Word: bernhard
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...woman shows, Bernhard offers a vaudevillian hybrid--part comedy, part song, part dramatic monologue. This genre-bending works to keep audiences perennially on edge as she prods, sometimes viciously, at American popular culture. Bernhard may be trying for something similar with this book, described on the jacket as "a mix of memoir, fiction, invented memoir, and fiction that rings with the truth." This mostly means that these pieces feel unfinished or uncertain. Too many read like abandoned short stories or tiny ideas stretched unconvincingly over a few pages...
This overall lack of unity is all the more frustrating because at least a few of the pieces capture the unique comic sensibility that informs her performances. In the better snippets here, Bernhard shows herself the best sort of critic of American popular culture and values--one who has unabashed respect and affection for the thing she critiques...
...tell you I've been cooking again? I'm really turning my house into a home...When the heat pours out of the oven and I baste the browning bird with all those good juices, it makes me never want to read another issue of Vanity Fair." Bernhard sounds both snotty and heartfelt; her pen drips in a sarcasm so intense it redeems these cliches, rendering them oddly evocative and always hilarious...
...recall a more causative day and spark the fire of revolution once again. I am so fucking mad'...and in her fury she jumped two stories and tore her jeans in all the right places. All the girls screamed and told her she looked really cool." Bernhard's precise ear for the nuances of the language of popular culture works here to almost poetic effect. There are few writers who could put a phrase like "causative day" into a characters' mouth without delivering her up for the reader's contempt. Bernhard retains a sense of empathy, ridiculing the words' inherent...
Sadly, this double edge is somewhat scarce in Love, Love, and Love. In far too many of these vignettes. Bernhard sounds like a Brat Pack novelist who thinks spare descriptions of lonely, confused people having sex, taking pills and spending money are inherently interesting. The longer pieces are rarely as insightful as the brief snippets, and the only identifiable story line--involving a disgruntled Parisian woman and her violent, international love life--falls particularly flat...