“Who cares? It’s published now.”
“But I want to know.”
“Well, it is certainly impossible to know and probably unimportant.”
“So, you mean I’ll never know whether Palo Alto would’ve been published if Franco wasn’t already famous?”
Loveable stoner come frenzied, self-mutilating adventure-man stuck under a rock, James Franco is a commanding actor whose (for lack of a better term) body-of-work testifies to his own creative curiosity. For Franco, writing short stories is another of these curiosities; a branch stemming from his “performance art”.
I’ve long thought “writing” or, more specifically, short story writing to be related to acting. Perhaps not an immediate family member but more a distant cousin (did I hear the other day that Lady Gaga somehow shares a distant blood relation with Madonna? [did I just involuntarily shriek or do I have the hiccups?]). This sentence could easily bleed into a Gaga/Madonna analogy but I’ll leave that where it is, right behind this full stop.
At first, I really wanted to read Palo Alto oblivious to Franco’s celebrity. I soon realised this to be inescapable and instead went about embracing it. Palo is a surprising read. Franco gets jiggy with short story writing in the same way Will Smith successfully traipsed music and acting: not bad and definitely amusing.
Franco can write. Now that’s out of the way: can he write a collection of stories worthy of being published? For the most part, the stories are enjoyable; first-person teenage vignettes explored in simple, clean-as-new-glass prose. Franco inhabits adolescent characters and circumstance in a similar fashion to which Raymond Carver explored middle-aged, midde-class, American mid-westerners only with more Bukowski-styled nihilism and self-loathing. Franco is no Carver or Bukowski though; it’s their influence that’s obvious.
Where the book begins to lean toward cliché, Franco throws in a pop-culture reference to let us know any stereotype might be a deliberate cliché-for-effect; a feculent decanting of adolescent suburban ennui. And for the most part the effect works. Franco sustains a plausible consciousness for all his characters but falls short of fully animating them. We are given a glimpse of potential characters and a potential writer. The stories smell mildly contrived and that might be because Franco completed the stories as part of his MFA creative writing programme.
For me, the strongest story is Lockheed. A young, female maths-whizz scores an internship at Lockheed Martin and works for a “Swedish guy” marking blemishes found on old film reels of the moon. The story burns slowly through a hazy meditation on identity, boredom and (teenage) desire. Franco demonstrates some restraint in the Vulgarity Department1 and hires some Sensitivity2.
Palo Alto probably earned Franco high marks at university but the sum of these stories fall just short of impressive (this criticism could possibly be the result of the exaggerated expectations generated by Franco’s celebrity). However, Palo is an entertaining read with many-a-gruesome musing on contemporary moral vacuity and blunderbuss adolescent behaviour. Even if he didn’t play the bad dude in Spiderman, I’d buy it and read it.
1 Vulgarity Department - employees receive commission-only pay. Commission is earned when Vulgarity Department employees find a use for Something Gruesome without it being vulgar-for-the-sake-of-earning-commission (i.e. for Vulgarity’s sake).
2 Sensitivity - Usually sole-traders, Sensitivities are often outsourced, underpaid and misused.
