Book Review: Suicide Casanova by Arthur Nersesian
Suicide Casanova by Arthur Nersesian
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this — it’s a bit on the predictable side, and the language, although it claims to be pulpy and contempo-noir, mostly falls flat and sounds silly. I had read The FuckUp many years ago and was looking forward to another by the author. The packaging was pretty great, although I ended up just getting the standard paper back. All in all, I stuck with it but it was trying. A couple of decent moments. Interesting structure in the book, but hasn’t held up well with the passing of a few years.
Divided into discreet sections akin to the limited functionality of a store-bought VCR, we follow the main character’s (Leslie Cauldwell) journey into a porn-inspired relationship with former actress Sky Pacifica. Detours on the road to his own demise include run-ins with porn bosses in Los Angeles, misguided attempts to blackmail a bankruptcy court Judge, the botching of a once-promising career as an attorney, and an accidental murder of an ex-wife during a kinky foray into BDSM. I don’t know about you, but even when I re-read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, some of the vernacular rooted in the NYC yuppie-dom of films like Wallstreet still sounds solid and evocative of a very specific time and place. It reads like a ethnographic document. Nersesian’s book, though it seems to want to exist in the same world, tends to read like a B-Grade version of the real deal.
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