Double Feature: A Novel
“. . . terribly funny and charming . . .”
“A double feature is a showing of two movies back to back. . . . But the second movie of the double feature was always better . . . So. Make believe. It is important. Your second feature will start soon.”
As a metaphor for the way life moves along, this compression of Booth Dolan’s speech to his son Sam’s fifth-grade class on Career Day is pretty nifty. Unfortunately, it takes many years before Sam himself is ready to take his father’s advice to heart.
In the interim, he will see a dream destroyed, have unsatisfying personal relationships, lose a beloved parent, and try to get over himself.
Film school auteur Sam is devastated when his thesis film is tampered with by his assistant director, a troubled young man Sam is using for his money. His artistic sensibilities bruised, Sam eschews trying again and instead drops into a sulk. His depression is only exacerbated when the film he abandoned later becomes a cult classic along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Stuck with a choice of moving into his own second feature of life or staying static, Sam chooses the latter, and fills his days as a video store clerk and later a wedding videographer, mentally re-scripting his life to feature himself as misunderstood genius and casting his father, the aforementioned Booth, as central casting’s perfect villain.
Through a series of increasingly unbelievable scenarios, Sam comes to a tentative understanding of life and his place in it, reconciles with his estranged father, and (maybe) makes a new start. And he gets the girl! Fade to black.
Along the way, the story meanders through Sam’s past as well as his present, taking side trips to his parents’ past as well.
It is clear in Owen King’s book of short stories and a novella, We’re All in This Together, that he has talent as a writer. His dialogue is believable, and he has a turn of phrase that is a joy, with frequent lines like: “He looked as if he’d spent the night crammed inside a glove compartment.” What a wonderful, evocative character description!
Mr. King clearly knows his stuff as far as the technicalities. There are no narrative missteps to be found, no awkward phrasing or out of character moments to tear a reader out of the narrative. His nearly 13-page, single-paragraph description of the making of Sam’s movie is incredible; intentionally claustrophobic and uncomfortable, it’s one of the finest examples in print of how it’s okay to break the (writing) rules only if you understand the rules. For that passage alone, the book has merit.
In We’re All in This Together, Mr. King showed a fine hand with his work, his writing more literary than pulp despite the pop fiction nature of his subjects. He shows a similar sensibility in Double Feature, describing characters and settings deftly even in the crudest of situations.
This particularly shows in his loving descriptions of the process of making a film and in his depiction of Sam’s relationship with his mother. Though back and forth time jumps in novels often render the work choppy, Mr. King manages them well, each feeding organically into the next. And the book is terribly funny and charming, with many “read aloud” passages when it works.
With all of these components, this book should have been a home run. Unfortunately, these components come in a package that includes some less delightful elements.
Though all of the characters are described nicely, many of them feel like caricatures. Given Booth’s profession and life, perhaps this can be forgiven in him, but it’s not so forgivable for the rest of them. We meet the Funny, Fat Roommate, the Crazy Ex-Wife, the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and her Homicidal Husband . . . but there’s no context to them as real human beings, no sense they have a life away from Sam. That’s one problem.
The second is Sam himself. He is an utterly unlikable character. Whiny, self-absorbed, and self-important, he never quite connects as real. He’s like a Seinfeld character come to life. While having a “nice” protagonist isn’t necessary (witness Lara Santoro’s lead character in The Boy or Brian in David Nicholls’ Starter for 10), what is necessary is that the character have something in them with which the reader can connect, however uncomfortable that connection might be.
Sam has nothing because Mr. King lets us see nothing in him besides his unlovely qualities. Maybe loving his mother is a redemptive quality, but that doesn’t quite work as she plays so little part in his decisions. Booth Dolan, despite being his son’s nemesis, is a stronger, much more sympathetic character—even with his flaws.
Finally, the book suffers from a surfeit of wackiness. Much like Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang (published in 2011), Mr. King’s book teems with crazy, whacked out characters doing unbelievable things.
Both books share the DNA of John Irving’s books and the movies of Wes Anderson, but there’s an important difference: those men use a hyper reality in the service of making very real observations about real human beings and how we act.
Mr. King and Mr. Wilson’s work each individually lacks that crucial element. There is no discernible reason for the craziness, aside from being, well . . . wacky. The third act of Double Feature is especially crammed with silliness, as Sam and Company go on an inexplicable drug and sex trip (drugs played little part in the novel up to that point), leading to a credibility straining ending.
When all is said and done Double Feature is perhaps a young man’s book. That demographic might find it easier to relate to self-absorbed Sam; might believe a woman they met once (and whom they spectacularly and publicly dumped) would be so desperate for them that she’d pursue them for days and joyfully sleep with them at the end of the chase; might be able to ignore Sam’s lack of emotional growth.
The rest of us should take a hint from Larry Mc Murtry’s lukewarm cover blurb, “Double Feature is a beautiful, wrenching beginning, and Owen King is a young writer of immense promise,” and wait for Mr. King’s own second feature.