The Buzzing

Rating:
Summary: The Paranoids
Review: As obsessive, absorbing and funny as Thomas Pynchon's CRYING OF LOT 49 - THE BUZZING's main character, Roscoe Baragon, is a 42 year-old journalist who was once a crack-reporter, but has degenerated into, well, mostly just cracked. After years of writing for major city newspapers, Baragon settles into a rut where he produces rather shoddy reporting on the various conspiracy theories fed to him by his network of less-than-sane "informants", and he publishes these theories in his column called The Kook Beat. Over time, Baragon begins to get sucked into the paranoid world of the conspiracy theorist himself... what follows is a wonderful portrait of a man losing his grip on one reality and maybe seeing some truths in another... afterall, can the conspiracy theorists be wrong all the time?

Rating:
Summary: Fun, Thought Provoking--Buzzing!
Review: I find Thomas Pynchon to be the single-most disturbing American author to date - both for his brilliance and his incomprehensibility. So when the venerated author reccomends a book, I tend to think there's something special between the covers... but this time I was wrong.

Either that, or I definitely missed something.

The quirkiness of the story was promising, but the plot lagged (after 100 pages I wasn't sure if the real story had started yet) and the writing style, while at times comical and quick, was over all not impressive. Worst of all, however, was the ending of the tale, coming abruptly and much too early. About twenty pages after the story finally gets going it's over - and without resolving anything. This, of course, is a typical function within the contemporary "smart" novel, but the rest of this book did not warrant that lable.

If this story was supposed to be about the main character's dissolving into madness, it remained way too shallow and colloquial for that effect. If, however, it was supposed to be about his uncovering a bizzare, unthinkable conspiracy that normally he would never think to be true... well, it was a good start, but didn't come anywhere near to being finished.

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: I got a real kick out of this novel. Neat characters, well-told, funny, weird, ultimately sad. There's a lot going on in this book, and always surprises, so I never got bored with it. Lots of in-jokes for fans of Japanese monster movies and 30s era horror pulp. I liked it well enough to go out and buy another of his novels.

Rating:
Summary: LOOK OUT FOR THE TRAIN WRECK
Review: I once wrote that a good book to read to learn how to write would be Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. Now I come across a book to read where everything the writer attempts to do comes out wrong. I found that book to be The Buzzing by Jim Knipfel. Oh boy, what a wreck this novel is.

The Buzzing is about a reporter named Roscoe Baragan who works for a third string newspaper in New York City whose two rules of journalism are :

"1.There are some stories that, for whatever reason, simply cannot be told.

2.Everyone's a liar."

Roscoe works the "kook beat", which means he follows up on all the stories that even the tabloids wouldn't touch. He has come to this beat because after 15 years in the same job, he has lost interest in the news he is assigned to cover. At one time, he was the most respected newsman in the city. Somewhere along the line he just got lazy. Living on his past glories has allowed him to cover the news in his own fantasy world.

His private life isn't so hot either. He basically just gets drunk everyday after work with his friend, Emily, who he has no romantic interest in (that would take too much effort). Then he goes home and watches old Japanese monster movies on video. You know, all the Godzilla movies where some guy stomps on Tokyo or fights against other monsters.

A problem arises when all the crazies and the conspiracies that they espouse begin to actually make sense to Roscoe. Earthquakes, dead corpses that are radioactive found in the city, calls from a guy kidnapped by the state of Alaska, all seem to take on a pattern and weave into a real threat to the very earth itself. Roscoe's greatest fear of covering the kook beat was that someday one of the crazy stories he covered would turn out to be true.

This book was very poorly done. It had a very interesting premise and could have perhaps been well done if Kurt Vonnegut was still a young man. It just lost steam halfway through when you realized that the payoff for the book wasn't going to amount to much in the end. The writer just didn't have enough imagination to take it where it needed to go. The inner life of all the characters was nil. They just get drunk most of the time. Even Roscoe, to me, was very shallowly portrayed. He is basically the equivalent of a stick figure to me. The references to Godzilla movies and of other Japanese cult films are thinly disguised interests of the author himself that has no appeal beyond his own taste. This was a long inverted dialogue with a writer that belongs to a future of obscurity, not "a distinctive new voice in American fiction" that the blurb on the back of the book announces. Avoid this book.

Rating:
Summary: If you liked the memoirs, you might like The Buzzing
Review: It depends on why you liked the memoirs. If you liked them for clean, unobtrusive prose and an acute, peculiar and hilarious, but compassionate, take on things you might otherwise miss or take for granted, I think you'll like The Buzzing. Knipfel's prose is deceptively simple: elegant, not ornate. He's generous with detail, yet manages not to crowd the reader. In fact, it may be that very space, together with an unorthodox approach to structure, that disconcerted some readers who liked the other books.

The memoirs present discomfiting slices of imperfect lives, but Jim Knipfel is always right there to reassure the readers that he sees what we see, that our uneasy feelings are valid, and that everything's okay enough at the end of the day. It's almost like being able to rubberneck at a car crash with the injured driver patting us on the head and telling us thanks for looking.

The Buzzing is different. Nothing gets tidied up for us. The main character, Roscoe Baragon, is not there to hold our hands. He's funny and he has a six-toed cat, but he leads us into anxiety-provoking places and leaves us there. I loved it. This is the first book I've read in a long time that gave me room to think, let alone something to think about.

Rating:
Summary: If you liked the memoirs, you might like The Buzzing
Review: It depends on why you liked the memoirs. If you liked them for clean, unobtrusive prose and an acute, peculiar and hilarious, but compassionate, take on things you might otherwise miss or take for granted, I think you'll like The Buzzing. Knipfel's prose is deceptively simple: elegant, not ornate. He's generous with detail, yet manages not to crowd the reader. In fact, it may be that very space, together with an unorthodox approach to structure, that disconcerted some readers who liked the other books.

The memoirs present discomfiting slices of imperfect lives, but Jim Knipfel is always right there to reassure the readers that he sees what we see, that our uneasy feelings are valid, and that everything's okay enough at the end of the day. It's almost like being able to rubberneck at a car crash with the injured driver patting us on the head and telling us thanks for looking.

The Buzzing is different. Nothing gets tidied up for us. The main character, Roscoe Baragon, is not there to hold our hands. He's funny and he has a six-toed cat, but he leads us into anxiety-provoking places and leaves us there. I loved it. This is the first book I've read in a long time that gave me room to think, let alone something to think about.

Rating:
Summary: A good "read" but hardly "literature
Review: The Buzzing is an entirely quirky work of tentitively comedic Science Fiction more than anything else. If you're really out of ideas for things to read and you're up for a story about a "has-been" newspaper reporter with psycholigical problems that don't lead to much, this is a fun story, but know what you're getting into.

Rating:
Summary: Love Knipfel, don't love this book
Review: This is the first book I have read by this author but heard a lot of good about him (Jim Knipfel). Needless to say I was very disappointed by this book. It takes forever for the story to get moving and then just when it does, it ends. I dont mind books that leave open ends for you to close up on your own but this one never even gets started to begin with. The characters arent that likable and its just a very hard read overall. My recommendation would be to skip this one all together.

Rating:
Summary: Love Knipfel, don't love this book
Review: To be honest, I haven't finished the book. About halfway through I put it down and haven't had the desire to pick it up again. I loved Knipfel's "Slackjaw" and "Quitting the Nairobi Trio, so when "The Buzzing" came out I ordered it immediately and dove into it. It was an interesting premise but it just wasn't going anywhere for me. I found that after reading half the book I still didn't care that much about the characters, nor did I care to see how the big conspiracy got resolved. I love memoirs and I love Knipfel's memoirs and essays. I think his writing style is perfect for that genre, but it doesn't necessarily translate well to traditional fiction. For those who didn't like "The Buzzing," try reading his other two and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Rating:
Summary: Wacked Out and Fun! Lunatic Fringe Journalism and Beyond
Review: Visiting wackos are certainly the order of the day at the New York Sentinel - or, at least, Roscoe Baragon's corner of the office. Once a star reporter with a nose for a breaking story, Roscoe has drifted into stagnation in the last few years, demoting himself from front-page news to human-interest stories to the rock-bottom "Kook Beat," a series of news-of-the-weird featurettes, courtesy of the city's nutjobs (of which there is no lack). Out of deference to his formerly stellar reputation, Roscoe's boss Montgomery allows him to pull many a shenanigan, but with a steadily decreasing lack of patience for the whimsy. Roscoe only survives his job with liberal helpings of booze and cynicism, trying to convince himself that he does what he does for the laughs (rather than because he's a washed-up hack). When necessary, he anesthetizes himself with terrible B-movies, which he owns in quantities large enough to fuel MST3K for several millennia.

Most evenings, Roscoe meets his friend Emily at a deserted bar to hang out and chew the fat. Emily's a medical examiner at the city morgue, but surprisingly reluctant to spin hilarious tales about cutting up corpses, so most of the time they tacitly agree not to discuss their jobs. Occasionally, Emily will give Roscoe a highly confidential tip (what else are ME's for?), and he'll use it to break a story - or he would have, before his permanent self-exile to the Land of Conspiracy Theorists. As it happens, Emily decides to share a weird anecdote about a homeless guy whose body was determined to be radioactive when they brought it to the morgue. How did they know it was radioactive? Well, the uranium sensors picked it up. What are uranium sensors doing in a city morgue? Uh...good question. Maybe you could ask the HazMat team called to the scene, or the government suits who showed up instantly to reassure, deflect, and conceal, before issuing a press release that said exactly nothing.

A long-dead fire reignites in Roscoe's whiskey-dulled eyes, as he perks up and starts asking the kind of difficult questions that make Emily nervous. Suddenly, he's seeing signs and connections everywhere: in the confused ramblings of his regular kook callers, in the white noise of natural disasters and geological phenomena, in the mysteriously omnipresent acronym SVA. With a cavalier disregard for his actual job, Roscoe starts pounding pavement again, in search of the thread that will lead him through the labyrinth and give him a story that will save his career. But wait - he doesn't care about his career! Or does he? The trouble with maintaining a facade of ironic distance is that you eventually begin to believe your own ruse (even if no one else does); does Roscoe want to be a flash reporter again, or turn his back forever on the know-nothing kids and incompetent bosses who rule the roost these days? The answer depends on where the story leads; but the further Roscoe delves, the more closely he resembles the crackpots he interviews. Then again, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Featuring a delightfully lurid cover by Chip Kidd that reminds me, strangely, of a lunchbox circa the 1960s, The Buzzing is fresh and quick-witted in a way that's all too rare - I laughed out loud several times, which is not something I ordinarily do when reading. The dialogue is distinctive and vaguely noirish (most of the characters qualify as "hard-boiled," and everybody drinks and smokes, all the time), but doesn't sound phony in the modern setting. A cast of colorfully named characters straight from the fringes of society helps to keep the pace moving, too. The ending is purposely ambiguous, and although I see why it had to end where it did, I really, really wanted there to be more; very little is definitively answered, and quite a lot is left up to the reader's imagination. Which, I suppose, is a condition of a novel about conspiracy-theorist kooks and the journalists who love them. Pick up a copy of this very cool book! Along with The Buzzing I also urge you check out another fun novel: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez -- maybe the most entertaining novel I picked up off Amazon this year.