More Praise for PALO ALTO
“The stories are raw and funny-sad, and they capture with perfect pitch the impossible exhilaration, the inevitable downbeat-ness, and the pure confusion of being an adolescent…. Franco has a flair for creating these stopped moments that lift a story from its specific setting into a universal place, so that particular meanings resonate out from themselves and redouble their effect.”
—Elle
“Delightfully coarse, riffing dialogue that hones in on subjects like race and sex, love and violence …Compelling and gutsy.”
—Vogue
“Franco writes with such deep empathy and affinity that one has to wonder if he lived this life.”
—USA Today
“You’ll be able to pick out Franco’s influences: Raymond Carver’s tight-lipped stoicism; the sun-streaked disaffection of Less Than Zero …Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn…. He excels at dialogue.”
—Salon.com
“In ‘I Could Kill Someone’ especially, about a high schooler’s deliberations over murdering a bully, there is an element of sympathy for the tormented narrator that makes his thought process real and frightening…. Franco is a serious writer.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[Franco’s] economic construction seems so simple throughout, but the stories end up approaching profundity. These stories were not published because James Franco is a movie star but because they are good. He makes the difficult appear simple, which only a good writer can do.”
—Booklist
“The collection exhibits a …clear sense of purpose…. It is, in short, literature.”
—New York Journal of Books
“It’s the harsh humor that surprises in these stories—that and the observations that show James Franco to be an original and simpatico voice finely tuned to the territory. These quotable, unsettling stories stay with you; they seem to change the ions in a room.”
—Amy Hempel
“James Franco’s stories are raw, unsettling, and delectable. Each articulates a very American yearning within a dystopic suburban landscape of shifting sexuality, class, and race. They are both really scary and fun to read.”
—Darcey Steinke, author of Easter Everywhere
“Franco’s talent is unmistakable, his ambition profound. He has taken the twin subjects of suburban Palo Alto and American adolescence and made them as scary and true as they must be. This is a book to be inhaled more than once, with delight and admiration, with unease and pure enjoyment. As a writer, he’s here to stay.”
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“James Franco’s chilling stories seem too true for comfort. The characters in Palo Alto navigate off a moral compass so smashed, they bruise everything they touch. Franco’s intense artistry swarms all over this gripping book. Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker. Or better yet, just think James Franco.”
—Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women
“These rough messages torn from the notebook of angry youth just make us want to ask James Franco to say it ain’t so. These angular stories read like dispatches from the edge of civilization: all the young people hurting and denying it, denying connection, denying their hope for anything but tonight, the next thing. James Franco does not blink as he offers us these stories—and it is hard for us to look away.”
—Ron Carlson, author of The Signal
“James Franco is a writer of skill and sensitivity whose depiction of cruelty and neglect, of amusement and loneliness, of longing and being lost—of the pains and chaos of adolescence—is original and impressive. He manages to depict the numbingly stupid and dangerous behavior of teenagers and make it amazingly amusing then suddenly deeply sad.”
—Susan Minot, author of Rapture
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Designed by Carla Jayne Jones
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010032932
ISBN 978-1-4391-6314-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-6315-3 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-7572-9 (ebook)
The story “Jack-O’” first appeared in Esquire magazine in a slightly altered form.
To the teachers
Ian R. Wilson
Mona Simpson
Amy Hempel
Michael Cunningham
Jenny Offill
There is hardly a single action that we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.
—Within a Budding Grove,
Remembrance of Things Past
Contents
PALO ALTO I
Halloween
Lockheed
American History
Killing Animals
Emily
Camp
Chinatown
Part I, Vietnam
Part II, Headless
Part III, Caffe Buon
PALO ALTO II
April
Part I, The Rainbow Goblins
Part II, Wasting
Part III, April
Tar Baby
I Could Kill Someone
Jack-O’
Yosemite
Acknowledgments
PALO ALTO I
Halloween
Ten years ago, my sophomore year in high school, I killed a woman on Halloween.
I had been drinking at Ed Sales’s house all afternoon, which I wasn’t supposed to be doing because I was on probation. The probation rules said I was only allowed to drive to school and then right back home after school was out. But it was six months since I’d been arrested for being a minor under the influence, and my parents had become lax about the driving rules. On that Halloween Tuesday, instead of going home, I took some friends over to Ed’s and we all got drunk.
His father was a mathematics professor at Stanford and his mother was a nurse, and neither of them came home until at least six but usually seven. His professor father had a great liquor cabinet. I had my first drink there when I was thirteen, and in the three years since then we had been taking from his cupboard and putting water back into the bottles. We could never get much from any one bottle because it would be too obvious; so we would take a little from all the bottles and mix everything into a punch like the bums did in Cannery Row. I like that we did that, I liked thinking that we were like Mack and the boys, even though the punch tasted horrible. We’d usually mix it with grape juice, but it wouldn’t help much.