Perforated Heart
A Novel
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Almost forty years after moving to Manhattan, author Richard Morris has achieved if not stratospheric renown then at least the accomplished career and caliber of fame that he envisioned for himself as a younger man. Now financially comfortable and artistically embittered, Richard is at his home upstate recuperating from heart surgery and nursing resentment toward his publisher and his reading public who have found new, more exciting writers and left his star to wane.
In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late '70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime.
Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright and actor Bogosian presents in his Rothian third novel the diaries of a once-prominent author embittered by his declining fame. The diary of Richard Morris begins with the writer losing a major award to a lesser talent, his latest book a failure and his agent busying himself with more marketable clients. Death and the prospect of being forgotten hound him, and heart surgery leaves him with a metaphorically convenient scar. Housebound while recovering from the operation and hiding from the affections of his young girlfriend, Richard becomes engrossed in his diaries of 30 years earlier, when he was new to New York City. While these notebooks "reveal what a total idiot" the young writer was, the elder Richard fails to notice how very little has changed. Richard remains a man who mistakes self-destruction for authenticity and is utterly incapable of seeing himself as others see him which is aggravated when his literary fortunes take a welcome, belated turn and faces from his past show up in the present. Richard is a grade-A bastard, and his rise and fall and rise again exemplifies the often arbitrary and opportunistic machinery of the literary world and operators within it.
