Fiction
Palo Alto: Stories, by James Franco, $24. There is no rule that says handsome young movie stars cannot also be gifted writers, but James Franco’s celebrity hangs like an unspoken rebuke over every word of “Palo Alto,” his debut story collection.
Franco has been at earnest pains to establish his writerly bona fides, as if he might through force of will forestall any accusations of line-jumping. His faith in the idea that he could be considered just another aspiring wordsmith is touching, if ingenuous; even if his prose somehow turned out to be staggeringly brilliant, the critics and bloggers and readers who make up the literary establishment would rather die than admit it.
Fortunately for them, “Palo Alto” spares them any such dilemma. The book is a yawn: 11 sketches of youth-gone-awry in suburban California, undone by boredom and indifference, all narrated in a flat, affectless tone that reads like a parody of early Bret Easton Ellis, except not funny.
“One night in ninth grade we were drunk and wandering around the neighborhoods in a pack. There were some girls with us too. There was nowhere to go and no more alcohol,” begins a typical sequence.
The rote, staccato rhythm and colorless language reflect a precocious kid’s idea of ruthless nihilism: “When are things supposed to start mattering?” asks the narrator of “Killing Animals.” Likewise, the homophobia, drug use, casual violence and lifeless sex, meant to be shocking, come across as calculated and, finally, laughable: We’ve been down this road many, many times.
To be fair, Franco does manage a couple of neat tricks: The book has a well-balanced symmetry, with some of the characters recurring from story to story, adding a sense of continuity. And 2 1/2 stories (“Lockheed,” “Emily” and part of “April”) are inhabited by female narrators, which works surprisingly well and betrays at least a hint of imaginative candlepower.
These mitigating factors are not enough, however, to rescue “Palo Alto” from being essentially undergraduate-level mulch. It takes most writers years of hard work to find their voice; many never get there. Franco has made a start on it, but that’s the best that can be said.
nonfiction
On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, by Wray Herbert, $25
In his engaging new book, Wray Herbert delves into a subject that has topped the best-seller lists of late: the unconscious actions and reactions that affect our daily lives (think “Blink”).
But ignore the subtitle’s promise of self-help tips, because Herbert doesn’t spend much time telling you how to circumvent your gut reactions. Instead, he’s more interested in explaining how our minds process information and the implications of our cognitive quirks.
The book starts slowly, with a discussion of unconscious physical reactions, before moving into the more interesting territory of how we comprehend numbers, the world and existence itself. “Our brains employ all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to get us through the day,” Herbert writes. They can be simple, like imitating others in order to feel accepted and connected, and the littlest things can have a big impact.
The font on exercise instructions, for example, can influence whether we choose to work out. Wray also cites intriguing research that shows how “our deepest psychological needs may play a big part in determining where we fall on the political spectrum.” In one study, psychologists found that conservatives “have little tolerance for any messiness,” whereas liberals were more likely to live amid clutter.
Herbert, a former Newsweek columnist who writes the blog We’re Only Human for the Association for Psychological Science, clearly shows the effects of various daily mental maneuvers and peppers the text with explanations of how the human mind has evolved. It’s readable, meandering and eminently “Gladwellian.”
