Book Review: 'Seconds of Pleasure: Stories' by Neil LaBute

Neil LaBute, in my opinion, made two of the best films of the 1990s: In The Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. He is also the respected playwright behind The Shape of Things, The Mercy Seat and numerous other plays. His legacy, though, may become his direction of the disastrous 2006 film The Wicker Man. To be sure, I hang out with too many Nic Cage enthusiasts, but whenever I mention Neil LaBute being a great screenwriter/playwright, the most common response is, “Oh, that dude who directed The Wicker Man? He sucks.” Hopefully he can shake this reputation, if it does in fact exist outside of my social circle.

Aside from “Director of The Wicker Man,” Mr. LaBute’s most critical label is that of “American theater's reigning misanthrope,” as the Village Voice declared him. A misanthrope, according to dictionary.com is a “hater of humankind.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mr. LaBute a “hater” of any group of people, but he certainly does notice the dark corners of the human heart. Like Todd Solondz, Mr. LaBute puts on display the side of humanity that we often ignore, and I would categorize the majority of his work as comedic. In order to do good comedy, one always has to get a little tough on his characters.

Seconds of Pleasure (published in 2004) is Neil LaBute’s only collection of short stories and it is very accurately titled. From incestuous situations to adulterous affairs of miniscule and substantial proportions, the people in his tales are obsessed with feeling good - if only for a moment. They struggle in vain to reconcile their desires with the consequences of the selfish means they go about to satisfy them. Mr. LaBute seems to take his own pleasure in watching these animalistic (or is it robotic?) humans as they try to squirm out of these situations. He knows only misery awaits these people until that next moment when they can again feel pleasure.

Described in this way, Mr. LaBute certainly does sound like a misanthrope, but to label him as such would be to fall right into his trap, just as many critics did with his debut film, In the Company of Men. In that movie (shot for only $25,000), two businessmen decide to toy with the feelings of a deaf co-worker, only to purposely break her heart right when she starts to care about one of them. For his efforts, Mr. LaBute was labeled a misogynist. And I’m sure he delighted in this label (okay, maybe he’s a tad bit misanthropic), because with the film he was making a point about how men often believe themselves superior to everyone, able to label those beneath them and put people in little boxes and categories. Every article about how Mr. LaBute “hated women” could easily have been asterisked by him with a “See? I told you so.” The film or theatre critics didn’t want to face the ugly side of themselves, so they just called Mr. LaBute a “mean name,” as one of his characters would, and wished the whole mess away.

One weakness in Mr. LaBute’s short story writing is that his description of his characters’ thoughts reveals that they have such awful, despicable viewpoints that they often come across as cartoons. It’s one thing to see the actions of a person in a film or play, but to know what they are all thinking every moment is exhausting, especially if they're such despicable thoughts.

In “Perfect,” the narrator obsesses over a mole on his wife’s shoulder. At first it is a feeling of identifying as the reader understands how one can be critical about a lover’s flaws, but as Mr. LaBute goes into details regarding just how much the narrator hates the mole, it becomes boring and is obviously the work of a writer, not this man’s actual account (as we should believe it to be). His best story in the collection is “Opportunity,” a slightly comedic at-first, and then deadly serious tragedy about a young girl's relationship with her father and how that relationship haunts her memory of her long deceased sister.

With every story, even those that go too far on a single topic, LaBute is trying quite sincerely to get at the heart of a human being’s desire and he takes to this task with great care. It would be easy for him to just direct films like The Wicker Man (as well as Lakeview Terrace and the upcoming Death at a Funeral remake), but Seconds of Pleasure is a treat and it falls in line with the best of Mr. LaBute’s work: art that is trying to confront humanity, by a writer who’s willing to take a few punches in order to get his point across. [B] - Ryan Sartor.