholic saints of antiquity to Sting and Ben and Jerry.

Energized, he buys a lot of environmentally sound, not-tested-on-animals products, then embarks on a campaign of stunt generosity. He tracks down and delivers a rare CD to a stranger in another state. He gives $1,000 to a writer screwed out of a literary prize. He goes to a rally for a death-row inmate. He writes apologies to subjects savaged in his articles. All the while he updates us on his moral regeneration, and assesses the toll it takes on his family.

And at the end, Queenan realizes -- as you knew he must, as this sort of comic formula demands -- that he'd rather be bad old Joe because the money's better.

Buy the premise, buy the bit, Johnny Carson used to say, but it's not that easy when it comes to book-length humor. "My Goodness" is all premise, no bit; it reads like a fleshed-out book proposal instead of an actual book. The "Joe Queenan" in these pages is a caricature, his conversion to goodness entirely unconvincing, quite obviously a gimmick to sell the idea to a publisher. If you never once believe his remorse, you become an unnecessary third party to the real transaction, between Queenan and his publisher. Product delivered, payment issued.

Even that might be tolerable if you didn't get the overwhelming sense that Queenan was mailing it in, typing fast to meet the day's quota of dollars earned. Look at this sentence: "Again, this would be of great appeal to a kid growing up in a housing project where you had to take a lot of crap from all and sundry." Had he taken time for a thoughtful revision, you think he would have removed the last four, unnecessary words. They're harmless enough in one sentence, but it happens in many more than one, the extra words piling up like arterial plaque until you are fatigued from reading.

Likewise, the book is stuffed with lists (of articles he wrote, items he bought, dollars he earned or didn't earn), overlong explanations and reprinted correspondence: filler.

You can understand why Queenan decided no more Mr. Nice Guy; he estimates he turned down about 50 large in nasty assignments during his flirtation with good (so you have to believe he was sincere on some level). That sort of loss in the ledger is simply too much for a bad guy to take. He's gotta be him. "God had put me on this Earth to be unpleasant ... By refusing to write mean stories, I was in effect turning a deaf ear to the will of the creator."

A tin Mencken, Queenan can nonetheless be a genuinely funny writer. Many of the pieces in "If You're Talking to Me" are gems, and there were amusing patches in his last book, "Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon" (in which Queenan, in familiar fish-out-of-water format, forays into bad pop culture and loves it for a while before reverting to type).

Indeed, the present volume contains enough good material -- the CD episode, for instance -- to make you wonder what would happen if Queenan channeled his energies and vast irritability into a project he selected not for its earnings potential, but for sheer love of the game. We'll probably never know.

Reading list

The bad news first: The normally reliable Bryan Burrough weighs in with a report on Europe's "Salvador Dali serial killer." Such a headline might mislead you into thinking the story was about a serial killer and that there is some connection to the famous surrealist painter.

In fact, several cops believe the two confirmed victims were murdered by different culprits, and most discount the Dali angle, proposed because the bodies were mutilated in ways mildly resembling images in Dali's dream-like artwork.

Desperate to salvage his thesis, Burrough ends the piece by describing his visit to a Dali museum. He professes to be creeped out by the dark power of the art and can suddenly see how an unhinged mind might take evil inspiration from them. Too little, too late.

Meanwhile, Ned Zeman's tale of the drug-marred life and pathetic death of Hollywood superagent Jay Moloney is a fine piece of work. Yes, it's about a Hollywood superagent -- can you image Vanity Fair being interested if it wasn't? -- but Zeman does a good job of finding the human story beneath the high gloss.

The February issue, the first under her redesign, is out. Verdict: Same stuff, new packaging.

And so ends another day at Shelf Life -- like Joe Queenan, I can rest easy knowing I've made a little money. (Although Queenan would be appalled to learn just how little!)

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