The Losers' Club

Rating:
Summary: Unexpectedly Funny Take on Dating Hell
Review:
As someone currently trying to navigate the often treacherous waters of the "single scene," I found this lively, oddball story of a hapless "poet" addicted to the personal ads to be timely -- and darkly funny. Although I never visited New York, I once lived in San Francisco where urban 'hipster enclaves' such as described in the book were well advertised. At its core, the novel is a romance of sorts -- a rather simple, slender story, much along the lines of Sophia Coppola's Lost In Translation, only instead of being set in Japan it's set in New York's East Village, which is apparently just as foreign to me, if not as bizarre. I truly enjoyed the insights on relationships that this book provided and laughed frequently, often reminded of my own painful experiences in the dating scene (I currently use an online dating service, feeling like much of a loser myself). I read the whole book in one sitting and I can truly say this little novel made my day! There was much for me to relate to. The same may hold true for you.


Rating:
Summary: Winning and Losing in Love....or Just a Fun Romp!
Review:
One of the reasons we read books is to learn about people and places that exist beyond the fringes of our own experience. By that measure, The Losers' Club certainly delivers, at least for this reader.

The protagonist, Martin Sierra, is an aspiring writer with an undemanding day job who spends his nights out on the streets of New York's East Village. He is looking for love, mainly in the wrong places, and uses the personal ads in the newspaper as his dating strategy. This is how he meets Nikki. To Martin's mild frustration, she's involved in an on-again-off-again lesbian relationship, but they are attracted to each other and manage to sustain a warm-blooded friendship that occasionally veers towards a deeper intimacy but never takes the plunge. The personal ads lead him to other women, and the ensuing relationships allow the author to take us on a tour of the clubs and bars in the Village.

Richard Perez has obviously spent a great deal of time in these places: He describes, in fascinating detail, the décor, the ambiance, the performers and their performances. His narrative creates a montage of observations and descriptions against which to tell his story.

As to the characters, perhaps one should keep in mind that the title of the book is The Losers' Club. The people in Martin's small circle take themselves seriously, and they are quite well drawn.
When Martin and his dates are prowling the Village they are accompanied by the author's running commentary, and those are the best parts of the book. He communicates his characters' speech in a very credible style ("Just, I wanna be alone, I think."), evoking the shock tactics of street speak by not holding back on the expletives. Once in a while, Mr. Perez weaves in a little of his character's poetry, which is not grungy or punky at all, but rather a welcome change of pace. And he writes amusingly about waiting by the phone in his studio apartment, with its piles of magazine rejection slips mirroring the mood of his love life. It's all a work in progress.

I can't even say why I liked this book as much as I did except to say that I, like most of the characters in this novel, feel pretty much lost (and, in love, quite often "the loser"). It's a energetic book, a very fast read, and I thought it was fun. How often can you say that?


Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Loser
Review:
Salt Lake City is worlds away from New York City. Right? You wouldn't expect someone from Springville to know much about the club scene, drag queens, or frustrated artists of the East Village, would you? When would I have ever found myself a magnet for freaks while the girl I've spent my every aching second pining for only thought of me as 'friendship' material?

Have you wallowed in unrequited love? Have you ever gone to dance clubs? Have you ever squirmed violently in the orgiastic throng of a concert audience, adding your own pressure to the mass at the stage like so many sperm beating against an egg? The pulse throbbing in you still as you left the building, vibrating you like a bell until shirtless, you fall into the filthy frozen snow bank and writhe until your body bleeds from the scratches?

Okay, so maybe not all of this is universal. Suffice it to say, Richard Perez's The Losers' Club rang familiar for me. Even though I've never been to the Village. Even though that stage of life ended for me by age 22, and Perez's protagonist, Martin Sierra, is in his latter twenties.

Martin is an Export Assistant at Japan World Transport. He hates it, of course, and spends most of his time on the phone or on the photocopier, checking for messages on his personal ad or copying poetry for submission to whichever journal will reject him next. I hope I'm not the only one who's been there -- a collection of cold form letters from publishers your only greeting after each day at a meaningless job.

The fascination for the personals keeps Martin going day to day. What better way to people-watch than to actually set up a meeting with the watchee? Martin's obsession certainly has a hollowness to it. But it's more than idle curiosity. Once upon a time he fell in love with someone he met through the personals. Nikki. And now? They're best friends. The word is a curse. Perhaps Martin is continually trying to reenact their first meeting. As if getting it right somehow would break the spell and free him and Nikki to move beyond friendship. As for the idea that Martin is searching for his possibly abusive, definitely mysterious missing mother, I don't buy it. Were that the case he'd never have developed more feeling for Nikki than he does for any of the others.

These others form quite a menagerie. In the novel two figure prominently. Lola is an art student who lives with her mother and paints absurdly violent images. Amaris has a son and believes in vampires. Martin starts seeing both, and things are progressing in each case, through no urgency of his own. But however insignificantly mundane Martin's life may seem, with its pointless daily carousel of work, alcohol, arranged meetings and clubs, it can still come crashing down. When it does, he finds that the only thing left is something he hadn't even started with.

This is actually a formulaic romance. In fact, the climax and resolution are a little too much, the dream triggering them a deus ex machina.

Yet the book surprises with some excellent writing. There's no question Perez can tap into the era he's portraying. And the dialogue is natural, entirely credible. Dance clubs, including mosh pits, are very well described. And moments like Martin's searching for a parking spot, asking women sitting in their cars if they're leaving and invariably being told no, are exquisite.

The frustrated artist aspect of Martin's personality is underdeveloped. When the mountain of rejection letters is introduced, the description is prosaic -- a lost opportunity for Kafkaesque indulgence. But I love the discussion of journals requiring SASEs, the humiliation of providing the vehicle for your own rejection. And I suppose this aspect of Martin's character is little more important than his parking woes, or his inability to skip stones on a pond, or the fact that a club lacks his preferred draft. The point of each is to reflect on his love life.

Martin himself is far from the typical romantic lead. He's too much the good-for-nothing-but-the-appreciation-of-irony post-Gen-Xer. I suspect most readers will either find him unendurably dull or succumb to a nostalgic sympathy. But one thing I find remarkable about him is the fact that, like any genuine person, he's not entirely at ease in his context. Perez doesn't portray him as too streetwise, nor too naive. Instead, Martin has an open mind. He doesn't surprise easily. At the same time, there are drugs he's never heard of, he doesn't know what a 'swatch' is, Amaris's sexual confessions shock him, and despite his sophistication his enjoyment of silly sci-fi movies is not purely ironic. The girls themselves are interesting characters, but hardly dynamic. Lola and Amaris are props, really, and Nikki seldom more real than the Grail. Of course, that's as it should be. That's the point: she isn't tangible. She's a dream. And isn't everyone entitled to have a dream or two when they're young?

What I like most about The Loser's Club is the lack of pretension. To me this novel comes off as entirely unassuming. This isn't an overly fraught narrative like academia would relish. Neither does it strain too hard to excite the interest of mainstream young adults. Its perspective (from Martin) is straightforward. Simple and observant, as a disinterested good-for-nothing-but-unremarkable-introspective-poetry guy should be. I found myself enjoying this story despite its weaknesses. Despite the fact that it's not 'important' and that it recreates an era that isn't yet old enough to be cool again. Why? Because at one point I would have identified closely with Martin (except for the weird mother stuff, thank heavens). If the same might be true for you, I'd recommend the book.




Rating:
Summary: Raw and Energetic Downtown Portrait of Love and Failure
Review:
"The Losers' Club" is the story of Martin Sierra, an aspiring writer in New York's East Village during the mid 1990s, as he searches for relationships with a future and meaning in life.

The reader follows Martin, rejected professionally and personally, as he feeds his body through a dead-end job as a shipping clerk and attempts to feed his soul through appreciation of the East Village Art Life. He searches futilely for a woman who will respect his abilities as a poet, a writer, a lover and a friend.

His friendship with Nikki is ongoing when the book begins. Bisexual, Nikki is attainable romantically because of a continuing but ultimately doomed relationship. She spends time with Martin and the two connect physically, however Martin's emotional longing for her seems one-sided.

Martin is addicted to the personal ads, although he finds rejection there as well. The damaged women who contact him are a physical manifestation of the commercial publishers who reject his craft - commercial, promiscuous, disloyal, selfish.

As he pursues "The Art Life," it becomes clear that the associated freaks and weirdos of the East Village clubs represent Martin's own preference for pain over feeling nothing, that and other people's scorn over being perpetually ignored.

Martin's need for validation seems to emanate from the fact that his mother ignored him as a child, placing her budding career as a poet over her role as a caregiver.

This is not a perfect novel, parts of it are raw a la Bukowski, other parts seem underwritten, and overall the book seems fragmentary, but I must admit that I liked it. Almost more than I wanted to. The imagery is always razor-sharp; it's fast-moving, some of the dialogue really killed me -- hilarious, and it's written with genuine heart.


Rating:
Summary: Real.
Review: "Fiction / relationships: doomed or nonexistent" So reads the back cover of "The Losers Club", and such is it's topic.

Martin Sierra is an unsuccessful writer, living in the East Village of New York City in the 1990s. He has a boring job which pays the bills, and spends his evenings trolling around the bars and nightclubs of his locale, becoming intoxicated, and seeking meaningful relationships and good entertainment.

Martin has few close friends. The only person upon whom he calls regularly for company is the girl Nikki, his unrequited love and good companion. To Nikki, Martin seems mostly to be a source of entertaining tales, concerning his attempts to find a love through the personals.

Martin uses both the newspaper personals column, and also a telephone dating service. Through this, his main social outreach, he finds a number of contacts through the course of the book. Martin runs into a variety of girls as a result of his outreach, and we observe his interactions with them as he meets and greets them on the East Side club scene.

His women run the gamut, from demure and withdrawn Lola, who provides endless frustration and no catharsis, to extravagant new-age vampress Amaris, who offers instant gratification but no emotional succor.

Endlessly late for work, always tired, constantly calling the dating exchange tens of times each day, Martin is locked in a life which satisfies him not at all. Outside of his brief moments with Nikki, his life offers him no emotional and spiritual support.

Can Martin find the right girl for him? Will he ever get published, and get the fame he deserves? Can a telephone dating service and a bottle of malt liquor stand in for a social support structure indefinitely? Find the answers to these and other pressing questions in "The Losers Club"

So much for the plot then....rich material, ripe for the picking!

This is Richard Perez first novel. He hit a nerve with me, his age is not listed, but I would be not surprised to discover that he was, like me, in his early thirties. I have no first hand knowledge of the East Side scene in New York, but by the sounds of things the Village should twin-up with Manchester England, as they appear to have exactly the same scene! Perez does an admirable job of indicating the aloof anonymity of such a scene. Despite an eclectic plethora of locations, serving up experiences of every kind, such a scene has often no more ability to enrich the population it serves than does a maze for a laboratory rat. Martin inhabits this scene in a glum state. The nineties, and in particular a big city in the nineties was no good place to be alone, and above all, Martin is alone.

This novel serves up a commentary on the Generation X solution to loneliness....intoxicating sensory overload.

Martins addiction to calling the personals phone line (which we learn he can do one-handed, in the dark, without even thinking of the number, so ingrained is the pattern) reminded me of the rooting reflex of my baby son, forever mouthing, hoping that the source of nourishment would be around here somewhere. A lonely male in a big city in the West cannot easily find occasion to understand the source of his sense of isolation. Seething hormones insist that love is the solution to loneliness, and so the nineties was populated with an army of young men, rats in the maze, looking for Mrs. right, but in all the wrong places. Intoxicated males desperately lonely, and desperately lonely females, more frequently intoxicated by their own emotions at the same sense of loss, are not a good match.

We observe Martin in these mismatches. Cleverly Perez offers Martin a wide range of experiences. One girl constantly pulls away, another constantly offers everything, but with a dulled ennui, and neither offers any relief to the soul, except in the most immediate sense. The writer delicately portrays Martins emotional responses.....typically Martin lacks the self-awareness, in his intoxicated state to correctly identify the source of his angst, but his dreams are revealed to us, and between them and his actions, we see Martins growing desperation for the future, and misunderstanding of the past. Throughout the book, the only opportunity for growth that Martin has, is in his talking to Nikki. And this becomes more and more rare.

Oddly, though we see continually that Martin receives rejection letters, and sends out more work to publishers constantly, he never actually writes anything. When did he do this writing? Personally, I found that my own analogous experiences in the nineties provided me with the best writing I have produced, it was fully charged with the emotions I didn't understand and couldn't otherwise excrete. Perhaps Martin has forgotten that the first principal in being a great writer is to write? There is little commentary in the book regarding this side of the protagonists personality, and would have liked more, what little there is I found fascinating. I think little is of more interest to writers the hearing other people talk about their writing.

This is surely a book for no one younger than mature teens. Personally, I don't think one could understand the nuances until you had been through your own turmoil's, and therefore I would say it was best read by thirty-somethings. There is some reference to drug use, though it is viewed only askance, and Martin seems (mercifully) ignorant of that scene. There are some frank sexual scenes, and all in all, it is a book for those whose sensibilities are not offended by a frank and accurate portrayal of the singles club scene.

I enjoyed this book once I fell into it's rhythm. It took me some time to realize what the authors message was, but once I switched on to it, I could hear the echo of my own footsteps in Martins, and to be touched in that way by a book is always worth the reading.

Rating:
Summary: Humorous and sad at the same time
Review: "The Losers' Club" is a look at the New York East Village area and a man looking to find the woman of his dreams. Working through the personal ads he encounters a variety of, well, rather interesting people. Martin is a man that many of us can relate to in one way or another. Stuck in a boring, dead-end job, looking for excitement, looking for someone special, he changes his life by getting involved in personal ads. As the calls come in, some quite humorous, he starts going out with different people, going different places and establishes almost a split personality lifestyle - one Martin at work, and a completely different Martin in the evening.

Instead of boring the reader with paragraph after paragraph describing Martin's personality, the reader learns about him through his experiences with the various women that come into his life. While it does not have the plot twists and turns that I would expect in a typical novel, it makes up for the somewhat straightforward plot by exposing the reader to a wide variety of unusual and unexpected dating situations. You never know what Martin will be getting into each time he gets his messages from someone else answering his ad. It is a fun read that is both humorous and sad.

Rating:
Summary: Raw and Energetic Downtown Portrait of Love and Failure
Review: "The Losers' Club" is the story of Martin Sierra, an aspiring writer in New York's East Village during the mid 1990s, as he searches for relationships with a future and meaning in life.
The reader follows Martin, rejected professionally and personally, as he feeds his body through a dead-end job as a shipping clerk and attempts to feed his soul through appreciation of the East Village Art Life. He searches futilely for a woman who will respect his abilities as a poet, a writer, a lover and a friend.

His friendship with Nikki is ongoing when the book begins. Bisexual, Nikki is attainable romantically because of a continuing but ultimately doomed relationship. She spends time with Martin and the two connect physically, however Martin's emotional longing for her seems one-sided.

Martin is addicted to the personal ads, although he finds rejection there as well. The damaged women who contact him are a physical manifestation of the commercial publishers who reject his craft - commercial, promiscuous, disloyal, selfish.
As he pursues "The Art Life," it becomes clear that the associated freaks and weirdos of the East Village clubs represent Martin's own preference for pain over feeling nothing, that and other people's scorn over being perpetually ignored.
Martin's need for validation seems to emanate from the fact that his mother ignored him as a child, placing her budding career as a poet over her role as a caregiver.

This is not a perfect novel, parts of it are raw a la Bukowski, other parts seem underwritten, and overall the book seems fragmentary, but I must admit that I liked it. Almost more than I wanted to. The imagery is always razor-sharp; it's fast-moving, some of the dialogue really killed me -- hilarious, and it's written with genuine heart.

Rating:
Summary: Unexpectedly Funny Take on Dating Hell
Review: As someone currently trying to navigate the often treacherous waters of the "single scene," I found this lively, oddball story of a hapless "poet" addicted to the personal ads to be timely -- and darkly funny. Although I never visited New York, I once lived in San Francisco where urban 'hipster enclaves' such as described in the book were well advertised. At its core, the novel is a romance of sorts -- a rather simple, slender story, much along the lines of Sophia Coppola's Lost In Translation, only instead of being set in Japan it's set in New York's East Village, which is apparently just as foreign to me, if not as bizarre. I truly enjoyed the insights on relationships that this book provided and laughed frequently, often reminded of my own painful experiences in the dating scene (I currently use an online dating service, feeling like much of a loser myself). I read the whole book in one sitting and I can truly say this little novel made my day! There was much for me to relate to. The same may hold true for you.

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended!!
Review: Despite the edgy settings that this story takes place in - the night clubs of the East End of Manhattan, and the colorful characters we see there - this is, in one sense, a very traditional story about a struggling young artist looking for his place in the world and about a lonely young man looking for love. Will he find success; will he meet his true love? Whatever the answers, we are there for the ride with Martin, as Mr. Perez, in his debut novel, paints a very sympathetic character in Martin that we want to hang around with and follow his exploits. Not only does the author paint a vivid picture of the East End scene of the 90's, but he also brings us to the heart of Martin, so that soon into the book he becomes part of our family and we're willingly along for the journey.

This is a fun, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always enjoyable, read that has us sitting with Martin at the bars, checking messages with him, and generally rooting for him. The author puts us dead center in the middle of Martin's world. It is a hard book to put down and one that I highly recommend. I look forward to reading more books by this talented young author. -Mitchell Waldman for Scribes World

Rating:
Summary: An underground gem
Review: Having long admired the work of such derelict writers such as Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, I was more than interested in a book a friend of mine recommended to me. Let me start off by saying that this novel, The Losers' Club, is not what I expected, exactly. But, as a writer myself, reading about a rejected and "lost" writer -- you may understand my strong connection to this book.

The main character, Martin, lives in Queens New York but hangs out in downtown Manhattan exclusively. There, he meets other dissociated creative types and women through the downtown personal ads.

The first woman we meet is Nikki, a bisexual woman who Martin has grown attached to and who for most of the novel becomes Martin's central love interest. When Nikki appears to remain non-committal, Martin continues with the personals, meeting first Lola, an intense Latin East Village painter, then Amaris, a writer of sorts and a college professor, who appears to be a wild and free spirit, going so far as to bed down her own students.

The personals, in other words, become a kind of vehicle through which Martin is drawn deeper into this young Bohemian underworld of strange clubs and bars. It is through meeting these women that Martin is taken into clubs and odd places beautifully described in Perez's often precise, textured prose. For example:

"Babyland was like the many bars and cafes in the East Village whose décor shared a similar kitsch/retro esthetic, the theme in this case varying slightly in that it also centered on "infantilization." Thus, aside from the insider irony of cheesy cardboard cut-outs of beatific nuclear families and wide-eyed freckled-faced boys dreaming of being astronauts, of floating egg creams and malted milk shakes, there was also, throughout the place, a multitude of stuffed animals and Fisher-Price toys and games and, amid other bits of mismatched furniture in the back, four extra-large cribs that diapered patrons could climb into."

At another surreal nightspot:

"In the back was a lounge area comprised of zebra-striped floor, Salvation Army sofas, thrift store lamps, and about a dozen tacky black velvet portraits. Contributing to the self-consciously warped ambience was a suspended TV monitor that flashed loops of Super-8 smut, featuring "erotic" dances by the cheerful '50s pin-up icon, Betty Page.
After buying drinks from the heavily pierced barmaid, Martin and Lola pressed to the rear, past a mounted rabbit's head with antlers, and a passageway tiled with campy, obscure album covers from the '50s and '60s."

These descriptions are amazing -- and the novel is full of such passages. So, in large part, the novel is a kind of travelogue, a snap shot of what appears to be an exciting time and place in the life of this young writer. Never having traveled to New York's East Village, I nevertheless feel like I've been there after reading this book.

No less amusingly, The Losers' Club also deals with Martin's fabulous "failure" as a writer and poet. He lives, literally, with a mountain of rejection letters. And there's some mention of a "vanished" mother, who apparently was an unstable presence in his life. During these memory passages, Perez's language changes somewhat and what appears to be the character's repressed ethnicity re-surfaces. The passages themselves are also more poetic and dramatically Latin in flavor, quite beautiful. It's as if there are two very distinct voices in Martin: the American vs. the Spanish side, each doing battle and creating chaos, adding to his confusion of identity.

If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it's rather short at 176 pages. I would've loved if there were more. It moves very quickly, with short chapters. Here and there, there's the occasional flashback, too.

Another complaint (from a writer's point of view) was Perez's decision to tell the story from a third person rather than first person point of view. Third person narratives make the reader stand outside the action, observing the action and characters as though we were watching a movie. And The Losers' Club works very much like a film, with quick jumps and cuts and atmospheric descriptions. For that reason it took me a little while to warm up to the book and the main character. By the end, though, I was totally absorbed and moved by Martin's sense of loss.

Anyway, I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys the occasional "underground" novel, which is how it's being touted. For any writer who's experienced intense rejection, of a professional and person kind, it will come as a odd comfort. I think Bukowski and Miller would've liked it. So will you.