Supineny's Reviews > What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer

hm...well, i got it because i loved one of his performances on The Moth (the one where he winds up doing crack in a Bowery flop hotel with a transsexual on Christmas). It was shocking and tender. He's kind of a wreck, but an interesting wreck who is surprisingly alert to kindness and intimacy.

Last night I read a bunch of the stories in this compilation of short auto-biographical pieces. They were along similar lines, and the best of it delivers similar pleasures. His troubled adolescence during which he shows his tender loving mother one of his first erections in the moment before understanding that one shouldn't do such things. A story in which he has sex with a trans woman he's not really attracted to, but his faked sexual pleasure seems to bring her a moment of validation and happiness. A dialog with a drunk in Saratoga Springs, during which nothing much happens, but...again, there's a certain unexpected empathetic dimension.

I'm giving it three stars as i really like something about his persona and he's got some good tales. But as writing I'm wanting a little more -- the stories were originally piece for NY Press and they feel that way a little. That is, they're good first-person pieces with surprising angles, but they get a little plodding if you read one after another -- the writing itself isn't that thrilling. I wonder if his novels are better or worse -- thus far he is his own best character and I can't quite imagine a book without that character.