They don’t write ‘em like Permission anymore. Kristal’s biting, beautiful, sex-soaked novel of a screenwriter’s unraveling is as bluntly masculine as it is bookishly cultured: Just pages in, Kristal writes “Stripped, my wife proved to be perfection, reminding me of Edward Weston’s nudes of Tina Modotti, sunbathing on the azotea.” The accounts of dalliances with sex workers to come, powered by the protagonist’s perfect intersection of self-loathing and disposable income, are similarly precise, turned-on, and simultaneously disgusted and unapologetic. “And are you an upscale gentleman?” they tend to ask, rousing the protagonist to muse “Though I could appreciate the desire of the businesswoman to determine how much the customer might be good for, ‘upscale’ seemed such a dispiriting word, so product-and-lifestyle oriented.” That quote exemplifies Permission: louche but glittering, impolite but incisive, as hung up on words as it is on sex, always written with rare brio and clarity. The story’s both simple in outline and richly complex in the telling, something like life. As the ‘80s edge into the ‘90s, a New York writer, convinced he’s the one who could capture his generation “in acerbic, sharply-etched works that might stand as testaments to a time and place,” enters recklessly into a marriage that soon goes south. After a couple rough years, he ventures to Los Angeles for an escape from the fights … and a crack at true cultural prominence. There he faces depression, a $5,000-a-month sex and coke habit, and the end of his discipline and optimism.
True to his word, though, that narrator offers us a sharply etched testament to Los Angeles in the 1990s, from the perspective of Mailer-loving not-quite-genius who elects to “[murder] shame by embracing it.” Vividly detailed, shot through with heartache, and slicingly funny about the humiliations of life as a screenwriter—"I’d been subjected to the process of development, an ordeal that began with the assumption that what I’d written was a failure”— Permission will thrill lovers of old-school, id-driven literary novels.
Takeaway: An incisive, hilarious, sex-drenched novel of ‘90s Hollywood and a screenwriter’s addictions.
Great for fans of: Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure, Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
