The joke it was that died
James Delingpole
AMERICA - by Joe Queenan Picador, £6.99, pp. 195 Iwas going to say that Joe Queenan is the funniest American writer since P. J. O'Rourke but then I changed my mind; not because it's totally untrue — on a good day, he writes so wittily and well (usually on film) that it's worth buying the Saturday Guardian for his occasional columns alone — but because it might give a misleading impression were it to be quoted on the back cover of his latest book.
You see, if I'd been lured by such a quote into paying £6.99 for America: A Descent into the Land of Red Lobster, White Trash, The Blue Lagoon and Other Cultural Atrocities, I think I might want to strangle the person who'd said it. Yes, there may indeed be the occasional passage here which recalls the savage comic splendour of Republican Party Reptile, but unfortunate- ly they're rather outnumbered by the bits that make you want to go `Eh?', 'Wrong!' or `Why did he bother?'
Which is not the reaction I expected to have at all. Besides being a huge fan of Queenan's style, I share his unhealthy obsession with the book's sub- ject: trash culture and the so-bad-it's-good phenomenon whereby a film, a book, a television series, whatever, manages to plumb the depths so spectacularly low that you can't help but be entranced and addict- ed by its ineffable ghastliness.
In Queenan's case this obsession started with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. Before that, he claims — somewhat disingenuous- ly, given that he writes about pop culture for a living — to have been part of an 'elite, effete sub-culture' dominated by dinner-party discussions of camera angles in Jean de Florette, Placido Domingo recitals at the Met and concerts by the Kro- nos Quartet. But with Cats began the author's quest to 'throw off the mask of the urban sophisticate and plunge headfirst into the culture of the masses'.
It sounds an amusing conceit and at first it's handled very well. Cats is dispatched with sadistic relish:
To give you an idea of how bad Cats is, think of a musical where you're actually glad to hear 'Memory' reprised a third time because the other songs are so awful.
So too is one of America's drippiest pop stars: For years I'd been vaguely aware of Michael Bolton's existence, just as I'd been vaguely aware that there was an Ebola virus in Africa. Horrible tragedies, yes, but they had nothing to do with me.
I also like his brief appraisal of Love Story: 'Die, witch! Die!'
Sure, wasting an intellect on the decon- struction of such pap may be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But cracking nuts with sledgehammers can be really good fun, and useful too when it leads to such ingenious coinages as 'Vanquished Chic' (the New-Age-style veneration — vide books like The Celestine Prophecy — of the wisdom of lost cultures like the Mayans, the Hopis or the Aztecs) and `Scheissenbedauenf (literally 'shit regret' — 'the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one hoped it would be').
Unfortunately, Queenan cannot sustain this level of ingenuity. There are only so many times that you can use the 'x was so bad it makes y look like z' formula before it loses its impact. And as Queenan plunges ever deeper into lowbrow hell, his respons- es to the work he is attempting to damn become increasingly unconvincing.
I can sympathise, for example, with his impulse to condemn schlock-horror fiction like V. C. Andrews's incest fest, Flowers in the Attack, but not with his glib attempts to tar Stephen Dobyns's intelligent, well- written The Church of the Dead Girls with the same brush. If you think that chilling subject matter automatically makes a book worthy of highbrow critical contempt, why not go the whole hog and trash The Turn of the Screw as well?
This critical laziness is a major flaw. The principal pleasure of this sort of book — and it's certainly true of P. J. O'Rourke's work — is that `Yes!Yes! You're so right!' thrill of communal recognition. All too often it's missing from America.
It doesn't help that many of Queenan's cultural references are likely to go above the heads of British readers. Sentences like Michener's mentioning himself in the same breath as Balzac seemed a bit like Chris Darden mentioning himself in the same breath as Clarence Darrow obviously aren't going to work if you don't know who Chris Darden is.
But I suspect the book's main problem is simpler than that. Queenan is a supremely funny journalist who has tried to turn what should have been two or three solid 1000- word features into a 195-page book; the joke, stretched to excruciating length, has died.
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