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books
First effort from reserved author is a soulful odyssey
by Kaizaad Kotwal
No novel since Mark Merliss' An Arrow's Flight has so stimulated this writer's literary cortex as has Brian Pera's debut novel Troublemaker.
Pera's elliptical and entrancing tale about Earl, a 22-year-old boy, searching for the raison d'être of his earthly, ennui-entrenched existence is simply brilliant.
The book follows Earl on his odyssey from Memphis to New York to Nebraska in search of his own sheltering sky.
After the death of his father, Earl's distant and difficult mother sends him off to Memphis to live with his grandmother. His grandmother's mistrust, fueled by paranoia and senility, forces Earl to take to the streets where he learns the trade of a hustler and kept boy.
New York yields him little comfort and fewer answers to life's questions, forcing him back to his mother, who continues to keep him shut out of her life, both literally and metaphorically.
At a local carnival, Earl meets Red, a man of mystery who becomes the focal point of an overblown obsession. Earl's journey now spins around the elusive Red and the vortex of dislocation, obsession, and a search for affection that spirals out of control.
The book's structure weaves back and forth in time, the fragmentation of the narrative echoing the brokenness of the main character's life. Pera allows Earl to narrate the story in a stream-of-consciousness dialect that is a hybrid of southern idiom blended with urban street tongue.
The result is mesmerizingly lyrical, and Earl emerges as an existential poet of sorts, taking the reader on a journey that is deeply troubling, darkly funny and yet unmitigatedly hopeful in its quest for a better, simpler, and more lucid tomorrow.
Pera spoke with this writer by phone from his home in Memphis, where he has been living for the past six years. At 31, Pera has lived a life that seems full of many things, but what exactly those things are, he is hesitant to spell out completely. He observed that people
live in a time where literary endeavors are marketing afterthoughts to the troubled and turbulent lives of their authors.
Pera strongly believes that a literary book should stand on its own merit and that the life of the author is irrelevant to the quality of the fiction. However, in this age of Survivor mania and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire frenzy, scandal sells and voyeurism is the virtue of the masses.
Thus, when asked if his life closely resembles the existence of his protagonist Earl, Pera bristled at the implied notion that his writing would be more interesting or valuable if we knew how prurient the author's life
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"Books are being sold by the author's personalities," Pera said, "and that is salacious because I am not here to sell my life, but my writing."
Pera's own life currently includes a relationship of five years with a man of 36. He‹ would not reveal more about his partner, but he would speak in greater detail about his own role in the relationship.
"Ideally I would live alone," says Pera, "and what I mean by that is that I am best suited to live alone but that is not what I want."
He notes that he is not easy to live with because he spends time constantly thinking about what he is working on.
One commonality that is unmistakably present in both Pera and Earl is the existential angst of cosmic proportions that the author shares with his subject.
Writing Troublemaker found Pera “at a point looking through my own past, which was confusing." He grew up in life being considered problematic but was never told specifically why.
"At twenty-five, I think it became normal to look over and see what makes me problematic and is that so unforgivable?" he questions rhetorically.
When asked what conclusions this inward journey led him to, he said, "I had less conclusions abut myself than about life in general." What he found was that "things don't always fit into a nice order, that life is chaotic, that you are an extension of the world and that things are circular and life is regenerative."
Pera's inner quest also led him to the Zenlike understanding that "loss is a huge part of life and there is a sadness in that. But the gift there is the relationships which become all the more sacred" in light of this awareness of loss and rebirth.
Pera's novel has many of the attributes of the classic American voyage in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn and some of Hemingway's tragic protagonists. Pera noted that "such journeys are more perilous now than ever before because we are as disconnected from each other as we have ever been." Pera argues that, "this alienation is part of our country's evolution with its wide open spaces. We can move further and further away and work is always tearing families apart."
I asked Pera if, like Earl, he had found a Red in his life-someone who had become an obsession to follow to the ends of the earth as Earl does in the novel.
"There have been many Reds," he says, "and I have embodied them all as Red." "Earl is trying to get away from himself,” continues Pera, “and desire is a way of trying to escape who you are."
When asked if he had followed his Red around, he replied, "Red was a fantasy because on my own, doing that would have been scary and lonely."
Pera talks openly, passionately, and unabashedly about his art.
"I am compelled to write," he says in explaining how people never understood his urge to just get away, lock himself in a room and create.
"I had every discouragement to write," he adds. "Being socially inept has a lot to do with it. A lot of things that I think about I don't know how to communicate other than through writing."
He is embarking on a book-reading tour, mainly of the West Coast and is simultaneously working on an Internet literary endeavor, at http://www.lowblueflame.com.
"There is a real struggle for beginning writers to be heard," explains Pera, where the pinnacle of writing is considered to lie in the world of sitcoms and made-for-TV movies. While Pera is cautious about maintaining his privacy and not giving too much away about his personal life, as an author he is generous. With Troublemakers, he has given his reader a book and a character so complex. moving, lyrical and soulful that it is an embarrassment of riches.