Flatscreen
By Adam Wilson. Harper Perennial, 336 pp, softcover

Slackers inhabit a venerable, if unkempt, corner of literary and cinematic culture. And in his debut, Flatscreen, the New York Times and Paris Review’s Adam Wilson revives the deadbeat in a story that’s as acerbic, perverted, and modern as you could hope for in your drug-addled dreams.

Eli Schwartz is a dishevelled, love-handled, love-starved guy who’s done nothing post–high school besides smoke pot, stalk his crush on Facebook, and shop at Whole Foods on his “slutty dad’s” dime. He lives in his divorcée mom’s basement, complete with flatscreen, and can quote films ranging from Magnolia releases to Vivid ones to suit any scenario. This slothful idyll is interrupted when his mom sells the house to a washed-up, paraplegic actor named Kahn. Eli develops a strange, vaguely homoerotic, oxy-and-coke-fuelled bond with Kahn, who goads Eli to go out into the world and get laid. Which he does: sometimes indulging his “milfy desires”, going upstairs with a former schoolmate’s mom; other times aiming for girls his own age, awkwardly screwing the wan ex-girlfriend of a guy who committed suicide (a contemporary calls her a “total whore-bag”).

This can’t go well, can it? And it sure doesn’t, fast. Flatscreen is a classic three-act production, and Part 2 is entirely devoted to Eli’s meltdown. And it is spectacular. Without spoiling too much, it involves a wide variety of drugs, at least one hooker, a high-school football game, and a gun. By the time we get to Part 3, where Eli deals with his daddy issues and actually tries to get his shit together, it’s tough to imagine things could get worse. But guess what!

Flatscreen’s writing is anything but slack. Wilson’s prose has an easy buoyancy that suggests he’s a writer who comes by his talent naturally. The book is phenomenally quotable; after reading it, you might want to run down to Bang-On and print “I want to live forever, but I’ll settle for suburbia” on a T-shirt. But beyond the absurdist humour and dry wit, Eli’s barrel-bottom-scraping humanity is what cements his standing as one of the best literary slackers out there.