Talk Back

[Patguy]

The subtitle is: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and that just about sums it up. The book is a series of essays that cover much of the same territory as her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, which is to say, fame and celebrity, and how they’re insulting, grotesque crippling diseases and such. I love this stuff. Wilson is hilarious, and she spends so much time reading Us Weekly and Perez Hilton and watching Inside Edition and TMZ that she can demolish it all better than anyone else I know. This also allows me to satisfy my prurient interest in all things celebritical without all of the attendant nausea and self-disgust.

One of the things I admire most about her writing is her ability to mix unparalleled snarkiness and unironic compassion. She’s devastating when it comes to things like Las Vegas (“the Death Star of Entertainment”) or Rent ("Cats with AIDS"), but is also, I think, the only person to have written something insightful and touching about the death of Anna Nicole Smith. As she says in the introduction to this book:

"I attack the maddening blizzard of tinsel scattered in the icons' wake; the tidal waves of false awe glaring off their shiny suits. I swipe at the lurid neon head of the amplified celebrity wizard and not the frail, dumpy little nebbish behind the big screen of fire, because we're all delicate and pitiable inside. I believe that deep down, everyone is fundamentally an OK Joe deserving of your civility and compassion, even the ones I really hate, like Richard Dreyfuss."

If I have one complaint about A Massive Swelling—and I hope I never have to use that phrase again—it’s that it’s not topical enough. Wilson takes aim at broad targets here, like women in sports, plastic surgery, teenage boy band fixations and Los Angeles in its entirety, but in doing so seems to lose some of the brilliant specificity of, for instance, her Salon.com columns, where she waxes wise about some inconsequential bit of topical Hollywood garbage. A good case in point is her piece on the Oscars here. Deciding to talk about the awards ceremony in general, she scores a lot of good points, but doesn’t have the chance to make precision attacks. There’s nothing in this piece, for example, that approaches the line, “Jada [Pinkett Smith’s] forceful, toothy bark laughing evokes neither happiness nor fun, but I do recall seeing similar athleticism in footage of an alligator eating a live pelican” (from her Salon.com article on the 2007 Oscars).

Fortunately, there's always her blog.