Commercial Break

Reviewed by Randall Radic 

There’s a guy named Keith Harmeyer, who lives in New York. He used to be in advertising. Keith decided to write a book. Taking the old adage “write about what you know” to heart, Keith wrote a novel called Commercial Break. And what a novel it is!

Commercial Break is a combination of Carl Hiaasen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. Which means it’s laugh-out-loud funny, replete with cynicism and verbal pyrotechnics. It’s the story of Adam Glassman, who, along with his partner, Carlo Fiore, runs a successful New York advertising agency that goes by the fitting name of Hot Posse. Adam’s marriage is on the rocks and he flamed out a long time ago. He’s sick and tired of overcompensating in his life. He feels like a fraud.

Adam’s looking for a way out of his miserable life. Utilizing the incredible virtuosity of his creative and organizational genius, he devises a plan that will provide him with enough money so he can retire forever. The plan has two tiny, little, teeny-weeny drawbacks. Mere hiccups, really: he can’t do it alone, and it means breaking the law.

The plan involves selling the same Super Bowl commercial to six of his clients. One commercial, six fees. The risk is significant, but the payoff is enormous. Adam recruits his partner, Carlo Fiore, who feels that the undertaking by definition entails a certain diminution of dignity. Rather than make a moral choice, Carlo decides to resolve his dilemma by placing it in the hands of a woman. This will relieve him of the tedium. By the way, Carlo’s luck with the fairer sex is not anything to write home about. He has a girlfriend who is the prototype of the new woman – she’s a pangynic nightmare. In short, she lacks that provocative warmth which draws man to woman.

Meanwhile, Adam has his own female problems. He gets romantically involved with a young woman – an employee – who is not only a dire and frightening female, but sucks down wine by the gallon.

One of the funniest parts of the book is the commercial that Adam is peddling to all and sundry. Composed of “six, magnificent blondes in patent leather bikinis sitting on a black iceberg,” with Bobby Darin singing ‘Mack the Knife’ in the background, the commercial is a gelatinous mass of rhodomontade and piffle, which just adds to the insane humor, because it’s so indicative of contemporary marketing and advertising.

It’s one of those things that has to be read to be believed. And Keith Harmeyer pulls it off without a hitch. This guy can write comedy. In fact, Commercial Break should be a movie. It’s got all he necessary ingredients for a blockbuster.

The reviewer refuses to spoil the book by revealing what happens along the way, as the “big idea” is implemented. Needless to say the author mixes in poetic paradoxes, bracketing oxymorons, morons, and a few tawdry magician’s tricks as he demonstrates how, in the final analysis, the masses are the final tyrants in today’s advertising world. Which means this novel can be read at a number of different levels. On one level, there’s an amusing story of white-collar crime. On another level there is a social commentary that points out how the hoi polloi seem to confuse standard of living with quality of life, and equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity. And how the scorn of the intellectual elite blinds it to the vast primitive power of mediocrity.

Commercial Break is the funniest and most entertaining book the reviewer has read in years. Readers will not be disappointed.

Contributing writer, Victoria Mixon, penned the essay analyzing (leaning on the pro side)  the genre. The writer who started the thread and was stridently against it, never responded to my note asking her to write the “con.”  Below is Victoria’s essay, and I’d like to add that Wide Sargasso Sea is now on my reading list.

Literary Mashing, or Zombies Don’t Dance by Victoria Mixon

One of the best-known and most beautiful literary mash-ups in the literature of any language must be Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys, if you don’t know, was a writer of peculiarly lovely prose and desolate perspective. She was born and raised in the Caribbean in the 1890s in a generations-old British colonial family and traveled to England in her late teens to more or less “start her life”. She tried to establish a career in the theater and wound up in traveling stock, working hard and earning peanuts. When she became the mistress of a young professional man in London, it took no great brains to realize this was a far more comfortable life than that of an itinerant chorus girl. This was around 1910. You can guess what happened when the young professional man got tired of her.

Rhys’ life followed a predictable trajectory, punctuated by her sporadic attempts to get a grip on it. She drifted in and out of relationships with young professional men who supported her for as long as they felt like it and dropped her when they lost interest. Her finances were never even faintly secure. She married and for a few years lived the high life in Vienna and Paris, had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and was unceremoniously dumped back into poverty when her husband was arrested and banished from the country. The marriage wasn’t working, she wanted to be a writer, but she had no profession. The powerful British writer Ford Madox Ford and his wife took her under their wing and, in short order (according to Rhys), into their marriage.

It was Ford who helped Rhys get the first of her four slender early novels published. But it was a much later fan of her work who, in the 1960s, tracked down the alcoholic and reclusive Rhys and learned that she’d written but never published a literary masterpiece, the gorgeous and bleak Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the unforgettable story of a woman much like Rhys, born Creole in the Caribbean in the 1800s and taken to England with no real concept of the 19th-century English, of their prejudices against their colonial families and particularly those of mixed race, or of what life in England was really like. Rhys’ heroine, like herself, is immediately taken advantage of by a man born to all the privileges of upper-class masculine British dominance. She is first romanced, then rejected, and finally brutally controlled, entirely through her female lack of social power, even though her weakness doesn’t include lack of money. She is, in fact, used for her inheritance. Eventually–unlike Rhys–her heroine is psychologically destroyed by the cruelty of her life. In the end it makes perfect sense to both writer and reader that she chooses suicide as her only escape.

The authenticity of Rhys’ voice, her chilling understanding of her heroine’s history and doom, and the beauty of her language make Wide Sargasso Sea a milestone in the ranks of literature.

Now, you might well wonder what this has to do with literary mash-ups. Rhys was an original, a genius, someone to be mashed. All of which is indubitably true.

But she was a masher.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Jane Eyre’s famous competition for the hand of Mr. Rochester, the original madwoman in the attic, the violent and lunatic Caribbean-born Mrs. Bertha Rochester.

Jean Rhys mashed Charlotte Bronte.

Interestingly enough, Charlotte Bronte herself was a masher. She mashed her brilliant (and superior) sister Emily Bronte when she rewrote sections of Wuthering Heights for its re-publication after her sister’s death. She even rewrote Emily’s extraordinary poetry, over Emily’s vehement opposition, after Emily was dead and could no longer object. Charlotte “clarified it”, meaning she altered lines and added stanzas of heavy-handed explanation to what Emily left ephemeral. Then Charlotte re-published it under Emily’s name. How’s that for mashing with a vengeance?

Admittedly, the vast majority of literary mash-ups are garbage, many of them puerile and insulting garbage.

Believe me, I’ve got no fondness for the staggering amount of porn out there masquerading as “sequels” to beloved classics like Pride and Prejudice, and I certainly haven’t made up my mind whether or not to even bother reading the recent version involving zombies. I’ve decided to wait and let Rebeca advise me on that. I read Wicked, the mash-up of the inimitable The Wizard of Oz, and lived to rue the day. And don’t get me started on the subject of laziness and fan fiction.

But Shakespeare mashed both popular and lesser-known stories of his time, and everyone from Tom Stoppard to Gus Van Sant and Billy Morrissette has since then mashed Shakespeare, often with brilliant results.

Robert A. Heinlein mashed The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver’s Travels, and Doc Smith’s Lensman series, among other great literary works, many of them in the single classic science fiction novel, The Number of the Beast.

Edward Eager deliberately mashed seven well-known children’s books in his own children’s classic Seven-Day Magic as a technique for encouraging children to read his favorites.

Literary mashing has produced not only invaluable additions to the literary canon, but also vast numbers of parodies, many of them outstanding.

Kurt Vonnegut actually mashed himself.

Flannery O’Connor (who, so far as I know, never mashed anybody) coined one of the most inarguable aphorisms in literature when she said, “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”

Mash if you must. Mash if you dare. But understand before you begin that mashing a beloved classic earns you the automatic opposite of a fanbase: a hatebase. You must overcome not only readers’ indifference to you as an unknown or only-marginally-known writer, but also their active hostility toward anyone who messes with their beloved.

Readers are not to be trifled with.

In mashing—as in so much of life—some aspiring writers need to learn this the hard way.

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Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com