Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Okay, Impossible Vacation doesn’t really work as a novel. It reads like one of Gray’s monologues. And if you’ve heard Monster in a Box or Sex and Death at Age 14, then the protagonist, Brewster North, his mother, and his journey, will be familiar to you. That said, it’s still a good read. Brewster moves through careers as an actor, a model, a storyteller, and through obsessions on meditation, marijuana, India, acting, porn, sex, and California. At one point, his girlfriend’s sister asks him, “Brewster, why do you have to turn everything into shit? Where’s your self-esteem?” In Impossible Vacation, Gray reveals the causes and the implications of his hero’s immaturity in naked, sad, and funny ways.
Nada Djordjevich 