OUT OF MY SKIN

A metafictional narrative from Haskell (American Purgatorio, 2004, etc.).

This short novel concerns a writer from New York who has transplanted himself to Los Angeles (the author’s bio informs that he splits time between the two cities) and who apparently has the last name of “Haskell.” The writer takes an assignment to write a feature article about a Steve Martin impersonator, and he becomes so intrigued by the process of inhabiting another’s identity that he starts impersonating Martin. Haskell proceeds to cover well-trod territory, offering meditations on identity in a city where everyone seems to be pretending to be somebody else. The writer meets his girlfriend after she pretends to be a photographer to capture his interest. But it may only be his Martin dimension that attracts her. His thoughts keep returning to examples of actors who transformed their identities, including the married Charles Laughton, who disguised his homosexuality, and Marlon Brando, who pretended to be a youthful motorcycle rebel when he was 35. We get it: Hollywood is illusion, a place where a New York writer can transform himself into someone else. “I’d detached who I was from the web that had organized my world,” he says, though it becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain interest in the first-person narration when the “I” is less a coherent self than a cipher.

A premise that could prove provocative and funny in a short story turns tiresome when stretched into a novel.