5 stars - linkLife moves pretty slowly; let's get off.
‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’, or volume 6 in Todd Strasser’s ‘Futile Development of Angst’ series, raises almost twice as many questions as it manages to answer over the course of it’s 176 dense, crammed and utterly vital pages.
While it’s easy to forget the fact, Todd Strasser hasn’t always been the literary giant he’s currently considered. When this book first appeared on the scene, I recall a fair amount of unfocused derision directed at Strasser, and at the time I remember thinking that this was unfair treatment of a genuinely promising mercurial talent.
It’s criminal that when people hear the name ‘Ferris Bueller’, they immediately think of the hackneyed portrayal committed to celluloid by Matthew Broderick (best known as a monkey’s friend in the execrable Project X), and this does an injustice to the masterly written character contained in the manuscript – much of the prose is written in a detached stream of consciousness style, recalling to mind some of the early literary experiments by James Joyce and Emile Zola.
However, the story is never less than utterly involving, detailing the existential road trip between Ferris and his flawed friend Cameron (thankfully no women here, unlike the characters created for the film, who are ghastly yet alluring) as they plot to murder Cameron’s cruel, unloving father. On the way they meet a vast array of complex symbolist characters, while being tailed by local sheriff-gone-bad Edward Rooney, and notorious serial killer Abe Froeman, the Sausage King of Chicago (who, again, is utterly unrecognisable in the film).
A slight criticism could be made of Strasser’s uneconomical writing style in this period, but only because we’ve all seen what a master of the written word he’s become in recent times. This is well worth revisiting with open eyes, and I declare it nigh on impossible to read it without it changing your life in some way. IMPOSSIBLE, I DECLARE.
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