After Nirvana: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Prettyboys onthe Street in PDX(and a few female stereotypes)
Review: A bit vapid, a bit glamorized...Williams' view of street life is one that seems right on if you are a gay prettyboy and your tastes in drugs run more to ecstasy and the psychadelics. As someone with two strikes against me (being that I adore opiates and that I do not possess a penis), I found this book somewhat lightweight. Perhaps because Williams either is or is fascinated by gay males himself, the female characters in this book seemed one dimensional and peripheral. They exist only to prop up the males' existence and do not have the same pathos, torment, and beauty as the male characters. Now, 99% of all films/books have this problem so I should really blame society for this flaw, not Williams...but if you are at all irked at this tendency, particularly in portraits of countercultures, do not buy this book. If however you are lucky enough to be an attractive young hipster boy you will probably adore this book and its depictions of sex, drugs, sleazy johns, parties, and Portland street life.

Rating:
Summary: Like the Northwest weather...this book is starkly gray.
Review: After Nirvana is Lee Williams' odyssey of five runaway teens living off the hard streets of Portland and Seattle. With a forcefully graphic style, Williams effectively and minutely details Portland's city streets, the hustling, the drugs, and the faceless sex. It is a staid, emotionless novel fully consistent with the emotional insulation of the teens. However, it also is a story where suppressed emotions occasionally break out showing the teens to be nothing more than cold, frightened, lonely kids. It is an interesting read, even though the ending is somewhat predictable. Overall, After Nirvana is an exceptional depiction modern hustlers and an excellent portrayal of street kids in the nineties.

Rating:
Summary: Non-Perishables
Review: At one point, the characters Lee William's first novel, After Nirvana, find themselves in a Safeway with a coupon book shopping for a single stick of deodorant to handle the five hustling runaways. They are five street kids teens, two girls and three boys, who banded together to watch after each other and collectively earn what they can in the park bathrooms, highway rest areas, and adult video booths along I-5 between Eugene and Seattle. This mission to buy deodorant is probably one of the most complicated tasks undertaken in the course of the story, which sort of makes After Nirvana sound like a chronicle of five mental deficients, but really illustrates how alien buying dry goods like make-up or toilet paper are to these street kids. They loiter in front of the confusing row of choices.

"I was standing next to Branch in the soap and pit-stick aisle and he was going through the Soft $ Dri's, popping the tops, sniffing and holding them out to me, one at a time, asking `Does this smell like snatch?' but before I'd say anything he'd sniff the stick again, say, `Yeah, too much,' put the top back on, put the thing back on the shelf. "Dude, there's gotta be one that doesn't reek like chick."

But before they stop at this Safeway to buy some deodorant they accomplish a series of tasks with as much fluent ease as my own tired trips to the Thriftway where I automatically pick up non-perishables and odds and ends, that is the things I need to survive and the various not essential to my survival items like deodorant to hide my own stinky presence. These kids have identified johns and hustled tricks at dusk in Eugene. They have hustled in video booths. They have engineered an appearance in a cheap triple x video and sold acid in back water towns in Oregon. But they can't manage to buy one stick of neutral deodorant to cover the smell of the five of them.

Lee William's doesn't seek a cause and effect chain which ultimately leads to a prime mover, some action or sequence that resulted in these kids ending up the street. There isn't any moral in this book about abusive parents or drug use. And there isn't a progression toward recovery or redemption or any other artificial Aesop style moral. Unlike the movie of a couple of years ago that plays out the hackneyed story of street kids, Where the Day Takes Us, which aside from flat characters followed the street exploits of a character named Lion who benevolently watched over his pack, After Nirvana is a naked narrative following the story of how these kids meet together and then aren't together anymore.

Consequently, the narrative feels effectively fragmented and episodic. The novel isn't about why these kids are like this but shows the way that they are. This book is sex, drugs, and rock and roll irony lived out on thirteen year old bodies where the equations are so basic that irony is the only form of clothing these kids have. Such values as straight or gay or love or powder fresh pH balanced really are just a little more expensive than they can afford.

Rating:
Summary: You have to be from Portland to get most of this book.
Review: I picked up After Nirvana by accident at the bookstore, thinking it a history of post-grunge music. I was suprised to find a novel whose action takes place in and around my own neighborhood in downtown Portland, Oregon. I purchased the book and found it to be an easy read. The story is about a teen-age "gutter-punk" who turns to male prostitution to survive and his friends. The story is told in an informal manner like it's being told to us by the author anecdotally. There are also several narrative jumps back and forth through time, a technique that is confusing at first. The first thing a reader notices about the book and Mr. William's writing style is that it is detailed. Every bit of minutae surrounding the characters is told in geographic detail. Being a resident of downtown Portland, I found the references to real-life locations exciting. Seeing what, to myself, are everyday locations told in such detail became the main pleasure in reading the book. Unfortunately, it's the same detail that may put off non-Portlander readers. It's as if the author knows the reader is from Portland and throws in the references so that there is no confusion as to what or where he is describing, but to a non-resident without such knowledge, the detail is lost and can even be confusing. The story itself seems to be a rather cliche'd re-telling of My Own Private Idaho and Basketball Diaries. No remarkably new territory is covered. After Nirvana, by Lee Williams, is a great in-joke for Portland residents, but the joke is unfortunately lost on everyone else.

Rating:
Summary: Good Insight To Street Life
Review: My best friend introduced me to this book and once I started it, i couldn't put it down. It was like I was there, with the narrator, while he was telling me this story of his life with Branch, Jody, Nicki, and James and i felt as if for a short period of time, I was there with them. It let me reach inside and touch something that I never knew was there

Rating:
Summary: I Can't Stop Thinking About This Book
Review: Sometimes you read a book, and it never leaves you. Well, I can't get this book out of my mind. It was just so good because it was so 90s, so post-grunge, so my generation. Who can't relate to listening a worn tape of Bleach through your headphones? This is THE book for anyone who remembers what it was like right after punk broke.

Rating:
Summary: Post-grunge existentialism?
Review: This is not the kind of book I would normally read, and thus I enjyoyed it all the more for bringing me into a world I would not have otherwise known. This account of young people in what is apparently recorded as a "post-grunge period" reveals to us the chaotic life of four youngsters who find themselves misplaced and out of touch. (I don't say out of touch with "reality" because they have their own reality with which they are very much in touch.) We're basically in the mind of the narrator, but at the same time we're not because he's actually addressing us, almost as if he's telling us his story. What startled or rather impacted me most is that these youngsters have no plan, few rules, and much life. They live the moment, worrying little about tomorrow although in their own way they're always thinking about their next step and concerned about the future. Williams seems to have captured well the existentialist nature of these post-grungists, if that term may be used. In the end, the characters may be trapped in a world that has forgotten them, but they are freer than the others who surround them.

Rating:
Summary: Post-grunge existentialism?
Review: This is not the kind of book I would normally read, and thus I enjyoyed it all the more for bringing me into a world I would not have otherwise known. This account of young people in what is apparently recorded as a "post-grunge period" reveals to us the chaotic life of four youngsters who find themselves misplaced and out of touch. (I don't say out of touch with "reality" because they have their own reality with which they are very much in touch.) We're basically in the mind of the narrator, but at the same time we're not because he's actually addressing us, almost as if he's telling us his story. What startled or rather impacted me most is that these youngsters have no plan, few rules, and much life. They live the moment, worrying little about tomorrow although in their own way they're always thinking about their next step and concerned about the future. Williams seems to have captured well the existentialist nature of these post-grungists, if that term may be used. In the end, the characters may be trapped in a world that has forgotten them, but they are freer than the others who surround them.