Living Colorful Beauty is a twisted, intensely character-driven ride. In Living Colorful Beauty, author Jonathan Harnisch tells the story of Ben, a man diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, and several other issues. Ever since his youth, Ben has been both plagued by mental illness and obsessed with venality. As he navigates through an unstable, directionless life and leaves a string of shattered romances in his wake, he generates a fictional character, Georgie Gust, to deal with his many paraphilias and neuroses. But with the introduction of a new psychotherapist, Ben may have a chance to let go of his doppelg nger as well as his overwhelming insecurity. Though the book is saturated with Ben's sexuality, its prevailing theme is actually his struggle to come to terms with his mental health. The entire book reads like a Freudian therapy session, so the ultimate resolution of Ben's problems is appropriate. Ben's internal creative process is integral to the book's effectiveness, since much of the psychoanalysis Ben receives seems to come from himself through the lens of his fictional creation, Georgie. The book features an almost claustrophobic amount of navel-gazing, which may be intentional. At times, the reading experience leaves no doubt as to how the book's main character could drive himself crazy with his recursive, obsessive self-examination. Ben and Georgie have an interesting and nuanced relationship. At times Ben seems completely unable to control his double while simultaneously being one with him. He often reassures himself that his creation is the inferior man, citing Georgie's pumpkin-like body as the reason that nobody will ever want him. On the other hand, of the two of them, Georgie seems to have the more active love life. Ben reaches for emotional intimacy through relationship after relationship, but his illness, issues with women, and physical demands--the Georgie in him--constantly hamper his progress. As the narrator, Ben's point of view colors all of the other characters. Several of these, in addition to Georgie, are or may be fictional, mere expressions of Ben's illness. This is especially true of the women in Ben's life. There are comparatively very few men in this story, but the women are usually of a seductive and even predatory type. Ben aggressively sizes up the ladies he knows, from his girlfriends to his therapist, in terms of their attractiveness, perhaps in an attempt to balance the scales, since in his own perception, women are domineering copies of his own terrifying mother. Part of Ben's evolution is to move toward a valuing of women beyond his mother issues, a satisfying direction for this character to travel. Living Colorful Beauty is a twisted, intensely character-driven ride that ends on a hopeful note. It may interest fans of Charles Bukowski and Tom Robbins. -- Foreword Clarion Reviews
Benjamin J. Schreiber has left rehab, but isn't out of the woods. His life, plagued by schizophrenic personalities and Tourette's, exists in series of maddening hallucinogenic episodes that combine his deepest insecurities with dark fantasies. In every one of these manic flashes, the same characters appear: Georgie, the alter-ego living in Ben's body, and Claudia, the object of his twisted desires and destructive obsession. In his sickness, Ben writes to his psychiatrist, Dr. C., about these "schizophrenic blue-movie skits and sleazy hardcore porn-flicks", creating with his pen a disturbing window into the psychopathy that controls his every moment. The Oxygen Tank is a dark chronicle of one man's schizophrenia and obsession. In a way no other book on mental illness has done, it provides a direct tap into a disturbing reality (and lack thereof) that tangles love, obsession, hatred, desperation, fear, dominance, and the terrible need to be loved.
Intense and artfully self-centered, this novel wraps around itself in search of release, after which the pleasure is over all too soon. Jonathan Harnisch's Pastiche is an exhaustive and frequently painful catalog of the struggles of the weirdly shy and chronically frustrated character Benny, who struggles to find a way to connect to the outer world. Benny likes latex. He likes to be encased, totally enclosed, and separated from reality by a thin, impermeable layer of rubber. His anxiety is that his membrane of choice, whether it's a prophylactic or a jumpsuit, will suddenly break. Author Jonathan Harnisch, in mega-fictional, maximalist style, spares no detail when it comes to Benny's life. From fellatio to family therapy, every humiliating detail is chronicled in this over-eight-hundred-page novel, which almost seems to take pleasure in its narrator's embarrassment. If there's an envelope to push, the novel pushes it--hard. The book's first sex scene takes place in the living room of Benny's neighbor, Vivienne: "She was a ball of chaos. She was a marriage counselor who'd never been married, a parenting educator who'd never had kids, a rehab counselor who'd never been rehabbed herself." The combination of these two personalities is predictably disastrous. Delightful, though, is the narrative's fine attention to small details: Vivienne's Lucky Charms temporary tattoos, the glow-in-the-dark stars on her bedroom ceiling. Benny is hyper-aware of his condition--his fetish isn't normal, and he knows it--and he has several theories about its origin. He vacillates between blaming others for his difficulty in finding satisfaction and desperately trying to understand what's the matter with him. His personality splits, then re-enjoins itself. Vivienne, grotesquely faithful to the last, is with him for the whole ride. She's "his personal trainer in pain. She has to ensure she gives him that high he craves and satisfy her own perverse longings; all the while she must be certain it's not too much for him right now." Themes of false confidence and amateurs playing at professionalism run through Pastiche, which seems intent on exposing its characters as frauds. Vivienne, so childish in some ways, is forty. Benny's other lovers also exhibit narcissism in the extreme, and are quick to assert their power. Yet it takes mere paragraphs for Benny to suss out their weaknesses, and he is equally quick to exploit them back. After all, what's a sadist without a masochist to torment? As the lowest of the low, the crummiest of the crummy, Benny holds all the cards in every one of these transactional relationships. With Pastiche, Jonathan Harnisch tests the limits of his subject. How far he can push Benny, how long he can draw out each painful scene, is sadomasochistic in the extreme. Pastiche succeeds as an example of art imitating life. Its self-centered intensity keeps it wrapped up in itself, like Benny. When it finds release, the pleasure's over all too soon. -- Foreword Magazine
