Author: James Franco
# of Pages: 211 (paperback)
Genre: Adult, Short Stories, Contemporary
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: James Franco’s story collection traces the lives of a group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism. In “Lockheed” a young woman’s summer—spent working a dull internship—is suddenly upended by a spectacular incident of violence at a house party. In “American History” a high school freshman attempts to impress a girl with a realistic portrayal of a slave owner during a classroom skit—only to have his feigned bigotry avenged. In “I Could Kill Someone,” a lonely teenager buys a gun with the aim of killing his high school tormentor, but begins to wonder about his bully’s own inner life.
Review: Palo Alto reads like a book that is written for Franco rather than for a certain audience. As someone who grew up in Palo Alto himself, he is writing to "memorialize his youth" (his words for the essay at the end of the book), so it is difficult to criticize this "artistic" fictional manifestation of his raw childhood experiences.
And yet criticize is what I'll do. The first major flaw is the POV switching. Since it's a collection of short stories, the perspective is going to change between each story. If this was the only POV switching this could have been fine - one story is completely read through before beginning a completely unrelated story from another high schooler. but unfortunately within each story there is first person POV switching between each chapter.
To make matters worse, the POVs are all told in first person. When I start a new chapter, I struggle to figure out who's POV it is because I have to wait for someone to mention the protagonist's name. Is this a character that was already introduced to us? Have I read from their perspective before? Are they related to any of the other characters I've already been introduced to? There was an instance where I was forming a new character in my head, only to realize the character was the same Teddy from a couple of chapters ago.
Franco said in his closing essay that he purposefully removed the unifying factor from the collection of stories (so the short stories do not all fall under some unifying theme or purpose). This would be fine if there was more obvious division between each of the stories. But with the way the POV switching was executed, this was not obvious at all.
This book is short, but it took me forever to read - I was just not interested enough in the short stories to pick it up again. It's a slice of life where each story doesn't necessarily have a strong message nor are the characters very diverse in their personality. All of them read as troubled, dysfunctional, wild, or delinquent, maybe all of the above. Since this is based off of Franco's youth, I'm assuming this is the crowd that he surrounded himself with, but the way Franco portrayed them did not make me any more intrigued to hear these fictional characters' stories.
Franco of course is no masterful writer. Regardless of where his true passions are, to me he will always be an actor first and a writer second. His simplistic writing style makes his book read like a YA even though the content matter leans more adult.
I could have lived just fine without reading this book. I feel neutrally about James Franco (he's fine as an actor, but I'm not a big enough fan to just be reading this book because of him). I don't feel as if I gained anything from these short stories either. But that actually feels perfectly fine. Something tells me that it doesn't matter to Franco if anyone likes it or not - he probably would have written it anyway. But in the eyes of a reader, this book was mediocre at best.
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