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By Alex Christodoulides
for The Brooklyn Papers
"So, I'm great in the sack," boasted Park Slope
born-and-bred author Ned Vizzini to a capacity crowd at the Brooklyn
Brewery in Williamsburg last month.
And yes, Vizzini was indeed
wearing a large, burlap sack.
"As we get further from high school
we lose track of the primal terror and helplessness that are part of that
time," he continued, "and the sack reminds me. Besides, it's comfortable."
Vizzini was at the brewery to read from his most recent novel, "Be
More Chill," and to present the director's cut of Richard Kelly's cult
film "Donnie Darko," both of which feature medicated, awkward high school
boys - whether willfully or voluntarily - as protagonists.
"If
you're here tonight, you were probably weird in high school," Vizzini
continued before launching into a well-received reading of the first three
chapters from "Be More Chill," which was published in June by Hyperion
Books. The audience wore dark-rimmed glasses and studded belts, and many
had visible tattoos: these were indeed the "weird" kids in high school who
were probably picked on mercilessly. A self-proclaimed former dork, whose
own high school experience is documented with self-deprecating wisdom in
his first book, "Teen Angst? Naah: A Quasi Autobiography" (Free Spirit
Publishing), and which inspired the fictional account of high school in
"Be More Chill," Vizzini is at ease with the crowd; he knows what will
ring true.
Vizzini, 23, is still near enough to high school age to
remember the struggle, not necessarily to be popular, but simply to not
feel conspicuous and inept all the time. Set in suburban New Jersey, "Be
More Chill" is the story of Jeremy Heere's quest to be cool - or at least
cool enough that the lovely Christine Caniglia (who barely notices him)
would give him the time of day. The plot traces the trajectory of Heere's
popularity following the fateful decision to buy and ingest a "squip," a
supercomputer in pill form that coaches the user to become cool. It's the
Midas touch for dorks - the squip offers fashion, comportment and speaking
advice, creating a sudden flare of fabulousness.
When asked
whether he would've bought a squip to become cool, Vizzini said, "Yes, of
course. I tried everything else - except clothes."
"Be More Chill"
is also a cautionary tale: the squip turns out to be defective, with
humiliating results.
Vizzini's Web site, nedvizzini.com,
prominently features squip propaganda. A banner along one page asks, "Has
your boyfriend been acting all cool all of a sudden? He might have a
squip."
Discussing squips at the Tea Lounge on Union Street in
Park Slope, recently, Vizzini seems mildly amused by the phenomenon he's
spawned.
"I hear from kids all the time asking how they can get
one; they don't seem to get that it's not real," he said. But like an
experiment in phenomenology, in which an image or idea acquires a life of
its own in the popular consciousness - such as the "Andre the Giant has a
posse" stickers which found their way on to lampposts and billboards
around the world in the 1990s - the squip might be what young readers
remember best from "Be More Chill," besides its candid voice and obvious
(and un-patronizing) familiarity with abject adolescent humiliation.
Asked how much of his books are autobiographical, Vizzini quoted
Anne Lamott's claim that "Fiction is 65 percent real life." Vizzini's 2000
book, "Teen Angst? Naah," which included pieces he'd written for the New
York Press and the New York Times Magazine while he was still in his
teens, deals with similar themes of social anxiety in high school, but the
stories he writes now are fiction. Vizzini is in the process of writing a
new novel, to be published late next year by Miramax Books.
"It's
about teen status anxiety, and money and how it screws [the protagonist]
up," Vizzini said, but declined to say more about the plot. "The main
character lives in Park Slope. I think it's comforting to write about
where you grew up, places you love, the din of family life." Comforting,
indeed, for a young writer who lives 10 blocks from the house in which he
was raised, since he's had the time and energy to examine Park Slope in
detail.
On a lamppost in front of a brownstone at 901 Union St.,
Vizzini points to a stenciled face.
"My friends think it's me, but
I'm not so sure," he said. The nose is too broad, but it otherwise looks
like a crude rendering of Vizzini. "There's another one near Marymount
Manhattan College. I want to know who's doing them."
Perhaps the
invention of the squip is making Vizzini cool enough to take over the
world, one lamppost at a time.
Ned Vizzini's "Be More Chill" (Hyperion Books,
$16.95) is available at, or can be ordered through, The Bookmark Shoppe
[6906 11th Ave. at 69th Street in Dyker Heights (718) 680-3680], BookCourt
[163 Court St. at Dean Street in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677] and Barnes
& Noble [267 Seventh Ave. at Sixth Street in Park Slope, (718)
832-9066]. |
