People in the public eye are always looking for the next big thing. Singers want to act, actors want to direct or sing, and they all want to write a novel. Add James Franco to that literary list. Franco, who has acted in movies and on General Hospital, made a short film and went back to school to get his master's degree, recently published Palo Alto, a collection of 11 linked short stories about teenagers growing up in (where else?) Palo Alto. I'm a big James Franco fan, but most of the stories in this collection make me think he should stick to acting.
The collection started out with a few promising stories. In "Lockheed," a very intelligent young girl is stuck in a boring summer internship and then she witnesses a disturbing act of violence at a party she shouldn't even have attended. "American History" tells the story of a student who feigns racism in a class assignment to impress a girl, only to have it backfire. But beyond that, every story is about rootless, self-absorbed and self-destructive teenagers who resort to drugs, violence, sex and, in one story, sexual abuse, to pass the time. I know that Franco was probably trying to make a statement about these kids needing direction, needing something concrete and worthwhile to fill their days, but I honestly felt very little empathy for most of the characters. Instead of exploring why a narrator of one of the stories would want to crash his car into an abutment, Franco sensationalizes it and turns it into a joke afterward.
I believe Franco's writing shows promise, but honestly, I think that this collection got published mainly because he is James Franco. I'm not a squeamish person, but the excess of drugs, violence, abusive language, animal cruelty, sex and reprehensible behavior became tremendously unappealing very quickly.
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