Another Wild Ride
SELLEVISION: A NOVEL
Publisher: Picador
Fiction
240 Pages
WHEN you’re browsing in a bookstore and stumble onto a book with an opening line that reads “You exposed your penis on national television, Max,” you immediately become a captive audience. Oh, well, at least I did.
Augusten Burroughs’s “Sellevision” is not a porn book. When I read the intriguing opening line, I knew I got in on something twisted. It sparked curiosity as to why a guy named “Max” would expose his thing on national television.
But Max Andrews, a gorgeous host for “America’s premier retail broadcasting network” called “Sellevision,” says he didn’t really expose it. “It just sort of peeked out,” he says.
And that’s how the story begins.
“Sellevision” is a spoof of cable’s home-shopping mania, poking fun on semi-celebrities, who host television retail programs.
The broadcasting network is composed of hosts, whose on-camera mishaps and scandalous affairs become staple for tabloids and TV talk-shows.
Max Andrews has been fired for accidentally exposing himself during a children’s special, in which the hosts are required to wear bathrobes. After losing his TV job, Max spends the rest of his time auditioning for other TV and radio jobs if not loitering around the bookshop, where he thinks he could catch a smart guy to date. But he finds no luck with either job-seeking and boyfriend-hunting missions. He ends up becoming a porn star, thus baring himself with a vengeance.
Another host, the prim and perky Peggy Jean Smythe, gets creepy e-mails from a mysterious fan Zoe, who comments on Peggy’s hairy earlobes, gruff voice, growing mustache, clumpy mascara. The spiteful letters from the e-mail stalker sends Peggy over the edge into Valium addiction and heavy drinking, and eventually to the mental institution. Peggy eventually loses her hosting job and becomes a born-again fanatic and author of a book that talks about how “Peggy Jean and Jesus” will save the souls of the humanity.
There’s also Trish Mission, the newcomer who tries to flirt her way to move her career upward. Then there’s Leigh Bushmore, the executive producer Howard Toast’s naive mistress, who waits forever for him to divorce his wife. A book titled “Women Who Love Bastards” is her bible.
And there’s Adela, who gets herself engrossed with the American Indian culture, thinking all along that she has native American blood, only to get devastated later when her mother reveals that she totally has no American Indian connection.
In his best-selling memoir “Running With Scissors,” Burroughs is hilarious and lunatic. In “Sellevision,” he is hysterical and sarcastic. And like “Running With Scissors,” “Sellevision” will give you a wild ride.
