Review: Lounge Lizard

"It's nothing less than what we have grown to expect from an uncompromising voice," writes Tony O'Neill.



It's always a cause for excitement when a new Mark SaFranko makes its way to me, doubly so when the book in question is the follow-up to the masterful Hating Olivia, the novel responsible for turning me on to SaFranko's work in he first place.

I was a little too young to fully appreciate the 80's—my memories of that time are mostly childhood fears about impending nuclear annihilation and the looming (though not fully understood) specter of AIDS. That and 'Thundercats' (well, I was under 12 at the time).

As we all now know, the 80's was the 'me' decade; the decade of Reagan and Thatcher's stranglehold on the West, a time of profit, a time of greed. It was when the likes of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and all of the other heroes of the 60's and 70's turned bigger profits than ever, and produced the worst albums of their careers. It was the decade when a lot of old hippies looked around at the way the world was going, decided that the dream was dead, and put on business suits instead.

There have been masterful literary responses to the excesses of the 80's, works like American Psycho or Bonfire of the Vanities. Both books took a scalpel to that "me decade", and now Lounge Lizard offers a new perspective. Max Zajack, reeling from the shipwreck of his relationship with Olivia, enters the 1980s with his life in freefall. When a chance job offer throws him into the world of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism, he embraces a world of easy money and even easier women. We see the moment that the last gasp of 70's hedonism meet the birth of 80's greed head-on. The book takes place before the dawn of AIDS brought the whole party to a sudden halt.

This is a raunchy book, but more so than Hating Olivia, there is a bleakness at the heart of it that is almost oppressive. In Hating Olivia, Max had at least the promised redemption of his art, but here he has nothing to fill the void except money and sex. SaFranko is unsparing in plumbing the darkest depths of human nature this time around.

Lounge Lizard works on many levels—as a modern, Alfie-style rumination on sex and what it means to be a man, as a dirty, Bukowski-esque romp—but ultimately its greatest strength is as a tale of what happened to those hedonistic, free spirits who ran up against the seismic culture shift that happened at the end of the 70's. A world where the old idealisms were swept away, and a collective madness took hold of us that is only now, almost 30 years on, beginning to loosen. 

In the final perusal of a power-suited, Republican woman called Sharon Garrity we witness Max Zajack's attempt to make sense of an era itself: to love it, to hate it, to fuck it, to destroy it… The denouncement here pretty chilling, but it's nothing less than what we have grown to expect from an uncompromising voice like Mark SaFranko. SaFranko has built upon the solid foundation of Hating Olivia, to produce a work that is even more ambitious and exciting. Murder Slim Press deserve a lot of respect for doing the work that the majors seem unwilling—or unable—to do, bringing important books like Lounge Lizard into the public eye.

[Tony O'Neill]

Buy this book>>

Lounge Lizard by Mark SaFranko
Murder Slim Press
216 Pages