"So, I’m great in the sack,"
boasted Park Slope born-and-bred author Ned Vizzini to a capacity
crowd at the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg last month.
And yes, Vizzini was indeed wearing a large, burlap sack.
"As we get further from high school we lose track of the
primal terror and helplessness that are part of that time,"
he continued, "and the sack reminds me. Besides, it’s comfortable."
Vizzini was at the brewery to read from his most recent novel,
"Be More Chill," and to present the director’s cut
of Richard Kelly’s cult film "Donnie Darko," both of
which feature medicated, awkward high school boys – whether willfully
or voluntarily – as protagonists.
"If you’re here tonight, you were probably weird in high
school," Vizzini continued before launching into a well-received
reading of the first three chapters from "Be More Chill,"
which was published in June by Hyperion Books. The audience wore
dark-rimmed glasses and studded belts, and many had visible tattoos:
these were indeed the "weird" kids in high school who
were probably picked on mercilessly. A self-proclaimed former
dork, whose own high school experience is documented with self-deprecating
wisdom in his first book, "Teen Angst? Naah: A Quasi Autobiography"
(Free Spirit Publishing), and which inspired the fictional account
of high school in "Be More Chill," Vizzini is at ease
with the crowd; he knows what will ring true.
Vizzini, 23, is still near enough to high school age to remember
the struggle, not necessarily to be popular, but simply to not
feel conspicuous and inept all the time. Set in suburban New
Jersey, "Be More Chill" is the story of Jeremy Heere’s
quest to be cool – or at least cool enough that the lovely Christine
Caniglia (who barely notices him) would give him the time of
day. The plot traces the trajectory of Heere’s popularity following
the fateful decision to buy and ingest a "squip," a
supercomputer in pill form that coaches the user to become cool.
It’s the Midas touch for dorks – the squip offers fashion, comportment
and speaking advice, creating a sudden flare of fabulousness.
When asked whether he would’ve bought a squip to become cool,
Vizzini said, "Yes, of course. I tried everything else –
except clothes."
"Be More Chill" is also a cautionary tale: the squip
turns out to be defective, with humiliating results.
Vizzini’s Web site, nedvizzini.com, prominently features squip
propaganda. A banner along one page asks, "Has your boyfriend
been acting all cool all of a sudden? He might have a squip."
Discussing squips at the Tea Lounge on Union Street in Park Slope,
recently, Vizzini seems mildly amused by the phenomenon he’s
spawned.
"I hear from kids all the time asking how they can get one;
they don’t seem to get that it’s not real," he said. But
like an experiment in phenomenology, in which an image or idea
acquires a life of its own in the popular consciousness – such
as the "Andre the Giant has a posse" stickers which
found their way on to lampposts and billboards around the world
in the 1990s – the squip might be what young readers remember
best from "Be More Chill," besides its candid voice
and obvious (and un-patronizing) familiarity with abject adolescent
humiliation.
Asked how much of his books are autobiographical, Vizzini quoted
Anne Lamott’s claim that "Fiction is 65 percent real life."
Vizzini’s 2000 book, "Teen Angst? Naah," which included
pieces he’d written for the New York Press and the New York Times
Magazine while he was still in his teens, deals with similar
themes of social anxiety in high school, but the stories he writes
now are fiction. Vizzini is in the process of writing a new novel,
to be published late next year by Miramax Books.
"It’s about teen status anxiety, and money and how it screws
[the protagonist] up," Vizzini said, but declined to say
more about the plot. "The main character lives in Park Slope.
I think it’s comforting to write about where you grew up, places
you love, the din of family life." Comforting, indeed, for
a young writer who lives 10 blocks from the house in which he
was raised, since he’s had the time and energy to examine Park
Slope in detail.
On a lamppost in front of a brownstone at 901 Union St., Vizzini
points to a stenciled face.
"My friends think it’s me, but I’m not so sure," he
said. The nose is too broad, but it otherwise looks like a crude
rendering of Vizzini. "There’s another one near Marymount
Manhattan College. I want to know who’s doing them."
Perhaps the invention of the squip is making Vizzini cool enough
to take over the world, one lamppost at a time.
Ned Vizzini’s "Be More Chill"
(Hyperion Books, $16.95) is available at, or can be ordered through,
The Bookmark Shoppe [6906 11th Ave. at 69th Street in Dyker Heights
(718) 680-3680], BookCourt [163 Court St. at Dean Street in Cobble
Hill, (718) 875-3677] and Barnes & Noble [267 Seventh Ave.
at Sixth Street in Park Slope, (718) 832-9066].
