Manthropologist Bogosian Tries His Hand at the Fairer Sex

Eric Bogosian’s Wasted Beauty

The Village Voice
May 3rd, 2005

Book Review of “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (Simon & Schuster, 260 pp.)

By Alexis Soloski

The apple – no longer content to merely serve as pie filling,
after-school snack, or means of keeping the doctor away – once again
presides over a fall from grace in Eric Bogosian’s second novel,
Wasted Beauty. On weekends, siblings Billy and Reba Cook drive from
their failing upstate farm to hawk their Empires and Winesaps at the
Union Square Greenmarket. When a handsome stranger buys an apple and
then returns to sample lissome Reba’s other wares, the farm girl
wakes from her virginity-losing one-night stand and finds herself
alone. Adrift on the streets of New York, she’s quickly discovered by
a fashion photog (a McDonald’s substitutes for Schraft’s) and thrust
into the world of top modeling.

A creator of remarkable performance pieces, Bogosian has spent most
of his career depicting men in angsty extremis. He lent voice and no
small amount of compassion to the obstreperous, the unpalatable, the
sorts that make you eye the seat next to them on the subway and decide
you’d really rather stand. His attempts to narrate the head and heart
of Reba, “the most beautiful girl in the world,” meet with decidedly
less success. Perhaps Bogosian means to argue that beauty renders Reba
opaque, that those who would possess her dispense with or efface her
personality. But should she be such a cipher to the author as well?

The author fares far better with the mentally unstable Billy and
with Rick, the married GP who obsesses over Reba. Phil, indulgent
and self-loathing, fixated on sex and material goods, would be the
more obvious protagonist. But while Rick is allowed any number of
soliloquies (many of them very funny), he’s never quite offered the
lead role, either. Consequently, a book that might have had as hard
a core as any Bogosian solo show must suffer a decidedly mushy center.

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