![[Harper Perennial; 2012]](http://www.full-stop.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/flatscreen-201x300.jpg)
[Harper Perennial; 2012]
“Oh, we all hated Holden in my class,” a Long Island high school student says about J.D. Salinger’s seminal antihero, in a 2009 New York Times Op-Ed. “We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’” Other students label Caulfield “weird,” “whiny,” or “immature.” It seems that, in a world where college has become almost compulsory and children practice filling in the bubbles rather than coloring inside the lines, students just don’t have time for apathy and angst like they used to. There was a place, once, where even the Lloyd Doblers and Judd Nelsons of the world could get the girl. But the Breakfast Club has been taken over by the preps, looking for one more activity to add to their college applications.
High school is over now, and Adam Wilson’s Eli Schwartz, who has neither the dreams of the nerd nor the memories of the jock, spends his days smoking weed, watching Food Network, and growing into his bath robe. A “glorified townie without the glory,” he has been relegated to the basement of his childhood home, along with the other remnants of a failed marriage. His father has remarried, and his friends — if you can call them that — have all left for college, reducing his already limited social life to transactions with his drug dealer and the cashiers at Whole Foods. Of course, his mother is just upstairs, knitting, drinking, and crying, but he doesn’t know what to say to her. “Separate solitudes, separate floors.” But Eli cannot remain this way forever; his father has cut off his drug stipend, and after months on the market, the house finally has a buyer. If he can’t move on, he will at least have to move out.
Eli lacks drive, but he has not given up. Between episodes of Top Chef and Rachael Ray, he continues to reach out to people, including the man who is buying his house, “Seymour J. Kahn: actor, cripple.” A middling, paraplegic television actor with an appetite for OxyContin and prostitutes, Kahn takes Eli under his wing and promises to get him laid. “I recognize my own kind,” he says. Plus, he’s been looking for a weed connection. But Kahn’s Byronic sentiments, even when they echo those of Eli, often seem remote, like lines from his many made-for-TV movies — or maybe his Skinemax flick — pieced together and delivered with the authority of hard-earned lessons:
We’re carried by our daughters and brothers, wives, mothers, lovers. We’re pathetic wards. We’re anchors and they’re beautiful ships stuck in dock until we unhook ourselves. I’m trying but it’s hard. I cling to those highs and lows, those legs wrapped in fishnet hose. Those legs just walk on past. I’m dragging behind, holding on for dear life.
Like a growing number of us, Eli learned to negotiate with his peers via instant message, text, and social networks. But while Facebook allows him to espy the status, interests, and activities of nearly everyone he has ever met, it seems that the bond Eli needs no longer exists. Whether aging actors passing off lessons memorized as lessons learned, or teenage cashiers reeling off niceties to endless streams of preoccupied customers, Wilson’s characters frequently cross paths, but rarely connect. They drift in the same space, but their inertia only allows them to glance off one another, touching, but only briefly, superficially. A supertaster, Eli can tell when a dish is missing even the subtlest of ingredients. Likewise, he can feel the absence of a connection he can barely remember.
Flatscreen is humorous and bleak, but what distinguishes Wilson’s Eli from other recent misfits — Sam Lipsyte’s Milo Burke comes to mind — is that he would gladly give up both:
People told me I was funny in high school. It was good for a while, the attention, until I understood what it meant. It meant I wasn’t other things: sexy, interesting, smart, ambitious. It meant I was going to have trouble getting laid. It might have even meant I was fat.
But Flatscreen isn’t just funny. There is a line between satire and invective, between wit and snark, and Wilson knows exactly where it is. As a result, Eli’s rants, though frequent, are prudently curtailed. A mix of lazy fragments and rambling allusions, they are abandoned as quickly as they begin, as Eli realizes that he is only creating more distance between himself and others. He does not want to be a misanthrope, bemoaning his parents’ divorce — he wants to be a romantic, driving to the horizon to be with his girl. He wants to be a student, like his older brother, one who knows that this generation will fall short of the previous one yet believes that he will be the exception. He wants to be like everyone else, even if everyone else isn’t.
As Eli plans his next move, he outlines 19 potential endings — the triumphant ending, the hopeful ending, the gritty art house ending. He wishes desperately to avoid cliché, and yet he is hopelessly drawn to the solace of familiar territory. He imagines pushing his loved ones away, but only to confirm their persistence. He imagines running away from it all, but only to realize what he has been taking for granted. He even imagines committing suicide. But he’s not ready for that kind of commitment. We are quick to dismiss people like Eli as insecure or depressed; we tell them to take their Prozac and get lives. Find a job; then find yourself. But, time and time again, studies show that depressed people have more realistic views than the rest of us. They just don’t have as much sex.
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