The Skin Palace continued

As I mentioned in a previous post, there's a lot going on in The Skin Palace.  Not all of it is profound (the theme that people will do anything to get a part in a movie is an old one), but it makes for a potent mixture, particularly toward the end of the novel.

Unfortunately, it's very slow to start.  Reel 1, the first 100 pages or so, which takes time to set up the characters, feels very static, and O'Connell either doesn't have the chops or doesn't care enough to really make the humdrum feel interesting.  I suspect it's the latter, because later in the novel, he becomes much better at picking out the salient detail that makes a scene come alive, even in the more quotidian settings like a basement darkroom.

For its strangeness, The Skin Palace is probably the most mimetic of all of the O'Connell's books that I've read, which is a pity.  When the novel is in high gear, the strangeness takes over, and it feels like we're in a world that's a sort of cracked reflection of this one.  There's nothing specific that one can call out as being impossible in our world, but the whole has a sort of phantasmagorical feel.  At those times, O'Connell can then deliver an emotional punch that jumps over normal logic but feels right in this novel.

The Skin Palace

Jack O'Connell's novels don't fit into any easy categories; although marketed as a "novel of suspense," The Flesh Palace is almost anything but.  O'Connell uses the props of crime fiction -- gangs, life in a ghetto, and so on -- but this isn't crime fiction either.

Instead, we step into a world that feels a little bit off-kilter, where a whole diner can be buried under-ground, where one of the city's gangs wears Jewish garb from talmud schools in Eastern Europe, and in which a film collector has the unexpurgated Wizard of Oz that never had a theatrical release.  (Yes, I know there's no such thing).  As in the previous Quinsigamond novels, O'Connell is writing about how images transform our thinking; in this case, movies affect the way we look at the world.

Unfortunately, I felt that this novel lost its way a little bit.  There's some weird meta-text that I admit I can't quite get my head around.  There's a German porn director (and the link to fascism is made explicit at the end) whose chief star is named Leni (as in Riefenstahl, hope I spelled that right), who produces (I think) inauthentic art.  That's made pretty explicit toward the end, when it's revealed that he made some fake photos in the style of great photographer Terrence Propp, but his photo doesn't give you a sense of underlying depth.

At the same time, his protege, Jakob, is a Jewish boy who fled from Eastern Europe.  Jakob needs to break free from his own gangster heritage as well as from his mentor's pornographic movie-making.

And that's all fine as far as it goes, but it's only one plot strand (and, in the end a relatively minor one).  I'm having trouble relating it to the major thread.   Too tired to do it now, in any case.