THUPERTHTAR! Andy Warhol's A: A Novel (Grove Press)

This sounded as thought it might be interesting, but it turned out to be sort of unreadable. Andy just said "Hey, let's tape record everybody and then have someone type it." That's a good way to document a scene, but not exactly a stellar way to write a novel.

It did make me almost late for work when I was reading it in the tub..it's the sort of book you end up jumping all around in, because it's so homogenously gossipy, bitchy, bland....it's about Ondine (Warhol thuperthtar Robert Olivo) more than it is about Drella (Andy)...and Ondine is friggin' annoying...you get the sense he thinks of himself as a character out of Genet...everyone in A is so messed up on amphetamine (partially responsible for the title...the A-heads grouped around Ondin) and whatever else is available, that normal life is a weird joke to them. I believe it's called arrested development...like when Ondine finds the newspaper pics of a child suffering from progeria hilarious. These are people who let one junkie shoot them all up with rat poison (strychnine) at a party and still wax nostalgiac about it. But like most things associated with Warhol, in the end the book is not horrifying, illuminating, endearing, or even that interesting...it's neutral to the point of boring, as neutral as Warhol was in his stance towards life...this is the guy that filmed a mall escalator running mostly empty for hours, after all, the guy who said that all cars should be black (he did have a sense of humor)...although I admit he's very funny in that little book of his thoughts on love, because no one ever talks about love in those neutral, blah terms...that one's worth picking up if you can find it, it's like a five minute read; I think it's called Warhol on Love. I suppose some people would read A and think it's Felliniesque or a modern adaptation of the Satyricon, but it's so, "oh, i don't know...something or other." Uh huh.

Andy Warhol may be the only "important" artist in the Western canon whose entire oeuvre was based more on attitude than ideas. (Neutrality and boredom are attitudes more than they are ideas.)