Bernhard's Second Book Mostly Cold, Haphazard Vignettes

"Love is the only shocking fact left on the fact of the earth," Sandra Bernhard declares near the beginning of her second book, Love, Love, and Love. Bernhard seems just the woman to prove it: she's flirted with Madonna on national TV, performed strip teases with the American flag and made David Letterman blush. Surely few other American entertainers know as much about the shock value of unusual pleasures. Unfortunately, her new book, composed largely of unrelated vignettes, suggests that she is an entertainer who works better on the screen than the page.

Many of these cold new stories have little going for them except the glamor of places with exotic names or expensive drugs. These pieces suggest that Bernhard is taking herself or her stardom a little too seriously.

In her one-woman shows, Bernhard offers a vaudevillian hybrid--part comedy, part song, part dramatic monologue. This genre-bending works to keep audiences perennially on edge as she prods, sometimes viciously, at American popular culture. Bernhard may be trying for something similar with this book, described on the jacket as "a mix of memoir, fiction, invented memoir, and fiction that rings with the truth." This mostly means that these pieces feel unfinished or uncertain. Too many read like abandoned short stories or tiny ideas stretched unconvincingly over a few pages.

This overall lack of unity is all the more frustrating because at least a few of the pieces capture the unique comic sensibility that informs her performances. In the better snippets here, Bernhard shows herself the best sort of critic of American popular culture and values--one who has unabashed respect and affection for the thing she critiques.

In several pieces in this book, her corrosive humor is quick to point out the hollowness of most mass culture while remaining faithful to its occasional ability to spark or capture real emotion. If she's good at ridiculing fans--soap opera watchers, record buyers, people who believe in movies--it's because she is, always and obviously, a fan herself.

In one page-long fragment, for example, she creates the voice of a socialite getting back to her roots through gourmet cuisine: "Did I tell you I've been cooking again? I'm really turning my house into a home...When the heat pours out of the oven and I baste the browning bird with all those good juices, it makes me never want to read another issue of Vanity Fair." Bernhard sounds both snotty and heartfelt; her pen drips in a sarcasm so intense it redeems these cliches, rendering them oddly evocative and always hilarious.

Another brilliant piece takes the form of a wide-eyed homage to a gorgeous campus activist. "She burns incense and listens to the Doors and everyone at Smith respects her strong opinions and clear insights into these times." At an anti-apartheid rally, the activist berates the crowd, "We've got to tear this world apart, we've got to recall a more causative day and spark the fire of revolution once again. I am so fucking mad'...and in her fury she jumped two stories and tore her jeans in all the right places. All the girls screamed and told her she looked really cool." Bernhard's precise ear for the nuances of the language of popular culture works here to almost poetic effect. There are few writers who could put a phrase like "causative day" into a characters' mouth without delivering her up for the reader's contempt. Bernhard retains a sense of empathy, ridiculing the words' inherent silliness while capturing their earnest enthusiasm.

Sadly, this double edge is somewhat scarce in Love, Love, and Love. In far too many of these vignettes. Bernhard sounds like a Brat Pack novelist who thinks spare descriptions of lonely, confused people having sex, taking pills and spending money are inherently interesting. The longer pieces are rarely as insightful as the brief snippets, and the only identifiable story line--involving a disgruntled Parisian woman and her violent, international love life--falls particularly flat.

In Bernhard's first book, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, reminiscences of a suburban childhood lent a unifying theme to the short pieces and kept Bernhard from getting carried away with brittle, celebrity cynicism. Many of these cold new stories have little going for them except the glamor of places with exotic names or expensive drugs.

These pieces suggest that Bernhard is taking herself or her stardom a little too seriously. The book concludes with an appendix comprising "unfinished pieces" which Bernhard says she's included because she "always find[s] it interesting and revealing to see what people don't include." She should probably have left well enough alone; few will find Bernhard's reject pile "interesting" enough to rummage through these pages of sparse jottings--some haphazardly typed, some scrawled by hand, many with cross-outs, corrections and editing arrows left intact.

In places, Love, Love, and Love recalls Bernhard's performance style, and one almost bears her distinctive vocal intonation--equal parts sarcasm and elegy behind the words. While this proves that Bernhard is sometimes capable of bringing her live energy to the page, it also suggests that her most effective medium is still performance. Love, Love and Love, like the elusive object it's named for, is occasionally enchanting but too often annoying.