![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfishAuthor - Triple H & Shawn Michaels with Aaron Williams
ISBN - 978-1-4391-3727-7
"HUNTER: Hey, welcome back. Remember, you turned on me, joined Vince's Corporation, and became the World Wrestling Federation commissioner.Are You Ready? The Unauthorized History of DX is a quasi-autobiographical history of the pro wrestling faction D-Generation X, as told by its two main members via the medium of Aaron Williams, a man whose only input seems to have been to turn tape transcript into text. This book has the intellectual content of a flowerpot, the critical penetration of a marshmallow, the revelatory insight of a small Welsh housebrick, the wit and wisdom of a stunned blackbird, and the industry secrets and insider scandals of the M25 on any given November afternoon. This naturally leads one to wonder why the hell I was reading it.
SHAWN: That's right. The original idea was to play off you burying me after Wrestlemania XIV and then carry on a lengthy feud. It didn't turn out to be that lengthy, did it?
HUNTER: No, Shawn, it didn't."
There is a very funny little book out there somewhere called The Meaning of Liff. It is something of a comedy dictionary. Under the entry for Swansea, the phenomenon by which a newspaper or book that someone else is reading is instantly far more interesting than whatever you yourself are reading is mentioned. It was via the Swansea effect that Rath enticed me to read Have A Nice Day: she sat and read it in front of me, occasionally laughing or squeaking or making muffled eep sounds. She left it by the fireplace; I picked it up, looked it over, flipped through a few pages and found myself reading Mr Foley's amiable recollections of doing a pro wrestling tour in a minor African nation, midgets and dodgy chicken included.
Mr Foley's handy doorstop got me curious. Mr Foley is a man who makes his living by putting himself through all sorts of pain and injury, up to and including being hit repeatedly over the head with a number of objects considerably harder and more dangerous than, say, a very fluffy pillow. Mr Foley writes with great clarity, both of recollection and of phrase, padding softly from one interesting anecdote to another. How is it that a man who is known as a legend in the most violent and shambolic subdivision of pro wrestling, that which is considered about as far from intellectual as one can get without watching football, can write with such thoughtfulness and intelligence? Was this particular to Mr Foley? Or was it that, as a pro wrestler, Mr Foley had learned the craft of storytelling in such a way that he could transplant the hothouse flower that is the specialised form of storytelling used both in the wrestling ring and out of it into the cooler, broader realms of autobiographical literature?
Thus curious, I embarked on a project to read whatever pro wrestlers' autobiographies came within my reach in the near future, and to analyse them, to see how what relationships there are in terms of storytelling. It also offers me an opportunity to look at how different people view the same events, since most of these autobiographies cover the same years and the same events.
Are You Ready failed as an entrant to this little project immediately out of the gate. This is corporate product, not a whiff of anything controversial - ironically, given that DX claim very much to have been the most controversial thing on the table in their time - with everything more vicious than a mildly arch word sawn off, sanded down and polished to a high gloss. None of the events I was particularly interested in comparing responses to were covered in detail - some, such as the death of Owen Hart, weren't mentioned at all - and everything is very kid-friendly. This book definitely belongs on the shelf of a fifteen-year-old boy who hasn't read anything that his school didn't force him to.
In terms of structure, Are You Ready follows standard chronology, starting with the formation of DX around about 1997 and petering out at some point around 2008-ish. It should be mentioned that the second half of this book is a waste of paper; events are told in such summary form, with no attempt to deal with detail or present information in a storied fashion. As mentioned, this book seems to have come about via the time-honoured method of putting the subject in a hotel room with a hack writer who has a tape recorder and a pencil to poke the subject with occasionally to keep him talking. By the later stages of things, either the two subjects had run out of things they felt the need to talk about or everyone had realised that what the DX fans most want to know about is the events of 1996 through to 2000.
The subjects in question are Shawn Michaels and Triple H, the latter of whom causes me style problems. My standard form for these reviews is to refer to writers as Mr Whatever or Ms So-and-So, excepting the greats such as Lovecraft. I cannot, in all conscience, refer to the person in question as Mr H, or indeed Mr HHH. This is neither a gangster movie nor an alphabet disaster. He apparently goes by the name Hunter most of the time, but that won't fit the format, and calling him Mr Levesque will just confuse issues. Given the amount of Are You Ready he spends stroking Mr Michaels' ego, I'm half tempted to refer to him henceforth as Ms Michaels, but there's already two of those around, so Mr Helmsley will have to do.
In any case, as the reader sits quietly inside a tape recorder listening to a mildly edited transcript, it becomes clear that Mr Helmsley is the one doing most of the talking. Mr Michaels is mostly there to agree with him and summarise things. Mr Michaels wanders off for a good section of the book, which covers the time he was out injured. Apparently nobody thought that his views on what his friend was up to without him - to see the faction that he started and led, and the industry changes he began develop and continue without him, to get an outsider's view on something he was originally inside - were of any interest to anyone. That shows precisely what level of deep introspection was reached for this book, what consideration was given to the opportunities for communication Are You Ready presented to two men known for enjoying poking fun at established conventions and writing rude words on the fourth wall: absolutely none.
As to narrative voice, Mr Michaels gives one the impression that he has other things on his mind; he's happy to let Mr Helmsley do the talking, nod and smile for the camera that isn't there, think about something else and only get involved when Mr Helmsley pokes him yet again. Mr Helmsley on the other hand is quite willing to take the padlock off his jaw and go on at some length about everything possible, pausing only to poke Mr Michaels and remind him he's there too. Mr Helmsley pays constant attention to his co- ... I hesitate to say co-author; co-narrator might be acceptable ... in a strange mixture of fawning and badgering. Mr Helmsley very clearly thinks that Mr Michaels is all that and a bag of chips too; Mr Michaels seems to consider himself closer kin to the wooden fork. Mr Helmsley also thinks that he is all that and a bag of chips too, albeit a smaller bag of chips than Mr Michaels - what Mr Michaels thinks of this is less evident - although he comes across as more someone who's found a way to be pleased with who he is and what he's accomplished without being either a smug, self-satisfied wanker or a big happy dog about it.
All in all Are You Ready's best hope is to serve as a summary guide to what DX did when, in the mildly edited voices of its senior members. It is not what it could have been; a very insightful and revealing recollection of a time of upheaval and challenge in an industry that's close to a micro-society, by the two men who helped change the system. Instead we have corporate product. The second half of the book is a waste of paper, the first half could have been shortened considerably by removing every instance of "isn't that right, Shawn?" and "didn't we, Shawn?", and the formatting and layout do absolutely nothing to assist any of this.
Never fear. Mr Michaels already has his own book out and Mr Helmsley clearly has more upstairs than the intended readership of Are You Ready. Sooner or later he's going to figure out what the word processor is for, and since the bastard's got an instinctive knack for coming up with interesting things to do with the fourth wall, that should be interesting reading to say the least.
In summary: Foley 1, DX 0.
This book is:
* - short on pages, shorter on content
* - corporate product
* - a tape transcript of two guys sitting in a hotel room rambling about things they did ten years ago
This book is not:
* - shocking, revealing or even surprising
* - going to tell you anything you didn't know if you already know anything about DX
* - literature, or indeed anything related to literature by blood, marriage, divorce, lawsuit or breaking-and-entering
