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Look deep into your heart, Gentle Reader.
Deep, deep, deep; past your desire for true love, for inexhaustible
riches or uncontested sexual championship, for the ability
to fight crime and restore peace to a weary world. Underneath
all this, if you are a true, red-blooded American, you'll
find the throbbing desire to be famous.
Liza Normal wants fame worse than
air, food, sleep, or self-preservation. Her talents are
slim, but she's been raised on a crash diet
of Hollywood "I-can-do-it!" mythology, game-show
anthems, and Love's Baby Soft–scented teen dreams.
According to the delusional logic inherent in these value-starved
sources, the key to Making It Big as a pop star is to simply
want it badly enough and Believe in Yourself (and to follow
the B-movie template for becoming one of life's golden winners
-- see page 20). And so, innocent Liza's disco-ball fantasies
are bowled down the yellow brick road, on a direct collision
course with that whirling hall of hammers: Reality. She endures
a wretched series of mishaps on the road to failure: disastrous
love affairs, scorching humiliations. But Liza, a far better
human than the two-dimensional starlet she thinks she wants
to be, is indestructible.
In Colors Insulting to Nature, Cintra
Wilson has fused ahilarious yet strangely touching coming-of-age
story with a blistering
satire of our celebrity-debased culture. In a world where
unknowns compete to wear their ethical pants around their
ankles on TV, where actors become presidents and plucky American
Idols claw their way to stardom over the corpses of the dreams
of a million wishful losers, Colors Insulting to Nature shocks
us into seeing ourselves as we truly are, not as we think
we look when we make that French pout face in the mirror.
Not since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Martin
Amis's Money, or, yes, Rabelais's Gargantua
and Pantagruel has an antihero peeled away the lamination of our society
with such savage glee and empathy. Laugh, cry, cringe with
self-recognition: Colors Insulting to Nature is a brilliant
achievement.
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