Possible Side Effects: true stories
Augusten Burroughs Atlantic Books, 224pp, £7.99
ISBN 1843545225
Is Augusten Burroughs the next James Frey? Not quite, perhaps. But still, there are definite signs that he is in danger of becoming an archetypal 21st-century literary figure, disappearing into tatty obscurity almost as fast as he arrived. The libel suit filed against him by the family he portrayed, thinly disguised, in his bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors, could well come to nothing; the Turcottes have quietly settled with Sony, maker of the movie of the book, so perhaps the same will happen with Burroughs and a court case will be averted. His writing, on the other hand, once so hilariously wild that I didn't give a fig if he was making it up, now has the feel of the production line about it - as if he knows that time is in some way running out and he must squeeze every last wince out of the routine that made him so popular in the first place. When a writer cranks out autobiography at this rate, it's not only anxiety about the so-called "truth" that nags at the reader; it's a wearying sense of having seen it all before. The jokes and wackiness seem at first frayed, then downright puerile.
But I'm running away with myself. To recap: in 2000, Burroughs published a novel, based on his career in advertising, called Sellevision. It wasn't much noticed. Then, in 2002, Running with Scissors came out and, suddenly, he was the talk of the town. The book is set in Massachusetts, where Burroughs was born in 1965, and begins when, at the age of 12, he is sent to live with his mother's psychiatrist, Dr Finch (his mother is a deranged lesbian who is obsessed with Anne Sexton). The house is filthy, anarchic, and an electric shock machine is housed under the stairs. Burroughs reveals to Dr Finch's adopted adult son, Neil Bookman, that he is gay. Bookman turns out to be a paedophile who forces him to have oral sex, although, oddly, the pair later embark on a love affair that no member of the Finch family attempts to stop (I'm guessing that this bit of the story won't have made it to the movie, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow). God, it was funny. Reviewing it at the time, I said it was like the Brady Bunch on Viagra. This was inaccurate. Dave Pelzer on amyl nitrate is probably closer to the mark.
Burroughs quickly published two more books: Dry, an account of his time in rehab, and Magical Thinking, which consisted of yet more slices of his loony life. And now here is Possible Side Effects, which is really Magical Thinking volume two, and contains 25 new tales in which no one is sane and weird things happen literally all the time. Some of the stories are from childhood, others from when he drank scotch all day and smelt like a tramp, and yet more from when he held down a job in advertising.
Any of this sound familiar? If it were not all so awful, I'd admire the cheek of it. But the writing is very bad, mostly: so lazy. Of the 25 stories - better described as fragments - only five hold the attention or result in a satisfying honk. Of course, this just makes the book all the more maddening, for when Burroughs gets it right, there is no one like him. His account of a mini-break taken in a "doll-infested" B&B is great. So superbly . . . childish.
It's his tone that I relish: it's so sarky and wheedling and camp (and also impossible to quote usefully out of context, which is why I won't even try to here). Elsewhere, he simply goes through the motions. Stories begin by being about one thing (his urgent need for platform shoes) and end by being about another (does an apartheid system operate in America's fast-food outlets?), as though he were a sixth-former desperately filling sheets of foolscap.
Most of the stories are so desultory that even when the strangest things happen - his mother's lesbian lover, Sommer, kills herself and is buried in a coffin-shaped bookshelf - you rarely feel anything other than bored or, worse, wholly disbelieving. The most serious offender in the department of Too Tall Stories is "Moving Violations", about a waitress so feisty that she removes her own tampon right in the middle of the restaurant so she can hurl it at a noisy frat boy. Yuck. Reading this, I could be heard to say: "Yeah, right," out loud on more than one occasion.
What Burroughs is going through just now is a rerun of what happened to him when he was in advertising and working on the Junior Mints account. Pitching his new slogan - "Entertain-mint!" - he felt he'd reached a new career low. So did a colleague, who passed him a note that read: "Debase-mint." He can do a lot better than this and, adman that he once was, I bet he knows it.
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