Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jerk

Bryan Bedder / Getty Images In Eric Bogosian’s new novel, he conjures a young writer who seems oddly like the author of Talk Radio. Bogosian talked to The Daily Beast about his dark Rothian doppelganger.

An acclaimed actor, playwright, and novelist, Eric Bogosian is best known for starring in the film adaptation of his play Talk Radio and in NBC’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent. His third novel, Perforated Heart, follows a washed-up writer and misanthrope, Richard Morris, through his metaphorically convenient heart surgery via a series of journal entries. When the aging Morris discovers the journals he kept when he first came to New York 30 years earlier, he begins to revisit his past in an effort to understand his own loneliness.

“Richard, like many men I know, is specifically looking to have relationships with women who he can overpower [so] he doesn’t have to meet them halfway.”

The book hinges on the resonance between the embittered older Richard and the naïve and drug-addled younger Richard through a series of failed relationships and empty trysts. Perforated Heart is a meditation on memory, identity, and the fleeting nature of fame. Bogosian talked to The Daily Beast about his pitiless new book, and how great artists can also be big jerks.

Perforated Heart. By Eric Bogosian. 288 pages.Simon & Schuster. $25. You have some surface similarities to Richard Morris, the misanthrope at the center of Perforated Heart. Both of you are from Massachusetts, both of you write, both of you came to the New York in the 1970s and worked at experimental art collectives. How do you relate to Richard?

[The book asks] “What would happen to me had I not, in 1980 met my wife and married her six weeks later, ten weeks later?” I married her and began a road toward a level of discipline and organization that wasn’t my lifestyle. What happens if the guy becomes sort of single his whole life?

When my kids were small and they took up so much time and I wasn’t doing drugs anymore or anything I thought, man, this is like having a drug habit and it’s taking up a lot of my time and maybe it’s slowing me down as an artist. I wasn’t sure. You worry about things like that, I mean you see that your colleagues, their only priority is their work and I wanted to think about that.

On stage, you’ve said you depict characters who aren’t “nice people” and who represent parts of you that you find problematic, parts of you “don’t write pieces on.” Has that changed?

For me, this book is an X-ray of an artist. [Artists present] themselves to the world as being thoughtful and involved in life in such a way as to digest it and understand it and then present it to everybody out there via their writing or their directing or their painting or whatever and saying, here, “I’ve gone off and lived and I’ve grabbed up all this stuff and I’ve brought the best attention I can do it.” We don’t sit around and think that this artist hero of ours is actually a petty shit and [that] their whole point of view is corrupted by the fact that they are so petty and self-involved to a level that is breathtaking.

My favorite moment in the book is a moment when [Richard’s] reading about his ex-girlfriend in the newspaper and she doesn’t even mention him and she’s dating somebody [else], and it’s upsetting him, and he ends up writing all day. That’s his solution when he’s in pain—he writes. That’s how come you write, you write because you have to write, not because you need to write. Really, writers write because they have to write.