"There are no second acts in American lives." F Scott Fitzgerald's words are tailor-made for Jim Carroll. He was a rising basketball star at a New York Catholic high school who descended into heroin addiction and male prostitution. His memoir The Basketball Diaries became a huge success.
Carroll coasted on his fame as a minor poet and musician and died last year at the age of 59. His first novel The Petting Zoo was his attempt at a second act. It is an abject failure.
Where The Basketball Diaries was fast-paced, fuelled by the youthful anger and rebellion of the mid-1960s, The Petting Zoo is turgid, narcissistic, cliched, pretentious, cluttered with fancy verbiage. The plot is ridiculous.
At 38, Billy Wolfram is a rich and famous New York painter, with a complicated past. At 13, he was enjoying a private moment with a magazine photo of Barbra Streisand in a bikini when his mother burst in to tell him that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Boom! He's impotent for life.
The rest of novel is taken up with his search for the meaning of Art with the help of a talking raven. Don't bother.
