The Last Book I Read

I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed in a book. As I've mentioned several times in previous posts, I consider National Lampoon's Animal House to be the signature film of the 1970s, and darned entertaining to boot. When Chris Miller (one of the film's writers along with Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney) put out this memoir of his real-life fraternity experience, I though it would be a worthwhile read, offering more of the laughs and social commentary found in the movie. Well, I was wrong-- there's less; in fact, both are basically non-existent. I knew from the lore of the film that it was Miller's experiences that matched most closely with plot elements of the movie. But evidently it was Ramis and Kenney who supplied the heart and the bite, as this account by Miller is a rather one-note litany of the sort of slob behavior that those who weren't paying attention ascribed as the dominant theme of the movie.

I plan to write at greater length about how the film represented an acerbic punctuation point on the generation that it depicted, as well as the generation that produced and embraced the film as well. It's dark humor is on occasion quite gross, but more to the point it creates a set of characters through whom all the hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement of the previous twenty years could be skewered. No one comes off well, even though you can't help but cheer for one side over the other-- which in itself hearkens back to the moral ambiguity that marked the sixties.

But that's the film-- this book seems only an effort to cash-in on the fame of the movie. I guess, when you stop to think about it, although the story Miller tells is boring, repetitious and ultimately a waste of time, that too is a kind of reflection of the critique offered by the film; but in this case I feel like I'm the sucker. Maybe on that level I have to reluctantly say, bravo!