Torture The Artist

Rating:
Summary: Paradise Found. Paradise Lost.
Review:

A wealthy media mogul with too much money and little time left to live hatches an unusual scheme: to bring true creativity back in all art forms, writing, music, etc. Under the aegis of New renaissance, the company posits that a group of young creative geniuses can be isolated during their formative years and carefully educated in the arts, at the same time undergoing systematic deprivation of the happiness most people enjoy, resulting in a surplus of angst-generated creativity such as the world has never seen.

Enter six-year old Vincent, one of 457 children chosen for the New Renaissance Academy. Each child is assigned a handler, a reverse "guardian angel"; Vincent's handler is Harlan Eiffler, a 28-year old cynic whose job is to thwart every opportunity for happiness and direct Vincent's creative flow. Vincent dances to the music of his puppeteer, churning out plays, screenplays, musical arrangements and novels, all well-received by the public. New Renaissance is making a fortune. Vincent's work is brilliant, even though his personal life is in a shambles, eventually reaching critical mass.

But humanity is what it is and this is essentially an experiment fraught with pitfalls and doomed to fail. One day Vincent and Harlan find themselves staring across an abyss, face to face with revelations that change their relationship forever, bitter truths colliding after years of subterfuge and dishonesty. Paradise Lost.

Torture the Artist is a difficult novel to describe. The closest I can come is a combination of incendiary superhero comics with subtle shades of pornography, along with the naiveté of childhood, the images as bold as the strokes of the cartoon artist's pen. Goebel attacks his theme with fervor and enthusiasm, daring the reader to ignore his radical ideas. Stuck in a jaded and sophisticated world, this young author strikes a blow for his own voice, load and clear, a cross between Boogie Nights, Animal House and Quentin Tarantino's limbic brain. Luan Gaines/2004.





Rating:
Summary: Turn off the sitcom, pick up the book
Review: With Torture the Artist, Joey Goebel is on his way to the ranks of Chuck Palahniuk, Will Christopher Baer, and the other leaders of contemporary fiction who have their own distinct voice and are not willing to compromise.
Torture the Artist moves with such speed and wit that it is easy to finish the book in a single day because you really don't want to stop reading it. Goebel's voice is so witty and powerful that it may just inspire some people to turn off the radio and find some music with substance, and do the same with television and movies. The entire entertainment industry gets a nice, well-deserved punch to the throat in this novel that sends it staggering backwards into the seedy alley that it lurched from.
The premise of the novel is very original and is an extreme version of the old question "Is the best art born from pain?"
With writers like Joey Goebel making his presence known with his debut, The Anomalies, and besting it with Torture the Artist, the "New Renaissance" of contemporary literature may very well be at hand.