Eric Bogosian

Wasted Beauty, cover

Finding salvation
in a world filled with vice

By Dan Tranberg

People are often confused about the fact that Eric Bogosian is actually one person. Equally known as an actor, a monologist, a playwright, and a screenwriter, he has appeared on TV shows such as “Law & Order,” and acted in more than 30 movies, including “Deconstructing Harry” and “Wonderland.”

He also has received three Obie awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his plays and solo shows, making his work in the theater the most critically acclaimed aspect of his career. Most famous is “Talk Radio,” a play he wrote and starred in four years before Oliver Stone turned it into a 1988 film in which Bogosian played the lead.

Least known is Bogosian, the author of books. But his new novel, “Wasted Beauty,” is in no way the smallest of his accomplishments. A sordid account of lives gone awry, it begins with two seemingly disparate story lines: Reba and Billy are recently orphaned siblings who are forced to try to salvage their parents’ dying apple orchard in upstate New York; and Rick is a suburban doctor, married with two kids, who seems successful on the surface but is burdened by self-loathing and increasingly difficult-to-satiate sexual desires.

The two threads soon braid together. Rick pops Viagra in hopes of reinvigorating his sex life with his wife, but ends up enhancing his late-night sessions of masturbating to Internet porn. Billy tries to sublimate his secret sexual desire for his sister by verbally and emotionally abusing her. And Reba is drawn away from the farm by her own budding sexual appetite, leading her to be discovered and reborn as Rena, a supermodel who soon becomes a heroin addict.

Poetic parallels abound as each character grapples with his or her desires, vices and search for self-preservation. Soon, the characters become literally entwined, as Rick becomes Billy’s doctor, leading to his inevitable romantic entanglement with Rena.

Throughout this quick-paced novel, the reader is put through nearly every known form of depravity. Bogosian manages to avoid the trap of telling a trite story about the corruption of the American dream or a tired tale of innocence lost, but there are moments when he teeters. One such precarious plot line has Reba giving an apple to a man, who soon takes her virginity, then lures her away from her brother and toward a life of decadence.

The author also indulges in a lengthy rant about brand names that echoes Brett Easton Ellis to the point that some might cry plagiarism.

But my read is that this is Bogosian having fun with literature rather than exploiting it. Much as it would be easy to argue that others have milked this territory to death, Bogosian’s exploration of the squalid terrain that lurks behind a veneer of glamour and success has a surprising twist.

In the end, the point is not the inevitability of corruption; it's the possibility of finding redemption in an ugly world.

Wasted Beauty
By Eric Bogosian
Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $24.

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This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, June 9, 2005