Flicker

Theodore Roszak

It must be twenty-five years ago now I tried to read Theodore Roszak's novel Bugs. I found it painfully boring, and never finished it. While the name stuck in my head for some odd reason, I never had any desire to read anything else the man wrote.

Jump ahead to 2003, and his out-of-print and previously obscure novel Flicker is announced as the source of Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream)'s latest film. I instantly recognized the name of the guy who wrote Bugs, and despite my misgivings decided to dive in again, then set about finding a copy (along with about ten thousand others). Instantly, hundreds of messages popped up all over the net asking where this book could be found, its price on bookfinder (and the rare ebay copy) skyrocketed. Amazon's zShops quickly sold out of copies. It's presently as sought after as Sierra Leone diamonds.

There's a copy at the Cleveland Public Library, folks. I'm done with it. And I hope that movie is a whole lot better than the book.

While I will give Roszak a few points for having a readable passage here and there (Sharkey describing the construction of his cameras to the narrator early in the book has an odd, slow hypnotic quality to it), and I was willing to give him more than the benefit of the doubt that I was just young and impatient when I tried Bugs, I found this book to have the same overwhelming problem as Bugs; it's painfully, glacially, unreadably slow. It's boring. Before reading Flicker, I'd have laughed if you'd told me you found a book whose author managed to make a threesome boring. But, well, here it is.

I can find absolutely nothing to recommend in Flicker, and again offer up a small prayer that Aronofsky can take this source material and make it into something watchable.