Perforated Heart

Playwright and actor Bogosian presents in his Rothian third novel the diaries of a once-prominent author embittered by his declining fame. The diary of Richard Morris begins with the writer losing a major award to a lesser talent, his latest book a failure and his agent busying himself with more marketable clients. Death and the prospect of being forgotten hound him, and heart surgery leaves him with a metaphorically convenient scar. Housebound while recovering from the operation and hiding from the affections of his young girlfriend, Richard becomes engrossed in his diaries of 30 years earlier, when he was new to New York City. While these notebooks “reveal what a total idiot” the young writer was, the elder Richard fails to notice how very little has changed. Richard remains a man who mistakes self-destruction for authenticity and is utterly incapable of seeing himself as others see him—which is aggravated when his literary fortunes take a welcome, belated turn and faces from his past show up in the present. Richard is a grade-A bastard, and his rise and fall and rise again exemplifies the often arbitrary and opportunistic machinery of the literary world and operators within it. (May)