Malingering

Set in the subcultures of Los Angeles and London, this book casts an unflinching eye on garbled gossip columnists, poets, jaded pizza delivery boys and the would-be vampires of the goth-rock circuit.

Misfits with wacky ideas populate these endearingly skewed stories, which with one exception are set in London and Los Angeles. Andy, who "has the temporary, presentient conscience of a displaced ghost" when he leaves a woman, puts the moves on his psychologist landlord despite her distasteful dog and jealous ex-boyfriend. Chloe, who is having an affair with a pizza deliverer named Skitz, feels that ghosts inhabit her body when she is menstruating and is fired from her job at a concession stand for failing to stand up straight and say thank you. Gossip columnist Havoc roams London in search of news but is done in by a false plant--her assistant insists that leftist singer Billy Bragg is backing Margaret Thatcher--and her own naivete. In another story, Havoc and a group of acquaintances become Barbie and Ken dolls, the women with pointy C cups and the man with no sex organs. The sense of all love being doomed can become repetitive, and occasionally the tales wander off rather than end. Furthermore, when minor characters pop up repeatedly it seems more like an inside joke than an attempt to link them. Still, Compo ( Life After Death ) has an inimitably original viewpoint.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Compo follows up her first collection (Life After Death, 1990) of post-punk fiction with 13 more tales filled with bizarre names, celebrity daydreaming, and aimless attitude-copping on the alternative-rock circuit and in teen subcultures of London and L.A. After a short but pretentious preface and an introduction-- where Compo gives an unnecessary thumbnail sketch of each story, akin to descriptions in TV Guide--the author fills her pages with riffs that occasionally capture the marginal bravado of young lost souls, but that more often feel too clever or arch and, at times, awfully overwritten: ``When the pop star finally kisses her sex, Chloe feels as if all her insides are shaken loose, and that they float out. She is lit within by uninhibited blackness, her empty stairwell resonant with sounds of joy'' (``Who Is Sleepwalking [And Who Envies Them]?''). At her best, though, Compo allows her flair for banter and oddness to cut close to the bone--as when Sharlatt, a romance writer in ``He Pales Next to You''--admits that ``I can barely be in the same room with anyone else, at anytime.'' At those moments, all the odd nicknames make sense as desperate gestures by generic characters determined somehow to be original. Likewise, in ``Ad Astra per Aspera,'' Holly (actually, Ms. Hollywood Cemetery, ``a poet of, and out of, sorts''), with Surfer Jay, who is reading on her bed, ``Hopes the words will draw him in deep and forever.'' Such forceful moments appear all too infrequently, though in a piece like ``(Don't Quit) Your Day Job,'' Compo sustains a funny satire of gossip columnist Havoc's rush for scoops for the National Intruder. It's as if Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson had cloned a child in a test tube and made her write. Entertaining but finally too uneven and mannered to sustain interest. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In her second collection, Compo (Life after Death, 1991) delivers with more short, poetic chops at the hearts of quickly aging youths clinging to the last vestiges of punk alienation. Though it is tempting to toss this on the growing pile of twenty-something nineties literature, the values here are strictly eighties, and the talent Compo shows goes well beyond her peers. With a cast of characters who pop up in different guises in Los Angeles, London, and Fargo, North Dakota, Compo reveals the often jumbled thoughts of the blue-haired boys sleeping under black nets, aging club-gossip reporters, and an array of ghosts. Few of these characters have jobs, most hang on to a dying punk and "goth" rock scene, and nearly all seem to live in a realm of mystical complexity and completeness. While Compo's prose is sometimes self-consciously poetic and vague, it also shines, as in such gems as "The Jealousy Loan" and "(Don't Quit) Your Day Job." Compo is confirmed as a true force on the inner-outer edges of fiction. David Cline