Lives Awash in Alternate Realities

Gus Van Sant is best known as a director of quirky but sharp-edged movies such as “My Own Private Idaho” with Keanu Reeves and “To Die For” with Nicole Kidman, and his first novel has its own quirks and edges. “Pink” is embellished with explanatory footnotes, different typefaces and a series of line drawings that turn into a flip-cartoon when the pages are riffled.

The near-mythic quest that drives the plot of “Pink” is the desperate effort of a middle-aged man named Spunky Davis, whose dream is to make a science fiction movie and thereby liberate himself from the backwater town in Oregon where he has washed up. He also hopes making the film might help him escape a web of dysfunction that has ensnared him and assuage the grief that he feels for a dead friend named Felix.

“I feel a midlife crisis sneaking up on me,” confesses Spunky, whose grip on the motion picture industry is limited to making infomercials for clients with bad breath and too much gold jewelry. “I fear artists. I fear art. I fear that . . . the gravitational pull of Saturn has lost its effect on me and I will go spinning off the surfaces of the earth toward the sun.”

But Spunky is pulled into orbit around a couple of beguiling young film students, Jack and Matt, who inhabit a world of their own making that resembles the setting of a Philip Dick novel--”a dimension they call Pink,” as Van Sant explains in one of his helpful footnotes, “which Jack and Matt are learning to control as part of their beginners’ education in handling movement and manipulation of time and space travel. They aren’t that good at it yet, but it’s pretty hard.”

Spunky, fat and fiftysomething and burning out fast, finds himself charmed by the lunatic good cheer of the twentysomething Jack and Matt; he is enchanted (and sexually aroused) by the fact that Jack resembles the dead Felix, and he is intrigued by the aura of mystery that surrounds the two young men: “There are secrets all around Jack and Matt,” he confides to us. “They only go by first names. I don’t know where they live.”

Now and then, Van Sant checks in on Blake, a rock star in a panic over the slippage in his album sales and the acts of emotional sabotage, real and imagined, carried out by his wife, Blackie. “You know, Toulouse-Lautrec had black satin curtains in his whorehouse bedroom in the upstairs of the Moulin Rouge,” Blackie announces one day. “I want Lautrec whorehouse curtains. Are you going to get ‘em for me, or do I have to go out and get ‘em myself, you pantywaist.”

Eventually, the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined tend to blur. At one moment, for example, a voice is heard from the confines of a rehab facility where Blake has landed--”We go about our business of communing, writing, thinking, smoking and making toast,” muses one of the denizens of the Cloudy-Bright Rehabilitation Center--and then, a moment later, Van Sant invites us to regard the sanctuary where the ritual of rehab is carried out as somehow equivalent to the dimension called Pink: “This is an alternate universe that is calm and sane, and we are here to help each other.”

Indeed, Van Sant’s book is awash in alternate realities, which help describe innermost yearnings that shape and distort our lives. The point comes across in a monologue delivered by Spunky in which he confesses a childhood longing to be a photographer for National Geographic: “The success of National Geographic being that for every sexual identity in the family, there were sumptuous, exotic, and suggestive full-color pages of whatever your fantasy was,” says Spunky. “That’s America’s hidden agenda.”

“Pink” is a kind of revenge novel, the work of a man who is heartsick over the compromises demanded of anyone who aspires to make movies, but Van Sant’s take is so smart and so knowing, his satire is so sharp and so deft, that “Pink” never sinks into bitterness or despair. In fact, although “Pink” is something of a Rube Goldberg device with more moving parts than it really needs, the whole unlikely contraption actually lifts off and soars.