Macaulay Culkin's Novel Gets Its First Trashing
It's an exciting time for former Neverland Ranch VIP Macaulay Culkin. There are rumors he may be getting ready to marry for the second time, and that he is considering taking a spot on the next season of UK's Celebrity Big Brother. But it's his debut novel Junior, due this March, that is getting the most buzz. Its first critique, from Kirkus Reviews, came out today. Some highlights:
Culkin s debut novel, to be published on March 15 by Miramax Books, kicks off with a five-question pop quiz meant to weed out any readers not quite up to snuff. Those who fail the quiz, Culkin writes, will not be allowed to go on. Reader, if you know what s good for you, you will fail the quiz. [...]
The book is essentially comprised of a couple hundred pages of semi-coherent diary entries coupled with a handful of scrawled drawings. The story, insofar as one exists, concerns a child star named Monkey-Monkey Boy and a guy, Junior, with no end of father issues. (People magazine readers will recognize autobiographical elements.)
Culkin isn t particularly concerned with narrative and takes no legitimate stabs at structure. He sticks instead with a rag-tag rambling style, tossing out his offerings like scraps on a trash heap poems piled atop lists piled atop letters, none of it really compelling, and none of it really going anywhere. All the usual typographical tricks font-size changes, phrases crossed out, blank pages helpfully labeled blank are brought out in a rather unsuccessful attempt to disguise the basic pointlessness of the exercise.
Not a rave, but let's not write off our fledgling man of letters just yet. Granted, to the uninitiated, it may seem like Culkin merely reached under his bed and fished out the stack of Mead spiral notebooks he has been scribbling and doodling his anguished former child star soul into for the past decade, trotted them over to Miramax books, only to plop them down on a starstruck editor's desk, saying "You want a book. I got your book." No, it's only upon closer examination that one realizes that Junior is in actuality the uncanny approximation of a teen diary of despair, sprung forth from the Bic pen of a celebrity literary master.
