Hating Olivia

September 6, 2010
SaFranko (Lounge Lizard) sets out to find new ways to write about sex, but finds little help from his sketched-in protagonist, Max Zajack, an aspiring writer in 1970s New Jersey with a blue-collar chip on his shoulder. As Max bounces from crappy job to crappy job, he writes a novel and woos Olivia, the June stand-in to his would-be Henry, and many pages are dedicated to overheated accounts of their carnal satisfaction. Max and Olivia twist each other into physical, then psychological knots, and their four years together are marked by fights that rise in intensity as the sexual pyrotechnics fade. Max's narration reads like a hodgepodge of Henry Miller's sexual ferocity and Charles Bukowski's self-satisfied scumminess, and is as content in awkwardness ("the flesh of her luscious melons bulging delicately") as it is in shades of purple ("We were to take the plunge together into the subsoil of raw concupiscence, from which both ecstasy and madness spring, and forgo the dusty, worthless upper strata of passionless habit and duty that most humans know"). Sexus it ain't.

October 1, 2010

A couple's torrid affair slowly hits the skids over money, sex and art.

The novel stars narrator Max Zajack, who's struggling to balance go-nowhere jobs with an ambition to write great fiction in the lover-and-fighter mode of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. (The book includes a praise-soaked introduction by Dan Fante, another member of that tribe.) Max is living in a decrepit New Jersey apartment and loading trucks for a living when, one night after playing guitar in a coffee shop, he meets Olivia, an attractive literature student. Their connection is almost immediate, though their relationship is more about sex than anything else—in the early pages SaFranko's prose is enthusiastically profane, capturing the hunger the two have for each other's bodies. Max moves into Olivia's apartment not long after, but it's soon clear that Olivia has bigger issues than he can handle: She quits her classes in a fit of pique, spends money she doesn't have on expensive clothes and is prone to screaming fits and threats that she'll do herself in. As Olivia's erratic behavior endangers the couple, Max struggles to find work, and many of the most entertaining set pieces have more to do with his day-job frustrations than with the titular character. Max's gigs involve doing practically nothing at AT&T and delivering newspapers to wealthy New Jersey suburbanites, jobs that heighten the novel's man-versus-Middle-America theme. As a narrator Max is engaging, funny and full of straight-talk, and his novel-in-progress is meant to push back against the complacency he witnesses daily. But while Max feels full-blooded, Olivia is largely a bundle of ever-escalating rage. There's little effort to identify the root causes of her actions (scenes describing her troubled relationship with her parents are thin), so the final chapters of the novel take on a repetitive feel: Olivia does something flighty, Max attempts to reason with her, Olivia explodes. Eventually the squabbles sap the novel's power—it, like the relationship it describes, has gone on for too long.

SaFranko (Lounge Lizard, 2007, etc.) has a talent for two-fisted, Bukowski-esque prose, but he needs a story more worthy of it.

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November 1, 2010
With a title like Hating Olivia, it seems obvious this novel will detail the darker side of a particular relationship. While that turns out to be true, SaFranko manages to create a story whose characters, pace, and structure make all previous assumptions null and void. Max Zajack and Olivia Aphrodite Tanga are clearly on the skids. After their initial meeting, followed by subsequent months of globe-trotting dreams, a dedicated antiestablishment lifestyle, and unbridled passion, reality begins to take its toll. Both work to keep their perilous finances from pulling them under while dreaming of a life lived by the pen. Olivias depression and substance abuse and Maxs near escape from the mental vacuum of a corporate job pull a once-passionate couple slowly apart. Yet with Max and Olivias inevitable demise comes deep knowledge. SaFranko attaches a powerful message to an often painfully familiar story, about the individual versus the collective, the struggle to maintain the dream, and the importance of getting back up no matter how many times you fall.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)