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Book Review
Barris' Big Question?
Bruce Upbin 05.03.07,
6:00 PM ET
Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. This is a truism, and it is an unattractive, sardonic worldview, the pessimist’s view, embraced by a line of writers from Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain to the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut. Somewhere in the back of that line of writers, with his arms raised as if to clap, is Chuck Barris, the 1960s and '70s game show icon. Barris invented spontaneous television in the 1960s with his unscripted daytime game shows The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. He later stepped in front of the camera, with increasing ferocity, for his third hit, the cult fave The Gong Show. Few shows since Gong’s syndication run in the late 1970s have ever been as funny. (It still enjoys frequent viewing on YouTube.) Barris eventually couldn’t withstand the abuse from critics. They blamed him for lowering the nation’s IQ. Who could take that kind of pressure without a good amount of cocaine and a nervous breakdown? Barris couldn’t, so he withdrew from television two decades ago to write. To write slowly, it turned out. The new novel The Big Question ($25, Simon & Schuster, 2007) is Barris’ second book in 14 years and his fourth novel. I count as fictional large chunks of Barris’ 1982 autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which tells of his TV years and reveals for the first time that he had a side gig as a freelance CIA assassin. People have debated whether Barris made up the hit man part. He doesn’t talk about it. It's hard to take these kinds of things too seriously, especially from a joker like Barris.
The Big Question takes up a subject Barris knows more about: TV game shows. But it doesn’t take up the game-show subject for very long. The year is 2012, and a pathetic cripple named Chuck Barris (that's the self-loathing, not the autobiographical part) foists on a famous TV producer an outrageous concept for a new game show. The pitch: Contestants must answer a frighteningly hard question for a chance to win $100 million. Get it wrong, and they get a lethal injection in their arm, on air, live. You go in expecting a rumpus satirizing the lengths reality TV contestants will go to get on air and the producer to keep the hysteria going, something a la Carl Hiassen in Midtown Manhattan. But early in the writing Barris got enthralled in the lives of his characters and flitting back and forth in time explaining their motivations for wanting to get onto the show. The show doesn't come until very late in the book, and Barris forgot to turn it into a send-up. He forgot to stick the knife into the celebrity-addicted television industry as a former insider. Instead we get a colorful ensemble building to a slow climax, a brew of foul people and bad situations getting worse. There are hookers, grifters, Swedish boxers, sex therapists, fallen priests and a guy named Jimmy Joel Jenks who just seems to be passing on through. There’s a two-bit crook with big ears who loses his teeth in prison, a country rube who finds himself deeply in hock to the Mob, a hulking hoodlum-turned-imam who meets a violent end and not one but two people carried off to the swamps of New Jersey wrapped inside an area rug. It's picaresque, a little hip, with indelible images, and I couldn't help feeling it was having trouble getting off the ground. But it did toward the end, the coda of which is lovely. Fans of Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard would like Barris' novel. It doesn't have the laughs of Hiassen or the crackle of Leonard but comes close to offering that kind of rich, sardonic stew of human longing, greed and sex. Keep writing, Chuckie Baby.
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