After 200 pages of playing the damaged kid, David Amsden comes clean: "It’s amazing, the lies you can get away with. That’s the problem with me, I’m always telling these sort of half lies to people." Well, at least he admits it. But even the confession has a crucial "half-lie"—when Amsden calls his ability a "problem." Amsden’s knack for lying is a "problem" the way Shaquille O’Neal’s size is a "problem."
Amsden is a classic American ambition machine who lied and schmoozed his way to fame while coyly pretending to be a naïve outsider. His book, like Madonna’s early pop songs, is more interesting as a career vehicle than in its own right.
In fact, Important Things that Don’t Matter is as conventional as any three-minute pop song, the work of an author interested in quick fame rather than writing. As the protagonist says of his self-willed fainting episodes, "I guess if you ever happened to walk in on one of these sessions you’d say I just fainted, passed out for a second. Or you’d think maybe I was crazy. But it was much more controlled than that, I swear." It’s actually all too easy to believe that Amsden’s voice is "much more controlled" than he wants it to seem. It’s so controlled it’s downright dull—adolescent suffering done by the numbers, a half-century late.
Amsden has the perfect parents for the troubled-youth genre: a solidly bourgeois, well-connected mother and a messed-up druggie dad. Amsden always gives Mom all the credit and Dad all the blame. Near the end of the novel, he mocks his father’s knack for fixing things: "I have a slight knack for it myself I guess, but nothing like Dad. Especially since I really started becoming Mom’s kid—I’d just rather call up someone like Dad to fix what isn’t working, the faucet or whatever." This is just one of Amsden’s many nasty laughs at those who haven’t made it. Though he accuses his father of many sins, he clearly despises him most for failing to become rich like Mom.
Amsden should be far more grateful to his ol’ Dad; without him, Amsden would have nothing to write. David and his mom are extraordinarily dull, cautious rich people. Dad not only livens things up, but provides the sort of familiar, easily-sketched scenes of suffering the genre requires. He takes David with him on visits to his coke dealer, drags him along to bars full of drunks and, in the opening scene of the novel, shows up an hour late to pick up the five-year-old David and his mother at the airport.
This airport scene goes on for 20 pages, as Amsden tries to make the delay in getting picked up into Dickensian pathos. In most parts of the world, they’d be delighted if Dad showed up at all. Which isn’t to say that middle-class Americans don’t suffer. They do. But like many other contemporary American memoirists, Amsden wants to blame all his sufferings on simple, familiar villains like drugs, drink and sexual abuse, rather than the more subtle sufferings of the wealthy. Since the authors of these memoirs tend to be white males of privileged background, the effort of remaking oneself as victim is a serious problem. Hence the popularity of the rehab memoir: By becoming a drunk or addict, you can become a temporary victim, then pop back up to the bourgeois world, using your connections to get the thing published.
If any of these writers took on the real suffering people like them endure—above all, the suffering of not being famous—they might be interesting. At least they’d have to tell a little of the truth. But they’re a very reactionary, unimaginative lot, so they lean on the big three: drugs, drink and divorce.
Then there’s the matter of "sexual abuse." There seems to be a rule for these memoirists that the protagonist must have endured something that can be called "abuse." In James Frey’s truly appalling rehab memoir, A Million Little Pieces, Frey claims to have beaten a French priest to near death for coming on to him. Frey, you understand, was the victim, because the man put his hand on Frey’s knee. Amsden seems to have searched his memory looking desperately for evidence of sexual abuse and come up with the rather harmless sex games a gay male cousin (from Dad’s side of the family, naturally) played with the 14-year-old David. The cousin goes to jail, and Amsden blames his subsequent lack of interest in girls on his cousin’s ass-touching.
Frankly, this is ridiculous. In the whole world, no one but a middle-class American would dream of calling a few erotically charged wrestling matches in which the cousin touched little David’s ass serious sexual abuse. Amsden simply needed something to fill in the "sexual abuse" box on his memoir checklist, and this was the best available material.
Amsden brings up the "sexual abuse" again and again, always pretending to be avoiding the topic. Of course, the reader is meant to notice his evasion:
After all that fun went down with [my cousin] I hadn’t really thought about him at all. It’s funny. I mean, there was that shrink that everyone made me see… Don’t ever go to a shrink, though. Like a lot of adults, they make everything up, and some of it stays with you a lot longer than you think.
If the voice sounds familiar, that’s because it’s good old Holden Caulfield: the breathless, first-person monologue, the asides offering the reader callow but sincere advice, and the division of the world into "adults" and kids, which Amsden repeats in a line straight out of The Catcher in the Rye: "I’m actually good with kids, if you really want to know." When Amsden breaks down at last, it’s revealed in the same Holden-ish aside: "If you really want to know, I was crying." Some of Amsden’s phrases strike me as Salinger borrowings that are dead wrong for contemporary American English, as when he says something "drives me mad" and gushes, "You would have died."
As Important Things trudges to a close, the echoes of The Catcher in the Rye grow stronger, the narrative momentum lessens, and the sense of old themes reworked without much care or thought increases. Amsden’s pilgrimage to Fitzgerald’s grave is, to borrow Amsden’s phrase, "the chintziest" moment in the book:
And then you get to this grave, and you see that F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, is stuck rotting under this ground, right across the street from my high school, in the shadow of this mammoth chain furniture store called Marlo, which I swear is listed in Guinness as carrying the world’s chintziest sofas.
It’s Holden’s voice, all right, but Amsden is getting it all ruined, showing none of the care Salinger devoted to inventing the idiom. Halfway through the description he breaks into bombast: "…in the shadow of this mammoth chain furniture store…" The real pathos is that the genre has evolved so little that a second-hand Holden ends up making a senseless pilgrimage to the grave of the most overrated preppie writer of all.
It’s strange that the little literary world in which these memoirs circulate has acquired none of the sophistication with which the livelier American arts treat alleged self-revelations like Amsden’s. By now, pop culture has developed a healthy lack of respect even about the sacred claim of sexual abuse. There’s a great scene in Todd Solondz’s Happiness in which the edgy poet, rereading her poem "Rape at Twelve," mutters bitterly, "Oh, if only I had been raped as a child.Then I would know authenticity."
Yet the memoirists and their Manhattan publishers go on falling for the same sob stories by the same rich kids, treating them as revelations of "severe suffering" (J.T. LeRoy’s description of Amsden’s story), rather than the self-serving reruns they are.
Important Things that
Don’t Matter
By David Amsden
William Morrow, 272 pages, $24.95
