The Worthy: A Ghost’s Story
By Will Clarke
Simon & Schuster, 240 pages
Available at Powerbooks
As the man who flared onto the scene last year with his wonderfully zany Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort of), it’s good to report that Will has not lost any of his humor and crazy set-pieces, and that his new novel The Worthy more than lives up to its name. To simplify it, The Worthy is like a cross between the films Animal House, Carrie and Ghost – and for my money, is a much better read on college-life craziness and high jinks than Tom Wolfe’s over-indulgent I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Conrad Sutton is a ghost, his living self having expired in the course of the initiation rites he was undergoing to become one of the Gamma Chi fraternity members on the LSU campus. Mistakenly treated as an accidental death, Conrad is out to effect revenge on one Ryan Hutchins, top dog of the fraternity, and perennial basher of his "low in self-esteem" sorority pin-up girlfriend Maggie. This revenge is plotted by possessing the body of new "pledge" Tucker, a well-meaning, beefed-up, but goofy wannabe. Ashley, the ex-girlfriend of Conrad, also carries a subplot, with weird friend Sarah Jane in tow. It is fervent born-again Sarah who experiences stigmata and single-handedly leads the campaign against frats and sororities.
Conrad is our narrator, and throughout he entertains. As when he has his doubts about entering the body of Tucker: "This possession thing ain’t for me. I guess the best way to describe it is it’s like sitting on a public toilet seat or something. It’s not like your toilet at home where you’d like to be, but somebody else’s. And using it makes you feel sort of dirty, like some kind of herpes or crab might jump on you if you stay too long... Besides, I haven’t met God yet, but I don’t think he’d look too kindly on me being a body snatcher." This novel may at times border on the juvenile and ridiculous, but just like junk food, you can’t help but enjoy, laugh in mirth, and be happy that silly books like this still exist.
Between The Bridge And The River
By Craig Ferguson
Chronicle Books, 331 pages
Available at Powerbooks
As host of the nightly Late Late Show on American network TV, transplanted Scotsman Craig Ferguson has proven he’s a quick one with words and turns of phrases, as are fellow late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. Craig has churned out screenplays (the British comedy on hairstylists, The Big Tease, is credited to him), and it wasn’t long before his very schizophrenic life as an acerbic European hosting on American television would seek and demand another "outlet." Thankfully, we now have his first novel, Between the Bridge and the River. If you’ve enjoyed the works of such writers as Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut, then Ferguson’s book has your name written on it.
The convoluted plotline basically follows two sets of protagonists. From Glasgow, we meet childhood friends Fraser and George; one becomes a televangelist who makes the weirdest and strangest seem distinctly normal, while George falls madly in love with an "angel of death," succumbs to a seemingly terminal illness, and encounters Carl Jung in his dreams. And from the deep South of the US, we follow the escapades of brothers Leon and Saul, one a vacuous crooner, the other a showbiz Machiavellian Prince in the making. From Glasgow to London, from Miami to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the stories of these two pairs crosscut and intersect with profane and deranged abandon.
And jumping off from these tandem picaresques, Ferguson skewers media, pop culture, reality TV, religion, Scientology, Hollywood, and Starbucks – all in equal doses. There’s a lot of stream of consciousness at work here, and what the novel lacks in terms of plot or real story development is more than made up for by the madcap social commentary and trenchant observations. Using his characters as mouthpieces, Ferguson delivers humor-laden diatribe after diatribe. This is contemporary satire at its best.