Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson

I'm choosing to write first about this 600 page epic because it's fresh on my mind. Box Office Poison was compelling enough for me to read in one day, but still, I couldn't really relate.
I didn't realize until I was nearly finished that the characters were precisely my age. I supposed correctly that Box Office Poison was written in the mid-nineties because of the Gen-X slacker vibe of the book, its references to Grunge and to Park Slope, Brooklyn as up and coming and cheap…the author has an AOL webpage to this day, and if that’s not a 90’s giveaway, I’m not sure what is. I was almost cringing in expectation of an appearance of Jay and Silent Bob. The whole thing does have a feel as though it was made for cinema not print: fast-paced dialogues, q&a interludes with the characters and daydream sequences galore.

I knew that the book was largely self-referential, and I can recognize now that the author was creating a kind of memoir of those surely nostalgic and aimless days of post-college life (the days that I am living out right now). The main character Sherman is begrudgingly working at a bookstore, as the author once did. He spends about a quarter of the book moaning about this, and to Robinson's credit, he mocks both Sherman and himself for writing stories that are perhaps mostly funny to those who share these experiences (eg: comic book conventions, horrible bookshop customers, rejection from publishers). He even throws in a plot about the little comic artist getting screwed by the giant corporation for good measure (see Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay), and who can argue with that?

But like I said, I read this book straight through so something must have touched me beyond my own need for completing what I set into doing. I can't resist a little bit of human entanglement, and this book offers plenty both emotional and physical. There's both celibate self-loathing and sex scenes set in the interplanetary void. I appreciated the fairly honest depiction of the characters as flawed and physically plain, no ultra-busty heroines in leotards, of course. I cringed honestly at the inevitable awkward encounters and I related to the pointless fights between lovers. I must say that the character that most mirrors the authors life does have quite a storybook ending...but then again, he did go on to be a renowned comic author after all.