Celluloid Cowboy by Scott C. Rogers
14/09/09 19:22 Filed in: Independent | Self-Published
171 pages, Black Coffee Press $14.95
Reviewed By Mike Attebery
I was rooting for Celluloid Cowboy right up until page 91.
That’s the moment. The precise moment, when the whole thing jumped the tracks for me.
The signs were there early on, particularly in the pages just before author Scott C. Rogers threw in one non sequitur too many, but up until a two page rumination on Milton Berle’s manhood, I kept holding out hope that this book would prove to be something akin to ‘The Big Lebowski’ as written by Charles Bukowski. Unfortunately, while the spirit of the book and the world the characters inhabit might be something the dude and various barely-functioning alcoholic postal workers might think of as home, the characterization and story just aren’t anywhere near what I had hoped for.
Mr. Rogers can write. He has clear style and definitely has a lot of cultural knowledge to bring to this tale of a mid-thirties slacker facing a serious turning point in his life. The problem is that none of it seems real, which would be fine if the story were meant to take place is a type of detached dream state, one in which fantasy and reality swirled together in a whimsical world of the down-trodden, but that’s just not the case. This is a book that revels in the seedy elements of life: Trashy bars, down and out lowlifes, drug dealers, blue-collar bigots, and a narrator who tosses off racial slurs with apparent indifference. But there are other elements, a midget with a sword, a physical attack on a supervisor, and a totally unbelievable scene in which the main character takes his revenge out on a lover’s violent cat, by urinating on it -- that all just seemed totally unbelievable, like elements written on notecards over the years and tossed in a shoebox, only to get hauled out and thrown into the author’s first published novel.
The Milton Berle segment in particular feels like a story the author has long told at bars or joked about with his buddies, and which he has included here as a sort of random bubble of ridiculous, archaic pop culture trivia that has nothing to do with the business at hand.
Getting back to the main character’s comments. One racially charged phrase is particular is tossed off repeatedly throughout the book, and in all honsty, it doesn’t seem to fit the story, the character, or anything surrounding it. Were the protagonist portrayed as a rascist ass, who doesn’t know better, and just is who he is, I might have viewed this unpleasant element as an unfortunate characteristic of a rotten character, but really, it just feels like something that sounded cool coming from Samuel L. Jackson’s mouth in ‘Jackie Brown,’ another tough crime story adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, but here it serves no purpose. It’s just one more ill-fitting element in an overall disjointed book.
Celluloid Cowboy starts out feeling like lighthearted, trashy fun, but you eventually limp through to the conclusion looking forward to the literary equivalent of a hot shower. When the entire book is only 171 well-spaced pages, well, that just is not a good sign. If you’re itching for Bukowski and Lebowski, do a shot of cheap whiskey, then pop in a copy of The Dude’s 1998 misadventures (be sure you have White Russian ingredients in the house, I’ve learned that lesson the hard way) and savor the feeling of character, tone, and story together in perfect harmony.