Straight to Video
SKINNER, DAVID
Straight to Video The comic novel as moviemaking device. by David Skinner Larry Doyle is a sit-down comic, a rather successful one. He writes funny stuff for the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs,...
...At times it seems to be barely a novel at all: more like a comic book with fewer pictures...
...These days, a novel is what you write when you don't already have Simpsons writing credits on your CV It's not as if Doyle deserves a medal—especially since, from his acknowledgments, it sounds like he knocked the thing out in a couple of months—but still, his authoring an actual book speaks well of him...
...But really, it is more a demonstration of the power of good comic writing (which here comes down to having lots of funny and obvious joke lines) than a demonstration of the author's literary gifts or his powers of seeing into the heart of a nerd or a cheerleading captain...
...The words "I love you, Beth Cooper" are spoken by the book's hero, debate team captain and class valedictorian Denis Cooverman, in his graduation speech, as he urges his classmates to seize this last opportunity to say what they've really been thinking the last four years...
...And yet, she is flattered, and so she deigns to speak afterwards to Denis, who invites her to his house for a party...
...But until this moment, Beth Cooper, captain of the cheerleading squad, has been only vaguely conscious of Denis Cooverman's existence...
...He writes funny stuff for the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs, a section that, to be honest, is not always funny...
...He also hopes it will lead to something...
...It's not unlike Lisa Simpson in her own nerd mode (as opposed to her progressive lib or dutiful-sibling mode...
...In fact, the book's humor so often depends on the reader recognizing brand names and evanescent movie lines that many of its jokes may be dated before I Love You, Beth Cooper: The Movie can even go into production...
...The style is comedy in bold letters, matched by a playDavid Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard...
...Knowing and wise," says one of Doyle's blurb friends on the back cover...
...Did you ever notice how nothing quite irks book reviewers like the possibility that the novel they're being paid less than the hourly minimum to read and review is a mere prelude to a lucrative development deal...
...He was a writer and producer for three seasons of The Simpsons, which of course has been funny with incredible frequency over the years, and he's worked on a number of other shows and movies— more funny than not, to my knowledge...
...The blurbs make I Love You, Beth Cooper sound like this era's most perfect representation of the American teenager...
...Nor are many of Doyle's jokes likely to be around for the ages...
...Unfortunately, I did...
...But that is exactly what the book is not...
...If your expectations are set at She's All That or even American Pie (with which it shares a certain scatological tendency), you'll be surprised by what Doyle has captured—less so if your expectations are set at, say, Clueless or Ten Things I Hate About You...
...Telling Beth Cooper he loves her is Denis's way of following his own advice...
...Much more sensibly, he has written a novel of updated stock characters and larger-than-life silly events, which he sets amidst the new Bobo suburbia...
...The reader never yawns waiting for something to happen...
...There's nothing novel in Doyle's chosen milieu of babes and geeks and muscleheads and the cruel caste system of the American high school or the device of this social hierarchy being temporarily upended by the events of one unforgettable night...
...There is one line of dialogue so dirty that were its meaning spelled out, it would not have gotten past even the copy editors at Hustler: A girl uses a strange word connoting a bizarre sexual act, then tells a nonplussed bystander to Google it...
...What Doyle does best is depict the inner world of a cartoonishly nerdy nerd whose little nerd head is filled with hyperbolically nerdy thoughts...
...The rest of the story is a slapstick romp through the familiar teenage wasteland of socially awkward parties, reckless behavior, and lax parental supervision...
...To banish such thoughts, Doyle could have written a novel so uncin-ematic, so internal in its concerns, so much like the plotless dramas of MFA graduates that no one would ever think to make a movie of it...
...The other characters, excepting Beth Cooper herself, seem little better than their average-quality teen movie counterparts, whom they are intended to upstage...
...But the whole thing charges forward with such zip that you forgive it its sins and enjoy the ride, sometimes laughing really hard...
...ful font and a drawing by the cartoonist Evan Dorkin at the beginning of each chapter...
...And now he's written a novel...
...When Beth Cooper actually shows up at Denis's house for the party, he is momentarily paralyzed: "Adrenaline, epinephrine, seratonin, corticosterone, testosterone and several other exotic hormones squirted from various glands or were being synthesized like crazy throughout his body, in far beyond prescription strengths, and so all non-essential functions such as thinking had shut down...
...Doyle takes his laughs when he can get them, which is pretty often, and his book has one major virtue: The story's action drives with beguiling speed to its conclusion...
...Unless I Love You, Beth Cooper turns out to be just another way to get a movie project started...
Vol. 12 • June 2007 • No. 38
