William Peter Blatty: Crazy

This week’s Santa Barbara Independent has my review of William Peter Blatty’s Crazy. Here’s some paragraphs:

Is the prospect “a touching and humorous novel from the author of The Exorcist a publicist’s dream or a publicist’s nightmare? Either way, that’s how William Peter Blatty’s new novel Crazy has been pitched to readers. It comes as the third in his late-career burst of productivity that began nearly 40 years after the book that spawned two literary follow-ups and five films. The popularity of the Exorcist franchise having ensured that Blatty’s name will always carry an underworldly tinge of quasi-Catholic menace, it’s no wonder the man would want to exercise other novelistic muscles.

This isn’t without precedent: Blatty spent the early 1960s as a comic novelist and the late 1960s writing scripts, most famously the second Pink Panther film, for Blake Edwards. Yet nothing about Crazy indicates a continuation of that tradition. Though ostensibly a story told in modern times by the now-82-year-old protagonist Joey El Bueno, the novel is thoroughly of early-1940s New York City as experienced by a 13-year-old, which means schoolyard scuffles, bull sessions on the block, and delirious trips to Coney Island.

Blatty, too, grew up in that time and place. Having reached his own early 80s, he presumably draws on a very similar store of memories as Joey, who also grows up to be a screenwriter. Here we feel the deeply unpromising premonition of a reminiscence-heavy one-man show; once you’ve heard one cultural veteran remember the joys of shouting up at the high window of a school chum’s Brooklyn apartment building to come out and play stickball, you’ve heard them all. Blatty allows himself all this and more, but in this frame of urban idyll he makes a few strange choices.

In my last Santa Barbara year, I’m on the lookout for more print venues in which to write book criticism. Any Los Angeles and/or non-local organs of repute you can recommend?

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