‘Lounge Lizard’ is the second of the Max Zajack novels, the first being ‘Hating Olivia’ where SaFranko explored how love turns into ugly obsession, and finally hatred. In ‘Lounge Lizard’, we meet Max Zajack after he has been dumped by Olivia, the love of his life. His life is at a standstill: no job, no sex, and worst of all, no inspiration for his art, for Max fancies himself an artist, one of the great romantic holdouts who refuses to compromise by living a life of routine and conformity. Still, the jobs used to sustain himself keep getting worse, and Max finally takes a position as an analyst for AT&T. Max excels at the job, most probably because of his contempt for the work he does and for climbing the corporate ladder to success. As well, his luck changes with the ladies, and Max goes from being without sex in several years, to becoming a sexual Lothario, cutting a path through the bars of Manhattan, bagging every woman he encounters. Max throws himself heart and soul into instant gratification, following the demands of his id and the pleasure principle, boozing, fucking, and partying his way into the empty lives of the many women he seduces, only to come to a shocking denouement at the end of the novel, done in true, creepy SaFranko fashion.

However, if you want to read this novel because you think it is erotica, or you if you want a good read to jerk off to, you will miss the point. While there is plenty of sex throughout, it is mostly passionless, mechanical, and often pornographic, and this is precisely SaFranko’s point. ‘Lounge Lizard’ certainly owes a huge debt to SaFranko’s heroes, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Both Miller’s ‘Sexus’ and Bukowski’s ‘Women’ tell the story of two would-be writers whose sexual exploits enthral the reader. Both Miller and Bukowski’s novels are replete with humour, humanity, and are completely authentic renderings of life experiences. Henry (Miller) and Hank (Chinaski) in the aforementioned books are the last of the great romantics, pursuing their art at any cost while finding inspiration through sex and the love of women. Mac Zajack, on the other hand, is, at best, a failed artist. He does have his heroes (Lawrence, Miller, Hamsun, Celine, Simenon, and even Dostoyevsky), and his opinions on art. He tacitly dismisses Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, and Nabokov, the latter two for not being “authentic” enough, all the while claiming that the only ones he is interested in are the “failures”. And it is at this point that SaFranko manages to deconstruct the notion of the writer as romantic rebel, while ironically commenting on the stance of most of his “underground” contemporaries toward traditional literature.

SaFranko has clearly read a lot, and he acknowledges his literary predecessors. However, his real gift as a writer is that, while operating within the “rebel” tradition, he manages to subvert it by showing that the idea of the writer as hero is, as Bukowski once said, “just another asshole who thinks he is immortal.” In fact, if Max Zajack is the deconstructed artist/rebel, he is the very antithesis of this romantic figure, totally without morality or any redeeming humanity. This is not to say that SaFranko fails in creating an interesting character, but rather that Max is one-dimensional precisely because he is amoral and into complete self-gratification. Max is this way because he is a reflection of the ME generation, the very people he despises, even though he becomes them not in terms of material success, but in terms of his sexual conquests. There is one point in the novel when Zajack waits for one of his women while she has an abortion, getting rid of the unwanted child he fathered. At that point, Max begins to cry, thinking of the life that could have been his son’s, but SaFranko quickly reveals the cheap sentimentality of his actions since he is crying for totally selfish reasons. As well, at the end of the novel, Max falls for a woman after all of his one night stands, and the pattern of obsession as in ‘Hating Olivia’ is about to be repeated. Yet the reader is never told why he falls for this woman, except that it may be the need to be abused that he finds ultimately addictive. At the end, Zajack is dehumanized, a feral creature devoid of the most basic human qualities.

SaFranko’s achievement is that he has managed to fashion a wonderfully readable novel that incorporates profound comments about the self-serving fashion in which society destroys our individuality and humanity. Though Max Zajack dismisses the Beats as “Ivy League boys” whom he detests, SaFranko’s writing is the closest to them in spirit. In fact, there was an essay written around 40 years ago by Norman Mailer called “The White Negro” where Mailer, thinking of Neal Cassady (an inevitable prototype for Max Zajack’s character) labels him as the psychopath who operates only to gratify his appetites (both carnal and sexual). Mailer contends that this is the result of the imminence of death, due to the Bomb, and the advent of the existentialist sensibility that seeks to find an authenticity in individual experience. In the postmodern nightmare that is the world of ‘Lounge Lizard’, even existentialist values have ceased to matter as SaFranko presents a darkly humorous and bleak comment on our present condition where the beatific is a permanent void in our lives, and only the beaten down remain to try to make sense of it all.

Mark SaFranko is a major writer, and ‘Lounge Lizard’ is essential reading.

Zsolt Alapi was born in Budapest, Hungary and grew up in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where he now lives. He is the former editor of the little magazine, Atropos, (winner of the Pushcart Prize) and has published poetry and fiction in various magazines in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, most recently in Front and Centre. He recently published a chapbook of stories, ‘Three Stories,’ (Mercutio Press, Montreal, Quebec, 2004) and is editor of the anthology 'Writing at the Edge' (Siren Song Press 2007). Zsolt teaches at Marianopolis College and Concordia University and has completed a Ph.D. at McGill University (Montreal) on Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics. He also edited a collection of poetry and short fiction, ‘Vistas’ and has written on the poetry of Pound, Williams, and Olson. To read a selection of Zsolt’s fiction on the showcase section of this site, click here.