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Colors Insulting to Nature
Look deep into your heart, Gentle Reader. Deep, deep, deep; past your desire for true love, for inexhaustible riches or uncontested sexual championship, for the ability to fight crime and restore peace to a weary world. Underneath all this, if you are a true, red-blooded American, you'll find the throbbing desire to be famous. Liza Normal wants fame worse than air, food, sleep, or self-preservation. Her talents are slim, but she's been raised on a crash diet of Hollywood "I-can-do-it " mythology, game-show anthems, and Love's Baby Soft- scented teen dreams. According to the delusional logic inherent in these value-starved sources, the key to Making It Big as a pop star is to simply want it badly enough and Believe in Yourself (and to follow the B-movie template for becoming one of life's golden winners -- see page 20). And so, innocent Liza's disco-ball fantasies are bowled down the yellow brick road, on a direct collision course with that whirling hall of hammers: Reality. She endures a wretched series of mishaps on the road to failure: disastrous love affairs, scorching humiliations. But Liza, a far better human than the two-dimensional starlet she thinks she wants to be, is indestructible.
In Colors Insulting to Nature, Cintra Wilson has fused a hilarious yet strangely touching coming-of-age story with a blistering satire of our celebrity-debased culture. In a world where unknowns compete to wear their ethical pants around their ankles on TV, where actors become presidents and plucky American Idols claw their way to stardom over the corpses of the dreams of a million wishful losers, Colors Insulting to Nature shocks us into seeing ourselves as we truly are, not as wethink we look when we make that French pout face in the mirror. Not since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Martin Amis's Money, or, yes, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel has an antihero peeled away the lamination of our society with such savage glee and empathy. Laugh, cry, cringe with self-recognition: Colors Insulting to Nature is a brilliant achievement.
In Colors Insulting to Nature, Cintra Wilson has fused a hilarious yet strangely touching coming-of-age story with a blistering satire of our celebrity-debased culture. In a world where unknowns compete to wear their ethical pants around their ankles on TV, where actors become presidents and plucky American Idols claw their way to stardom over the corpses of the dreams of a million wishful losers, Colors Insulting to Nature shocks us into seeing ourselves as we truly are, not as wethink we look when we make that French pout face in the mirror. Not since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Martin Amis's Money, or, yes, Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel has an antihero peeled away the lamination of our society with such savage glee and empathy. Laugh, cry, cringe with self-recognition: Colors Insulting to Nature is a brilliant achievement.
353 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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544 people want to read
About the author
Cintra Wilson
10 books59 followersCintra Wilson is a playwright, novelist, and a past columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, Salon, and the New York Times. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
October 8, 2021
In nearly 40 years of reading, I don't think I have ever read a book so greatly in need of an editor. There exists here the heart of a good book, but that book would be perhaps a third of the length of this inpenetrable morass. The author asides are amateurish and any editor worth her salt would have excised every last one. Scenes never end; one can almost see the author packing in every absurity possibly permitted by a given scene off of a checklist. We'll do a play! In Marin! So let's have Gay men dressed as nuns from the Sound of Music? Really? That was hackneyed in 1984. And since we have Gay men in SF we can come back a few years later and do an AIDS storyline! The characters are unlikable and so socially retarded it is hard to look at any of them with a lick of warmth. Peppy is Mama Rose -- and Mama Rose without a talented daughter is not a good story. Every single sentence is too clever by half (which is hard to do in a comic novel where clever is generally not an insult.) This author has talent, she knows her subject, and the bones of this story are witty and wise, hence the two stars. I might suggest that next time she writes a book rather than an article that she climb down off her hipster tower (do hipsters have towers, or do they pontificate from Bushwick rowhouse roof decks?) and let a good editor have at it with the full spectrum of Sharpies. She has it in her to write a really kickass book once she gets over herself.
June 7, 2009
you pick up that trash from the gutter of your tragic existence and wear it as the crown that it is.
December 19, 2022
This was a big, delightful surprise. This book came on my radar when I was looking into Montgomery McFate, the founder of the Human Terrain Project, a Pentagon effort to put social scientists into the field to support counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a bloody farce, as most things in those wars were. The media blitz around McFate as the program spun up added insult to injury, with a lot of emphasis on her credentials as a Bay Area punk in the eighties, raised on a houseboat by beatniks, theory geek, affecting punk style into her middle-aged aughts… one of the puff pieces brought up that a character based on her features in this novel by her friend Cintra Wilson, who upon googling turned out to be a sort of op-ed writer/style critic/general writing person. So when I decided I would write about Gen X literature for this year’s birthday lecture, I thought, perfect- a bridge between Gen X literary cynicism and support for our imperial wars, probably a piece of shit in literary terms, too. Maybe there’d be a cameo from John Dolan, aka the War Nerd, who in a very strange convergence dated McFate back when!
Well, “Colors Insulting to Nature” is none of that. The closest comparison I can make is to “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and that’s high praise. It’s a little too cute and self-aware (and, let’s be real, less relatable to me- you’ll see why) for it to quite scale the pedestal Dunces sits on for me, but it was a surprisingly great read. The story of the Normal family (you can see why I might have been rolling my eyes going in), particularly Liza Normal, and its efforts to make good with the one god that they can adhere to: fame, being on tv. Living on an arc between Las Vegas and Marin County north of San Francisco, the Normals are uniquely ill-equipped for their mission, lacking pretty much everything you would want for pre-ironic, mass-media late twentieth century fame other than one thing: “the tenacity of the cockroach,” as that one book called it.
The book opens with Peppy Normal driving Liza, maybe age eleven or thirteen, to a hopeless audition for a commercial. Maybe I’ve been doing too much generational reading — which is ironic because a lot of the point in my lecture is about how generational analysis sucks — but I feel like in a book by a millennial author, the audition would be about how hard Liza tried to meet an impossible standard, and then either she fails (due to some certified injustice, maybe) or succeeds to find that success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Wilson does not do that. Liza’s audition is a train wreck, partially due to lack of talent, but mostly because the Normals are possessed with a very specific idea of fame, beauty, and glamor, an extraordinarily tacky pastiche of better-forgotten post-fifties over-sexed fashions and phrasings, so that little Liza makes some profoundly uncomfortable performances without even knowing it.
I dwell on this audition scene to show that this novel is about the subject of so many great works of humor: miscommunication. In this case, the Normals don’t want to communicate anything so prosaic as ideas, or even desires. They have visions in their heads, differing but converging in some key areas, of glory, light, love, the limelight dream (agoraphobic older brother Ned even makes Liza an actual limelight at one point, not an easy technical feat). Perhaps the most important structural prop in Liza’s dreamscape comes from an almost forgotten subgenre of movies about street youth whose natural talent and authenticity propel them to fame by just doing what they do- perhaps the only well-known artifact of this wave of media is the musical actually called “Fame.” Needless to say, their peculiar aesthetics would be hard to get across in any event. But based as they are in a “dinner theater” in Marin County, they have a singular incapacity to instantiate their visions. The harder either mother or daughter try, the more humiliatingly they fail, and the more they only attract dregs drawn by similarly deeply sincere but inane visions to their productions.
There’s a lot more incident in this book than I could cover here. The future Montgomery McFate comes up during Liza’s terrible time in high school, as Lorna, the reliable friend who introduces her to punk rock. Punk does form something like an alternative to the world of chintz and glitz, and, for a subculture that was still pretty oppositional back then, something like a stable platform of values (and a way to rebel against Peppy). But Liza can’t quite rid herself of the fame dream- that she could get revenge in some spectacular way (arguably punk’s most fundamental dream), or when that fails, an LSD-and-TV inspired dream of ultimate purity and cleanliness, where her shining whiteness (not directly racialized, but not not racialized, if that makes sense) can’t help but draw in worshipping masses.
The San Francisco portions of the book keeps up the pace of amusing incident and is also of some historical use in the bargain, I’d argue. We sometimes act like “the sixties” (metonym: hippies) kind of shifted into “the eighties” (metonym: yuppies) and “the seventies” (metonym: disco? Pet rocks?) was sort of the stomp on the clutch and yank of the e-brake that facilitated a sudden and complete transformation. But of course, it wasn’t quite that way. It wasn’t just aging acid casualties trying to hold on to some dream of counterculture, deep into the eighties, certainly not in the Bay Area. Probably my favorite section is where Liza and Lorna fall in (for the classic reason- cheap rent) with a group of the sort of DnD players your psychologist warned you about, the kind who take a lot of acid and genuinely think they’re elves. This was before nerddom — many of the subcultures I grew up with as relatively discrete categories, and which are now dissolving into the internet — gelled, and confused ex-football players looking for meaning could actually think learning Sindarin and growing their hair was a good way to get laid. The elf house gets into a three-way conflict with some techno-music alien enthusiasts and some gothy wannabe vampires. This is funny enough on its own, made funnier by the historical dynamic- we know, Wilson would have known almost twenty years ago, that these lifestyles aren’t avant-garde, they’re jokes, and soon they’ll be seen as reasonably wholesome hobbies. But only the goths on this tableau have even the slightest capacity for irony. The ex-jock elf leader keeps telling Liza she hasn’t had the vision that would allow her to be true otherkin. She has her own vision during a three-way drug-addled subculture melee in Golden Gate park, and goes back to pursuing fame.
Irony plays an interesting role, here. Wilson, who makes occasional asides to the reader, relates Liza’s failures but never entirely dismisses her vision. Her ludicrous TV dreams are no better or worse than what animates most of us, Wilson insists. Still and all, what saves Liza — and, eventually, Peppy — is irony and queers. Queer people, mostly trans women and gay men, hovered all around the story and the creative efforts of both Liza and Poppy. They provide a certain degree of sympathy — and once the Normals’ productions become ridiculous enough (to a certain extent due to mother-daughter rivalry), a certain amount of buzz, an unwanted and ambivalent form of fame for two women who desire mainstream appreciation, but something. It’s a desperate last resort that Liza starts writing queer erotic fan fiction. In this pre-internet time, you could make money doing that! This is what saves her and her mom in the end, that and a well-timed move away from overly-pretentious California and onto the self-aware, take it or leave it Las Vegas of the mid-1990s.
I’ve known people who thought Gen X basically invented irony, and that irony, essentially, invalidates history. Wilson doesn’t go that far. But it provides a sort of, err, fairy godfather, if you will, a role similar to that of kismet in the Arabian nights, that will allow one with enough persistence and luck to survive and even thrive. It’s not quite happily ever after for Liza (it might be for Lorna, who drives off east with her fiancée- and unless John Dolan was ever a tattoo artist, I’m not sure there’s a cameo there). It’s close enough. These endings are always weak points for these misprision novels, but like Confederacy of Dunces, the ending here, while not the best part of the book, does what it needs to do. All in all, a very pleasant surprise of a book, and I think a good and fun source for insight into the end of the twentieth century in the US. ****’
Well, “Colors Insulting to Nature” is none of that. The closest comparison I can make is to “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and that’s high praise. It’s a little too cute and self-aware (and, let’s be real, less relatable to me- you’ll see why) for it to quite scale the pedestal Dunces sits on for me, but it was a surprisingly great read. The story of the Normal family (you can see why I might have been rolling my eyes going in), particularly Liza Normal, and its efforts to make good with the one god that they can adhere to: fame, being on tv. Living on an arc between Las Vegas and Marin County north of San Francisco, the Normals are uniquely ill-equipped for their mission, lacking pretty much everything you would want for pre-ironic, mass-media late twentieth century fame other than one thing: “the tenacity of the cockroach,” as that one book called it.
The book opens with Peppy Normal driving Liza, maybe age eleven or thirteen, to a hopeless audition for a commercial. Maybe I’ve been doing too much generational reading — which is ironic because a lot of the point in my lecture is about how generational analysis sucks — but I feel like in a book by a millennial author, the audition would be about how hard Liza tried to meet an impossible standard, and then either she fails (due to some certified injustice, maybe) or succeeds to find that success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Wilson does not do that. Liza’s audition is a train wreck, partially due to lack of talent, but mostly because the Normals are possessed with a very specific idea of fame, beauty, and glamor, an extraordinarily tacky pastiche of better-forgotten post-fifties over-sexed fashions and phrasings, so that little Liza makes some profoundly uncomfortable performances without even knowing it.
I dwell on this audition scene to show that this novel is about the subject of so many great works of humor: miscommunication. In this case, the Normals don’t want to communicate anything so prosaic as ideas, or even desires. They have visions in their heads, differing but converging in some key areas, of glory, light, love, the limelight dream (agoraphobic older brother Ned even makes Liza an actual limelight at one point, not an easy technical feat). Perhaps the most important structural prop in Liza’s dreamscape comes from an almost forgotten subgenre of movies about street youth whose natural talent and authenticity propel them to fame by just doing what they do- perhaps the only well-known artifact of this wave of media is the musical actually called “Fame.” Needless to say, their peculiar aesthetics would be hard to get across in any event. But based as they are in a “dinner theater” in Marin County, they have a singular incapacity to instantiate their visions. The harder either mother or daughter try, the more humiliatingly they fail, and the more they only attract dregs drawn by similarly deeply sincere but inane visions to their productions.
There’s a lot more incident in this book than I could cover here. The future Montgomery McFate comes up during Liza’s terrible time in high school, as Lorna, the reliable friend who introduces her to punk rock. Punk does form something like an alternative to the world of chintz and glitz, and, for a subculture that was still pretty oppositional back then, something like a stable platform of values (and a way to rebel against Peppy). But Liza can’t quite rid herself of the fame dream- that she could get revenge in some spectacular way (arguably punk’s most fundamental dream), or when that fails, an LSD-and-TV inspired dream of ultimate purity and cleanliness, where her shining whiteness (not directly racialized, but not not racialized, if that makes sense) can’t help but draw in worshipping masses.
The San Francisco portions of the book keeps up the pace of amusing incident and is also of some historical use in the bargain, I’d argue. We sometimes act like “the sixties” (metonym: hippies) kind of shifted into “the eighties” (metonym: yuppies) and “the seventies” (metonym: disco? Pet rocks?) was sort of the stomp on the clutch and yank of the e-brake that facilitated a sudden and complete transformation. But of course, it wasn’t quite that way. It wasn’t just aging acid casualties trying to hold on to some dream of counterculture, deep into the eighties, certainly not in the Bay Area. Probably my favorite section is where Liza and Lorna fall in (for the classic reason- cheap rent) with a group of the sort of DnD players your psychologist warned you about, the kind who take a lot of acid and genuinely think they’re elves. This was before nerddom — many of the subcultures I grew up with as relatively discrete categories, and which are now dissolving into the internet — gelled, and confused ex-football players looking for meaning could actually think learning Sindarin and growing their hair was a good way to get laid. The elf house gets into a three-way conflict with some techno-music alien enthusiasts and some gothy wannabe vampires. This is funny enough on its own, made funnier by the historical dynamic- we know, Wilson would have known almost twenty years ago, that these lifestyles aren’t avant-garde, they’re jokes, and soon they’ll be seen as reasonably wholesome hobbies. But only the goths on this tableau have even the slightest capacity for irony. The ex-jock elf leader keeps telling Liza she hasn’t had the vision that would allow her to be true otherkin. She has her own vision during a three-way drug-addled subculture melee in Golden Gate park, and goes back to pursuing fame.
Irony plays an interesting role, here. Wilson, who makes occasional asides to the reader, relates Liza’s failures but never entirely dismisses her vision. Her ludicrous TV dreams are no better or worse than what animates most of us, Wilson insists. Still and all, what saves Liza — and, eventually, Peppy — is irony and queers. Queer people, mostly trans women and gay men, hovered all around the story and the creative efforts of both Liza and Poppy. They provide a certain degree of sympathy — and once the Normals’ productions become ridiculous enough (to a certain extent due to mother-daughter rivalry), a certain amount of buzz, an unwanted and ambivalent form of fame for two women who desire mainstream appreciation, but something. It’s a desperate last resort that Liza starts writing queer erotic fan fiction. In this pre-internet time, you could make money doing that! This is what saves her and her mom in the end, that and a well-timed move away from overly-pretentious California and onto the self-aware, take it or leave it Las Vegas of the mid-1990s.
I’ve known people who thought Gen X basically invented irony, and that irony, essentially, invalidates history. Wilson doesn’t go that far. But it provides a sort of, err, fairy godfather, if you will, a role similar to that of kismet in the Arabian nights, that will allow one with enough persistence and luck to survive and even thrive. It’s not quite happily ever after for Liza (it might be for Lorna, who drives off east with her fiancée- and unless John Dolan was ever a tattoo artist, I’m not sure there’s a cameo there). It’s close enough. These endings are always weak points for these misprision novels, but like Confederacy of Dunces, the ending here, while not the best part of the book, does what it needs to do. All in all, a very pleasant surprise of a book, and I think a good and fun source for insight into the end of the twentieth century in the US. ****’
July 6, 2013
I should start off by saying that I bought Colors Insulting to Nature because I loved Cintra Wilson's previous book, A Massive Swelling. In fact, I loved it so much that I loaned it to someone else and bought another copy just in case I wanted to read it again/ loan it again.
Colors Insulting to Nature makes me wonder about my previous thoughts about a Massage Swelling.
The book started off wonderfully, with great one liners and moments that made you go ah. Unfortunately, Liza Normal and her family are not likable or unlikable. They are just simply vapid, thoughtless dolts that have fed on the teat of celebrity for so long that they too have become as glossy and flat as a People Magazine page. Great commentary about the Hollywood worship for awhile, but it becomes as as dull as I imagine the Keeping up with the Kardashian car wreck of a show is.
I wanted this book to be as great as Freedom was. It was not.
Colors Insulting to Nature makes me wonder about my previous thoughts about a Massage Swelling.
The book started off wonderfully, with great one liners and moments that made you go ah. Unfortunately, Liza Normal and her family are not likable or unlikable. They are just simply vapid, thoughtless dolts that have fed on the teat of celebrity for so long that they too have become as glossy and flat as a People Magazine page. Great commentary about the Hollywood worship for awhile, but it becomes as as dull as I imagine the Keeping up with the Kardashian car wreck of a show is.
I wanted this book to be as great as Freedom was. It was not.
July 19, 2013
I think this book might be doomed because, on the cover of the version I read, there's a quote by the NYT Book Review stating "Wilson is the thinking woman's David Foster Wallace" which doesn't make any sense to begin with. Wouldn't the thinking woman's David Foster Wallace be David Foster Wallace?
Anyway, the book made me laugh and surprised me at some points - clever, but not clever like "see I'm being so clever" more like, a bunch of friends that live in what's called the "Elf House" because they all had a trip in which they discovered they were elves and wear pointy shoes and have long hair. It's funnier if you read it in the book.
There really is no plot, it's one of those books you just have to go with the flow and when you do you will find yourself entertained. But not David-Foster-Wallace-y at all.
Anyway, the book made me laugh and surprised me at some points - clever, but not clever like "see I'm being so clever" more like, a bunch of friends that live in what's called the "Elf House" because they all had a trip in which they discovered they were elves and wear pointy shoes and have long hair. It's funnier if you read it in the book.
There really is no plot, it's one of those books you just have to go with the flow and when you do you will find yourself entertained. But not David-Foster-Wallace-y at all.
February 2, 2016
In "Colors Insulting to Nature" Wilson explores the effect of pop culture on a young girl who is raised believing that happy-ever-after, prince-in-shining armor, wish-upon-a-star, ugly-duckling-into-a-swan fairytales are actual, possible life outcomes. Not only are they "possible", but her mother Peppy actively chases dreams to the exclusion of pretty much everything else....including being an actual mother. Liza and her brother are lucky to have a grandmother who ensures they make it to their teenage years fed and physically intact. However, for Liza, the pull of achieving dreams "if she only tries hard enough" is overpowering, and her life careens from one tragedy to another. Wilson's coming of age tale is ironic, satirical, sometimes funny, often pathetic, and occasionally downright sad. Cintra makes the reader wonder how many children raised with the television for a babysitter view the world the way Liza does. And in what ways has the rise of social media since the book was written in 2005 changed or intensified the way television spun "perfect lives"? In any event, the Normal family is an interesting commentary on our present culture, and is definitely thought-provoking.
Pros: Wilson is laugh-out-loud funny at times. In particular, the "Sound of Music" play had me rolling, and had my husband giving me funny looks :)
~~Character development was well done in my opinion. I especially liked Lorna and Ned.
~~The underbelly of Hollywood glamour was told in a convincing and fascinating manner.
Cons: Parts of the book are a bit far-fetched ie. young adults living in a house who think they are elves and are trying to find their way to an alternative plane of existence.
~~As other readers have mentioned, the ending was a bit pat.
Overall, 4 stars or "Excellent". Recommended for anyone who enjoys irreverent humor! :)
Pros: Wilson is laugh-out-loud funny at times. In particular, the "Sound of Music" play had me rolling, and had my husband giving me funny looks :)
~~Character development was well done in my opinion. I especially liked Lorna and Ned.
~~The underbelly of Hollywood glamour was told in a convincing and fascinating manner.
Cons: Parts of the book are a bit far-fetched ie. young adults living in a house who think they are elves and are trying to find their way to an alternative plane of existence.
~~As other readers have mentioned, the ending was a bit pat.
Overall, 4 stars or "Excellent". Recommended for anyone who enjoys irreverent humor! :)
December 14, 2009
I didn't know how I'd feel about this book when I started it. Liza Normal is unlike any protagonist I'd ever read about. But this book hooked me in and I enjoyed every bit of the ride from there on. Cintra Wilson is an expert on celebrity- but more so the bizareness of it all, and here she transforms that into a world you can easily imagine. One where you didn't do as your parents told you to and you got to just follow every weirdo whim you had as a teenager. That's Liza.
The book is by turns touching, hilarious, weird, and insightful. when I reached the end I was aware there were many lines I would have normally underlined, but I was so busy reading that I didn't bother. I personally enjoyed the weird narrator interjections and formatting of the book, and I knew once the 80s references started that it was a winner. (realizing at the same time that they would greatly annoy another person) The characters are distinct, colorful, and pop off the page. I'd heard that said before - "characters that pop off the page", and now I believe that can happen.
My only mistake was to read this in spurts; I think if I'd read it in one quick go it might have gotten a 5. Someone had said it was relatable to a John Waters movie, and that's the closest I can get to describing it, although I enjoyed this more than I've enjoyed any of those flicks. Simply put, I've never read anything like this before, and don't know that anything like it will ever come along again. Bravo!
And if you haven't already read wilson's "A massive swelling", please do.
----
(later)
UMMM. The character of Liza just came to life. Her name is Lady Gaga.
The book is by turns touching, hilarious, weird, and insightful. when I reached the end I was aware there were many lines I would have normally underlined, but I was so busy reading that I didn't bother. I personally enjoyed the weird narrator interjections and formatting of the book, and I knew once the 80s references started that it was a winner. (realizing at the same time that they would greatly annoy another person) The characters are distinct, colorful, and pop off the page. I'd heard that said before - "characters that pop off the page", and now I believe that can happen.
My only mistake was to read this in spurts; I think if I'd read it in one quick go it might have gotten a 5. Someone had said it was relatable to a John Waters movie, and that's the closest I can get to describing it, although I enjoyed this more than I've enjoyed any of those flicks. Simply put, I've never read anything like this before, and don't know that anything like it will ever come along again. Bravo!
And if you haven't already read wilson's "A massive swelling", please do.
----
(later)
UMMM. The character of Liza just came to life. Her name is Lady Gaga.
August 19, 2009
I absolutely adored this. Great writing; exemplary vocabulary; wonderful, flawed, real characters; great story; smarmy narration by a jaded meta-voice - ahhhhh. Total book satisfaction. I do so love a story wherein a character f's up with the best intentions and inadvertently ends up fulfilling her destiny, because it feels awfully familiar to my own life story. And the childhood and high school humiliations were written perfectly right. Drop what you're doing and go find this book right now.
September 11, 2008
It just kills me that the cover of this book is clearly illustrated by someone who never read the thing! This book is HILARIOUS and outrageous and I was appalled and horrified and couldn't put it down all day. I felt dirty after I read it, but in a good way. Wilson is a great writer of mad, vivid characters, and the story is depraved and wonderful and nutty. I adored this book and I'm sorry it didn't do better- I suspect the cover didn't help. Yay Cintra Wilson!
March 28, 2012
What a wonderful find this book turned out to be. With original similes and analogies, crisp and pin-point sharp writing, original observations and an own-worst-enemy that you can’t help rooting for, I never knew where this book was going to end up. LOVED IT!
October 5, 2017
One of Wilson's heroes was Hunter S. Thompson, and she's a pop culture critic, so not only can her descriptions be wildly, hilariously imaginative and outlandish much of the time,
"The waitress working at the Korral was a sixty-year-old woman with a firmly structured silver permanent and a name tag that said PANSY, who had obviously worked as a cocktail waitress since the dawn of table service and had, like an eyeless, deep-sea creature, become accustomed to casino life without sunlight or windows, among the truly drunk, where the party never stopped and had never really started."
"Liza felt the stone-deep feeling of time, in a horrible circumstance, becoming composed of heavy individual minutes that one must chain-drag over one's shoulder alone."
but her observations on human nature and the influence of Hollywood and fame on the past several generations is astute. It's a very "American" story. It took a little while to get into because at first it seemed like farce, but then it evolved into a pretty recognizably accurate depiction, albeit skewed, of our society, not unlike Thompson's world view. Very entertaining, but wise.
"The waitress working at the Korral was a sixty-year-old woman with a firmly structured silver permanent and a name tag that said PANSY, who had obviously worked as a cocktail waitress since the dawn of table service and had, like an eyeless, deep-sea creature, become accustomed to casino life without sunlight or windows, among the truly drunk, where the party never stopped and had never really started."
"Liza felt the stone-deep feeling of time, in a horrible circumstance, becoming composed of heavy individual minutes that one must chain-drag over one's shoulder alone."
but her observations on human nature and the influence of Hollywood and fame on the past several generations is astute. It's a very "American" story. It took a little while to get into because at first it seemed like farce, but then it evolved into a pretty recognizably accurate depiction, albeit skewed, of our society, not unlike Thompson's world view. Very entertaining, but wise.
April 8, 2025
liza is my top kin
February 26, 2017
I previously read Wilson's book "A Massive Swelling", which was a nonfiction book about the horrible nature of Fame. This book takes a fictional look at the same topic. It tells the story of Liza Normal, Famous Person Wannabe. There are many aspects of Liza's personality that remind me of a younger me. I also wanted to be "Famous". I yearned for recognition and the envy of my peers. Wilson is around my age. She talks about 80s movies as a jumping-off point for many kids to this fame-worship. She has a brilliant section at the beginning that talks about the 80s movie as new-Greek Myth. Brilliant.
The actual plot is good too, if somewhat meandering. But then, life sorta meanders. You end up caring about these people, even though they are completely flawed and miserably ridiculous a lot of the time. Just like most people. Also features some great gay guys, cross-dressers and bondage loving Little People.
The actual plot is good too, if somewhat meandering. But then, life sorta meanders. You end up caring about these people, even though they are completely flawed and miserably ridiculous a lot of the time. Just like most people. Also features some great gay guys, cross-dressers and bondage loving Little People.
November 14, 2009
This was great! So entertaining. But what's with the interruptions from a self-conscious narrator? We're rolling along in the story of Liza --a girl who grows up with no sense of self, just a burning desire to be famous -- and all of a sudden we're interrupted by the author herself, in boldface type, explaining that "now we're going to have a flashback," or something. It doesn't even come close to working. All those passages could simply be removed and it would be a better book.
But, don't let me dissuade you, the story is lots of fun, and it gives a nice subculture view of San Francisco in the 80s and 90s.
But, don't let me dissuade you, the story is lots of fun, and it gives a nice subculture view of San Francisco in the 80s and 90s.
April 11, 2007
This story is a scathingly hilarious indictment of celebrity obsession. Too much contemporary fiction has been hobbled by the "good taste" of the author to exclude the sea of pop culture in which modern Americans float and read like dumbed down novels about 19th century Brits. The Hell with that! We need more authors like Cintra Wilson and George Saunders who actually notice that we're living in a hyper-commerical culture and that (gasp!) it's affected our national character(s).
January 9, 2012
This book surprised me. I thought it was just going to be pulpy candy reading for my sweet tooth, but instead it turned into a really grounded and friction-creating book. It made me want to wince and grind my teeth and roll my shoulders, and I consider such a visceral reaction an indication of good writing. Overall a very, very worthwhile read.
July 14, 2009
I quit reading this book, it was depressing, NOT funny, not even quirky, the main characters were beyond dysfunctional and they never seemed to move forward! I don't know if it was my frame of mind at that time so would love to know if someone else has read it and what they think.
February 21, 2013
I fucking loooooove Cintra Wilson. She's a hailstorm of hilarity, a voice so speedy it's like being on a road trip in Bombay with Hunter S Thompson. I like my life lessons delivered with an all-you-can-eat buffet of humour, and this book left me totally replete. Amen Cintra. Cintra for Prez.
October 9, 2007
I usually give a 1 to any book I quit reading, but I think that Wilson is a decent writer -- I just couldn't get into the book at all, and I finally gave up.
October 29, 2008
I had a difficult time getting through this book. I couldn't relate to the main character or what she was going through. Just kind of weird.
January 29, 2009
Argh, Cintra, what happened? Clearly fiction is not your forte. Painful.
September 10, 2015
As I said in my review of Ms. Wilson's "A Massive Swelling," she is my #1 literary crush (don't tell Wendy!). I read that book on a plane, having to close it about every two pages to calm my fit of hysterical giggles. Her writing is so spot-on, her insights so razor sharp, I chewed on each paragraph, each sentence with admiration bleeding into near-hysterical jealousy. Wendy had put "A Massive Swelling" on my to-read pile, and directed me to the Cintra Wilson back-catalog: the mindbending Oscar recaps on Salon, the fashion columns for the New York Times, and the dense, heart-heavy foreign policy analysis at her Dregulator blog (now sadly defunct). It wasn't that Cintra Wilson was just so damn good, it was that she was so damn good at EVERYTHING.
"Colors Insulting To Nature" is something else entirely, a comic novel about Liza Normal and her quest to Get Famous, no matter what it takes. Liza is raised by an outsized attempted-thespian named Peppy, along with her shy brother Ned and their grandmother Noreen in the Normal Family Dinner Theater, a former firehouse turned repertory house that never served a single dinner, and barely staged theater, let alone theatre. An unintentionally campy production of "The Sound of Music" turns into a sensation among the irony-drenched early '80s drag queens of northern California; not the clientele Peppy expected. We watch Liza suffer indignity upon indignity, many of the standard high-school-sucks variety, but becoming exponentially more humiliating once LA gets involved. In a press letter included with my copy of the novel, Wilson says she wrote Liza as someone "that gives sorry young women an antihero that sorry young men got when 'Confderacy of Dunces' came out." But my reading of it put Liza closer to Terry Southern's Candy -- Liza walks blithely into all sorts of horrific experiences, and is turned out viciously more often than not, a stylistic 180 to Reilly's self-centered mincing from dangerous room to dangerous room without a scratch. Wilson tosses Liza around the room like a 13-year-old abusing an old Barbie, giving her a glassy-eye incomprehension of clear and present danger that resembles the teenagers in 'Friday the 13th' movies. "Confederacy of Dunces" was about one blithe man making a thick, greasy mark across the squalid denizens of New Orleans. "Colors" is about all the cities that leave the same skidmarks on Liza's heart and body, an altogether nastier prospect.
Overall, there's a lot I liked, and I expect I'll look back on the book fondly as the years pass. I liked Liza's poor brother Ned, emotionally scarred from a traumatic high school fight that turns him into a beautiful artist and an intense agoraphobe. I liked several of the side detours on the plot journey, involving young people who believe they're elves, accounts of the early days of slash-fiction, and celebrity cannibals. There was, however, one small and one big negative. The small one was what felt like a constant scootching of the chronology to fit certain cultural events into the narrative. I will admit that I was surprised to find that slash fiction went back the '70s, and stand gladly corrected, and that "otherkins" date back at least to the early '90s. But when I was being told that people were downloading Venal de Minus's work on the internet, I'd make a mental note of where we'd likely be in time, only to go five pages later and have to say, "wait...we're still in 1989??" However, it's this constant dip into subcultures, fetishes, and pop-culture phenomena are part of the bigger problem of the book.
With every aside to the reader (there are quite a few), every extended description of a pre-fab'd boy band, every loving analysis of a certain moment in history when a new fetish coagulated and multiplied, there's a feeling that it's the asides, rather than the narrative, that the author would rather be writing, and that these are the things that she is, frankly, the best at. At its worst, the constant "I beg the reader's pardon" interruptions to contextualize a thought or idea smacks of slumming it, as if she's winking broadly at us and saying, "we both know that this kind of fiction is beneath me, but let's just poke at it with a stick to see what happens." In that sense, the writing of the book, an anomaly in Wilson's oeuvre, mirrors the protagonist's struggle against her inevitable destiny. Liza thinks she's born to be a singer because, as Wilson takes great pains to point out, TV and the media give us mutated views of how one is to live one's life. What is a life if it isn't seen by others? Liza rebels against Venal de Minus, her slash-fic creation which is an nationwide hit, and we wonder if Wilson wasn't similarly hurt at the time by only being known as the writer that creates those hilarious Salon takedowns of the Oscars. Still, having read several coming-of-age stories written for adults ("Black Swan Green" and the kids' narratives in "Crossing California" and "The Washington Story"), this didn't hold a candle to books like those for emotion or true insight. "Colors" was more like a book-length lecture on the falseness of coming-of-age stories.
But the writing of this book may have provided Cintra Wilson with the same experience as her protagonist, Liza Normal. This novel, her only work of the sort in the past nine years, seems to be alone in its class. With her next book, 2008's "Caligula For President" (which I'm reading now), Wilson synthesizes the skills she's best known for, namely a blending of insights into pop culture, politics, and the collective mind of the masses, into a Swiftian/Screwtape-ian satire that suggests that America might, in fact, be better off abandoning its pretensions of democracy and just go full-on fascist. Her most recent (still in the editing stages) book, titled "Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will take her NYT fashion columns and expand them into a gonzo journey into the worlds of fashion and commerce. I'm puking into my Prada handbag in nervous anticipation.
"Colors Insulting To Nature" is something else entirely, a comic novel about Liza Normal and her quest to Get Famous, no matter what it takes. Liza is raised by an outsized attempted-thespian named Peppy, along with her shy brother Ned and their grandmother Noreen in the Normal Family Dinner Theater, a former firehouse turned repertory house that never served a single dinner, and barely staged theater, let alone theatre. An unintentionally campy production of "The Sound of Music" turns into a sensation among the irony-drenched early '80s drag queens of northern California; not the clientele Peppy expected. We watch Liza suffer indignity upon indignity, many of the standard high-school-sucks variety, but becoming exponentially more humiliating once LA gets involved. In a press letter included with my copy of the novel, Wilson says she wrote Liza as someone "that gives sorry young women an antihero that sorry young men got when 'Confderacy of Dunces' came out." But my reading of it put Liza closer to Terry Southern's Candy -- Liza walks blithely into all sorts of horrific experiences, and is turned out viciously more often than not, a stylistic 180 to Reilly's self-centered mincing from dangerous room to dangerous room without a scratch. Wilson tosses Liza around the room like a 13-year-old abusing an old Barbie, giving her a glassy-eye incomprehension of clear and present danger that resembles the teenagers in 'Friday the 13th' movies. "Confederacy of Dunces" was about one blithe man making a thick, greasy mark across the squalid denizens of New Orleans. "Colors" is about all the cities that leave the same skidmarks on Liza's heart and body, an altogether nastier prospect.
Overall, there's a lot I liked, and I expect I'll look back on the book fondly as the years pass. I liked Liza's poor brother Ned, emotionally scarred from a traumatic high school fight that turns him into a beautiful artist and an intense agoraphobe. I liked several of the side detours on the plot journey, involving young people who believe they're elves, accounts of the early days of slash-fiction, and celebrity cannibals. There was, however, one small and one big negative. The small one was what felt like a constant scootching of the chronology to fit certain cultural events into the narrative. I will admit that I was surprised to find that slash fiction went back the '70s, and stand gladly corrected, and that "otherkins" date back at least to the early '90s. But when I was being told that people were downloading Venal de Minus's work on the internet, I'd make a mental note of where we'd likely be in time, only to go five pages later and have to say, "wait...we're still in 1989??" However, it's this constant dip into subcultures, fetishes, and pop-culture phenomena are part of the bigger problem of the book.
With every aside to the reader (there are quite a few), every extended description of a pre-fab'd boy band, every loving analysis of a certain moment in history when a new fetish coagulated and multiplied, there's a feeling that it's the asides, rather than the narrative, that the author would rather be writing, and that these are the things that she is, frankly, the best at. At its worst, the constant "I beg the reader's pardon" interruptions to contextualize a thought or idea smacks of slumming it, as if she's winking broadly at us and saying, "we both know that this kind of fiction is beneath me, but let's just poke at it with a stick to see what happens." In that sense, the writing of the book, an anomaly in Wilson's oeuvre, mirrors the protagonist's struggle against her inevitable destiny. Liza thinks she's born to be a singer because, as Wilson takes great pains to point out, TV and the media give us mutated views of how one is to live one's life. What is a life if it isn't seen by others? Liza rebels against Venal de Minus, her slash-fic creation which is an nationwide hit, and we wonder if Wilson wasn't similarly hurt at the time by only being known as the writer that creates those hilarious Salon takedowns of the Oscars. Still, having read several coming-of-age stories written for adults ("Black Swan Green" and the kids' narratives in "Crossing California" and "The Washington Story"), this didn't hold a candle to books like those for emotion or true insight. "Colors" was more like a book-length lecture on the falseness of coming-of-age stories.
But the writing of this book may have provided Cintra Wilson with the same experience as her protagonist, Liza Normal. This novel, her only work of the sort in the past nine years, seems to be alone in its class. With her next book, 2008's "Caligula For President" (which I'm reading now), Wilson synthesizes the skills she's best known for, namely a blending of insights into pop culture, politics, and the collective mind of the masses, into a Swiftian/Screwtape-ian satire that suggests that America might, in fact, be better off abandoning its pretensions of democracy and just go full-on fascist. Her most recent (still in the editing stages) book, titled "Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will take her NYT fashion columns and expand them into a gonzo journey into the worlds of fashion and commerce. I'm puking into my Prada handbag in nervous anticipation.
December 17, 2018
So I picked up this book fairly randomly. I liked the blurp on the back and six days ago I started reading it. It really took me a while to get into it. This is not the easiest book to read - it leans heavily on the ideas of post-modernism - and that means there is a lot going on. There is intertext, heavy irony, academic commentary, asides from the author and more of those thropes. Yet it fits really well with the story of a young girl, who grows up while believing all the hollywood crap she had been fed her entire life.
I like how the book questions the tropes of hollywood, the effect of hollywood stories on our lives, the philosophy around being famous and that this is all being mocked in subtle and sometimes less subtle ways.
This is an incredibly clever book that demands multiple readings but there is a lot to exam here - most definitly the effect of popular culture on young minds.
I like how the book questions the tropes of hollywood, the effect of hollywood stories on our lives, the philosophy around being famous and that this is all being mocked in subtle and sometimes less subtle ways.
This is an incredibly clever book that demands multiple readings but there is a lot to exam here - most definitly the effect of popular culture on young minds.
June 15, 2021
I picked this up because the cover appealed to me. Then I read the many positive, if not ecstatic, mini-reviews contained within its pages. And I've always enjoyed a good coming of age story. But I wasn't prepared for what this book contained. I have not read prose that leaps off the page with such energy since Paul Beatty's The Sellout. However, as Ms Wilson's book was published 11 years before Mr Beatty's, I can only conclude that he was the one who was influenced by her. Liza is born into a family that re-defines 'dysfunctional' & her mother, Peppy, is a narcissistic stage mum of truly horrible dimensions. In her quest for happiness & fulfilment, Liza ventures down countless dead ends before finally stumbling onto a relatively clear path. It perhaps goes on a little too long but I heartily recommend this wonderful book. It is, so far, Ms Wilson's only novel, although she writes non-fiction more regularly. I hope it won't remain so.
January 27, 2023
While this was a fun story, I had two major issues.
1) it didn't seem like Wilson liked her characters. MAYBE Ned? But Wilson's hatred and disdain for celebrity culture and the pursuit of fame for fame's sake bled over into how she talked about her characters, which made the reading experience a little confusing - if the author doesn't like the characters she created, why should we? Not that we need to root for every character in every book, but at least in other books with antiheroes, you can tell that the author has some love.
2) There was SO MUCH telling, and not nearly enough showing. And I'm not talking about the 4th wall-breaking. I mean the paragraphs and pages of descriptions of feelings and actions that would have been much better shown in behavior and dialog than description.
I was underwhelmed, and I hoped for more.
1) it didn't seem like Wilson liked her characters. MAYBE Ned? But Wilson's hatred and disdain for celebrity culture and the pursuit of fame for fame's sake bled over into how she talked about her characters, which made the reading experience a little confusing - if the author doesn't like the characters she created, why should we? Not that we need to root for every character in every book, but at least in other books with antiheroes, you can tell that the author has some love.
2) There was SO MUCH telling, and not nearly enough showing. And I'm not talking about the 4th wall-breaking. I mean the paragraphs and pages of descriptions of feelings and actions that would have been much better shown in behavior and dialog than description.
I was underwhelmed, and I hoped for more.
December 31, 2021
Sadly, a great title & clever writing couldn't make me like this book - never a good sign when every time I picked it up, I sighed & thought maybe the next bit will be better, but I'd turn out to be wrong. Just never connected with any of the characters & the action of the story didn't overcome this. One very funny scene - the production of `The Sound of Music - was not enough. But then I have to admit `message' books are usually not my cup of tea, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that this is ending the year on a low note
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April 15, 2020I read this a zillion years ago and all I can remember is dying laughing by myself at the Las Vegas airport reading the part where they are running around in zebra print yelling "Moo bitches!" I have been trying to remember the name of this book for years, and forunately the person I think I lent my copy to a decade ago just decided to read it. Earmarking for when I reread it now that I know the name again 🤣
June 28, 2021
When I found out the creator of Mtv's Liquid TV: Winter Steele, Cintra Wilson, wrote a book, I finally found a copy and devoured it! Once the main character gets past her mother, the story really takes off.
June 16, 2018
an unknown jewel. just read it
August 28, 2019
This is a weird book.
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