Eponymous

J. Eric Smith

Reviewing a book by a friend is usually a way to get oneself in deep trouble. Reviewing a book by a friend published by the normally-loathsome vanity press iUniverse.com is pretty much begging to be struck by lightning. This is the second time I've done it (Charles Sheehan-Miles' Prayer at Rumayla, on that other vanity press, Xlibris), and to put it mildly I was quite relieved when once again I wouldn't have to drag a friend's name through the mud.

I was rather taken aback, though, when I first got the thing. The back-cover effusiveness compares Eponymous to the movies high Fidelity and Almost Famous, two of the more nauseating pictures to come across the silver screen in the past few years. Having been reading Smith's shorter work for a while, though, I should have known better. The boy's a better writer than that, and it comes out here.

Collie Hay is a failed musician making his way as a music critic. Eponymous is the story of how he got that way, from his childhood working in the family music store in South Carolina to his band Arctangent's shot at stardom on a little Sony sublabel. It's also an exposure of self-loathing. Collie Hay does not like himself much. At all, actually. And while self-denigrating humor is pretty easy, to beat yourself up for this many pages with that kind of bitter cynicism rings both horrifying and oddly true. No one plots emotions this much, and that reality in the main character is the book's strongest point. No matter how out of control things get, there's not a single thing in the book that doesn't ring true. You will find yourself wanting to grab Collie by the shirt and smack some sense into him (and you will likely find yourself wanting to do this with a number of other characters in the book at various times) on a fairly regular basis, butt here's nothing here you haven't seen a hundred times in various friends and acquaintances of yours. Well, okay, in order to really see some of it, you may have to turn on Jerry Springer now and again, but it still rings true nonetheless.

The same first-novel failings I noted in my review of Silverlance are apparent here (though Smith avoids falling into the fantasy-adventure-cliche trap by, well, not writing a fantasy adventure novel), especially in regards to the pacing. The book is slow to wind up, and a little overly conscious of its structure. However, that is quite nicely balanced out by one of the characters, who reads the manuscript at various times while Hay is writing it (for, yes, this is an autobiography within a novel, which is pretty obvious from the moment you crack the cover) and commenting on the pacing, structure, etc. Extra points to Smith for realizing that, taking it into account, satirizing it, and picking up the pace. (Or extra points to Lindy; you make the call.) The other major problem with the book is the ending, which is painful in an H. P. Lovecraft sort of way; readers of Lovecraft should know exactly what I'm talking about without my having to say it, and thus spoil the fun for the many millions of you who have not yet read this novel. Well, you haven't yet. You should. It's funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way, the same way Takashi Miike's movies are funny. It's thought-provoking. But more than anything else, it's real.