Book Review: Near Wild Heaven
One rule of writing is that your best material tends to come from your experiences. If this isn't true about Dominic Cicere's Near Wild Heaven, then he's damn good at faking it.
Cicere's book — which contains a collection of poems, a short story and a screenplay — provides some wonderful flashes of the sort of affection that exists between a writer and what they know, especially in the short story "Split Decision," in which a Nick Hornby-esque character named Thom struggles over whether he should break off his current relationship with a sweet school teacher. While Thom suffers from Peter Pan syndrome, like most of Hornby's characters, Cicere teases the reader by later revealing details about the couple that add a layer of gray to the black and white proceedings. Some readers might understand Thom's reasons for the split, if not the planned execution of its demise, which could be defined as one of the worst ways to break off a relationship. It's this type of complexity that makes the story enjoyable, and it's unfortunate Near Wild Heaven doesn't have more of it.
Cicere also shows promise in his collection of poems. In "Empty Tank Blues," he summons the ghost of Charles Bukowski to give the finger to the oil industry, while simultaneously referencing "Red Dawn." "Gas costs as much as milk," Cicere writes, "and that's fucked up because milk won't get you anywhere." The poem "Adams Morgan" is a love letter to a neighborhood that has put up with so many "hipsters, hustlers, politicos and the underprivileged," who often discover the morning after that "the sun is bright and unforgiving."
It's with Cicere's screenplay, "The Catch," the final element of the book, that Near Wild Heaven loses us. Cicere notes in the introduction that it was included only as a historical document and to illustrate "good" bad writing, but it seems like the last thing you'd want to do as a writer is include admittedly bad writing in any of your books. As a screenplay, it's a mess. Since most films follow the basic three-act structure, "The Catch" is set up as follows: Act one has boy pining for girl; in act two, boy loses the girl; and in act three, boy gets the girl but finds out she has psychological problems and a drug habit, so he decides he didn't want her after all. On top of the banality of the subject, in screenwriting, each page represents one minute and Cicere has overloaded his film at almost two hours. There's no hook to the premise and a lot of the humor, Cicere admits in his introduction, is made up of "inside jokes."
Because Near Wild Heaven is a collection of material from 1997 to 2007, we can partially see Cicere's reasoning behind including "The Catch." Every writer has a piece they wrote that might be a little too personal or was created a little too early. Neal Stephenson shrugs his off whenever someone asks him about it or asks him to sign a copy. Cicere wants to embrace his writing, no matter what form it has taken over the years. And two-thirds of the time, that works wonderfully.
Cicere will hold a book release party for Near Wild Heaven tomorrow, Tuesday July 31, at 9 p.m. at Galaxy Hut with DJ Will Eastman.