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It helps the satirist’s cause if he has at least some warm feelings for the culture he intends to skewer. Twenty years have passed since the short stories of Benjamin Weissman first appeared in such literary journals and art magazines as The Santa Monica Review and The Village Voice Literary Supplement.  In that time he has published two story collections, Dear Dead Person (High Risk Books, 1994) and Headless (Akashic Books, 2004), both featuring the same grotesque gallery of serial killers, pederasts, porn stars, neo-Nazis, and average dysfunctional Americans.  Both also consist of interior monologues, usually under ten pages and often as short as two, and read like a pastiche of the abject voices of William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Dennis Cooper — writers who subject the reader to a prose as tortured, hypersexual, and banal as their characters’ twisted lives.  

Take, for instance, “Flesh is for Hacking” (1986), Weissman’s deadpan description of a pedophile copulating with the severed head of a young murder victim:

I twirl the head around like a slow pinwheel.  When was the last time he brushed those teeth?  I know it’s been at least two days.  Teeth feel good.  I like it when it hurts.  Yes, yes, just like that.  Uh huh.  Oh you little fuckhead, you dead little shit.  My God, you can’t do this to me.  And when I’ve suffered as much pain as I can stand I pull out and squirt on your eyelids.  Killing, cutting up boys has made me a better person.  It took me so long to notice.  For instance, now I give without expecting something in return.

The results, it goes without saying, are sometimes unfriendly to the reader.  Five years after the story’s publication, many people reacted squeamishly toward Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a serial killer novel that likewise aimed at illustrating how inured our society has become to suffering.  It is easy to see why readers were even less sympathetic to Weissman’s first serial killer stories, which take readers so far into the perpetrator’s mind that evil becomes uncomfortably banal, and not, as with Ellis, monstrously ironic.

Writing violence

Weissman has matured with regard to the style and content of his prose. Writing sentences that seem to be more syntactically complicated, lush even, with more adjectives and clauses, Weissman seems to have found a literary voice, while also achieving what his work was looking for: Sublimity in abnormality, an immersion in violence that leads beyond “dark humor” into the violent egotism of a book like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  

Consider, for instance, “Morality Play (Six Hours in Length)” from Headless, “an old-fashioned fable of the unendurable man known only as (raises his arm) … who wakes up one morning sick to his stomach.”  Not unlike the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, “this unendurable man” goes on to commit casual violence:

He shoots his daughter and son, strangles his wife, and heaves their newborn infant against the wall; clutter, he screams, every person takes up so much room … the world is passive, he says as smoke rises all around him, I am the active one, the spring rain of contempt, a swift morose icon, my gift is misguided love, I’m the only person who’s truly supposed to be here.

The prose’s lyricism gives the story’s violence an entirely different meaning. If “Flesh is for Hacking” is, as its critics accuse, only a hair’s breadth from being pornography, and if “Dear Dead Person” is a darkly humorous psychological cartoon, “Morality Play” longs to be like a grandly violent Renaissance painting — “The Rape of Cassandra” set in the modern living room.

At a few moments in Headless, Weissman becomes unexpectedly clever.  In subject matter, “Of Two Minds” is familiar territory: The tale of a boy who exacts his revenge on his mother’s bullying friend. But here Weissman plays a game with the point-of-view, alternating at every sentence between the first and third person, until the difference between inhabiting a violent mind and watching it is negligible:

Even at the collection’s smartest moments, the violence grows tedious, because Weissman seems so intent on exploring it at the cost of other themes.

There are strange lacunae in Weissman’s style, however.  

In “Marnie” Weissman adopts a more conventional voice to relate the story of a friend’s accidental death on a ski slope — a woman for whom the narrator had secretly pined. Here Weissman seems less concerned with displaying a less perverse vision. After so much blood and guts, Weissman’s readers may be shocked by the narrator’s vulnerability when he describes the paramedics who tear into his friend’s clothes in order to save her life. “They needed to get to her heart. Didn’t we all?”

With Weissman teetering on regarding the human heart as something more than a horror movie prop here, one can’t help but wonder what it is that ties ”Marnie” to the other stories in Headless. Written to honor a friend who died in a skiing accident that Weissman witnessed, “Marnie” is what Weissman terms “my kind of Vietnam,” a terrain for the author to struggle with the excruciating experience of witnessing death for the first time. If “Marnie” seems out of place in a book full of masculine sadism, it is only a testament to Weissman’s quest to push readers “in a different direction,” to challenge their sensibilities, and keep them reading.

Stomaching Weissman’s violence in a post-9/11 world

In light of the allusions to war and terrorism predominating the media today, those looking to do a little leisure reading might prefer something a little lighter and fluffier than Headless. Many readers may even contemplate putting Weissman’s book down before making it to the final page. But while the simultaneously ironic and banal tenor of Headless, like most of Weissman’s work, can be difficult to stomach, this discomfort is reason enough to continue reading — both the pages of Headless and the cultural and political milieu of Weissman’s seemingly fictional world and the stranger-than-fiction reality of post-9/11 America.

That is, like Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine,  Headless provides a fascinating domestic parallel to the destruction America has become entangled in overseas since 9/11. While the body count in Iraq and Afghanistan increases daily, the media avoids presenting the more graphic evidence of the conflict. An outcry ensued after the recent beheading of 26-year-old businessman Nick Berg in Iraq was posted on Salon.com, yet nightly news stories of murder-suicides and serial killers continue to titillate audiences without evoking the same indignation. Domestic violence in America is necessarily upstaged by news involving troops overseas, and yet graphic depiction of battles and their aftermath is censored.  

Though it does not depict violence America realistically, Weissman’s work provides an interesting snapshot of the frightened, aggressive, and sometimes callous mental atmosphere that has developed since 9/11 and redefined the domestic landscape. That is reason enough to seek refuge in Headless rather than our usual comfort zones, where violence, for many of us, seems rather distant — at least until it strikes a little too close to home.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679735771

Dear Dead Person: Short Fiction by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1852423307

Headless by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1888451491

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0395925037

The Stranger by Albert Camus
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679720200

Commentary >

“Jumps of Imagination” by Juliet Waters
URL: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2004/021904/books.html

Interviews >

Interview with Benjamin Weissman by Raul Deznermio
URL: http://www.akashicbooks.com/benwintv.htm

Justin Clark’s interview with Benjamin Weissman
URL: content/view/479/39

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Justin Clark