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What the Critics Say
Synopsis
Author's Biography
Sample Review
Order The Perfume Factory on Barnes&Noble.com

 

 

"If Bruce Springsteen wrote novels,
this would be the book he'd write."

The Perfume Factory, a first novel by Alex Austin, is an absorbing coming-of-age story set on the gritty coastline of central New Jersey. Centering on the corrosive relationship between a violent, abusive father and his rebellious but powerless son, The Perfume Factory has been lauded for its strong sense of place, stamp of authenticity and passionate portrayal of working-class American youth.

Alex Austin is a Los Angeles-based journalist and award-winning playwright. The Perfume Factory is his first novel.

Praise for The Perfume Factory:

"It's Catcher In The Rye as re-imagined by Bruce Springsteen.... I couldn't put this down."—Jim Testa, Jersey Beat Magazine

"I have just finished reading a great little novel, The Perfume Factory by Alex Austin. It is a dark and gritty coming-of-age story set in the 60's.... His young characters are fascinating. Their naïve invincibility, their teenage wants and fears bring them to life." —Laura Rae Amos, Blogcritics

"This is the working-class accurately portrayed in the conflict between an abusive father and his rebellious son. This is a powerful story, well told." — Allen Caruba, Bookviews

"Huck Finn might come to mind, and rightly so: Austin's authoring skills and ear for human rhythms of speech elevate The Perfume Factory to a lofty level of achievement indeed." —Geoff Rotuno, The Boox Review

"First-time novelist Austin draws a sharp, affecting portrait of wrong-side-of-the-tracks hopelessness, Jersey style. He captures perfectly the tone of teenage life, the aimlessness of finding something to do and the hesitant, meandering conversations of a budding romance. Through Sam's warring impulses, the author also probes the serious moral conundrums of youth, as he tries to break free of his self-absorption, engage with the world and solidify his character against the pressures of external circumstances." —Kirkus Discoveries Recommended

"Alex Austin can tell a story! His sensual, confused, and passionate teen-age characters kept me enthralled  from start to finish.  I can unabashedly recommend this book to anyone who has ever been 17." —Tom Waldman, author of We All Want to Change the World:  Rock and Politics from Elvis to Eminem

"With a lead character that combines elements of Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn and Charles Bukowski, this sharply observed story of youth on the Jersey Shore is in the best tradition of great American realistic fiction. At once brutal and tender.”—C.N.McCann, Director of Communications, University of Washington

"A modern Tom Sawyer story, where the mischievous have more serious trouble to get into, and 'boys being boys' has more wide-reaching consequences for young people and the world around them."—Nathan Price, Book Club 472

"If Bruce Springsteen wrote novels instead of songs, this would be the book he'd write."—Jerry Lazar, Director, California Lawyers for the Arts

" Every time you think the `coming of age' novel is dead, an author like Alex Austin comes around and brings it back to life."—Rob Cohen, author of Etiquette for Outlaws and Been There, Done That.

Published November 2005 by by Page-Free Publishing; ISBN 1-58961-404-6, $21.95.

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THE PERFUME FACTORY
SYNOPSIS

Port Beach is a faded resort where the children's playground is a polluted bay and a garbage dump that spreads across the town`s marshland like a cancer. Taverns outnumber grocery stores 20 to 1, unemployment is astronomical and hope is in short supply. Most ominous is the town's one source of jobs, the Perfume Factory, an industrial complex that "... spilled out the sickly sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of an old woman's handbag," an irony not lost on 17-year-old Sam Nesbitt, who views the Perfume Factory as a mocking reminder of the town's unchanging ugliness, oppression and empty promises. As the summer of his 18^th birthday unfolds, and Sam finalizes his plans to escape the town and his violent abusive father, he meets Julie, a pretty, vivacious young woman from the city, who takes an unexpected interest in him, heightened by the lies he tells about himself to cement that interest. Sam, who has survived by suppressing his feelings and emotions "playing it cool" obsessively pursues her, setting aside his habitual caution, altering his escape plans, and experiencing his first romantic love and sexual experience, pain and joy in tow. The Perfume Factory has been lauded for its strong sense of place, stamp of authenticity and passionate portrayal of working-class American youth.

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Author's Biography

Alex Austin is an award-winning playwright and journalist who was editor of PSA and Hollywood magazines, executive editor of the magazine division of Princeton, New Jersey-based Peterson's Publishing and most recently special projects director of SportsTravel. where he interviewed major figures Bud Greenspan, John Wooden, Charlie Pasarell and top sports agent Scott Boras. His plays include The Amazing Brenda Strider, produced at Glaxa Theatre, Los Angeles, March-April 2000. Brenda was a Backstage West Critic's Pick and won a Maddy Award for Playwriting. It was Produced at CoHo Theatre, Portland, October-November 2002. His play Mimosa was produced at Los Angeles Theater Center, March 2002. Mimosa was the featured play in Wordsmiths Playwrights Festival, presented by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Mimosa is published by Playscripts, Inc. Shotgun was produced at Santa Monica Playhouse, March-April 1999. Muslim was staged at the Levantine Cultural Center, Los Angeles, January 2002, as part of the New Millennium Project. His fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines, including Caffeine, Bachy, Beyond Baroque and UCLA's Westwinds. His screenplays include What Happened, Semi-Finalist, Austin Film Festival, 1997, optioned by Bootstrap Productions, Los Angeles. Innocent Hearts, Runner-up, Diane Thomas Screenwriting Awards, 1995, scheduled to begin production by Shaolin Li Productions. Austin has also co-authored music reviews with novelist Steve Erickson for the LA Weekly and the Herald Examiner. He is a graduate of UCLA and has a Master's degree in history from CSUN. Austin was born in Newark, New Jersey, spent his childhood in Edison and his teenage years in Union Beach/Keyport, where he graduated from Keyport High School. Austin later lived in Asbury Park, where he attended Monmouth College. Austin served in the United States Navy. He currently lives with his wife, Eileen, and their extended family, in West Hills, California.

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Sample Review
(This review can be printed in total or excerpted without attribution.)

Dirty Realism on the Jersey Coast

The Perfume Factory
A Novel
Alex Austin
PageFree Publishing: 223 pp., $21.95

The Perfume Factory is an absorbing coming-of-age story set on the gritty coastline of central New Jersey. The novel springs from the corrosive relationship between a violent, abusive father and his rebellious but powerless son, who suffers from an undiagnosed disorder that renders him physically helpless when taken by strong emotions. The son, Sam, is not without resources. Like others who have found themselves impotent in a hellish environment, Sam has survived by suppressing his feelings and emotions. Sam has deflected a thousand blows by playing it cool.

Sam's father is a monster, a cross between Pat Conroy's hard-nosed Marine Corps officer Santini (The Great Santini), and the sadistic stepfather Dwight of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life. A perennially out-of-work alcoholic, with a taste for classical music, Frank relives his military glory days by barking orders at Sam and perversely berating his every attempt to fulfill them. Not helping matters is Sam's mother, a good-hearted but wayward and combative woman who can match Frank's verbal outbursts with a fountain of foul language, but whose defense of Sam serves as a red flag for Frank's abusive attentions.

Given his dysfunctional parentage, Sam seems set-up to be a thoroughly sympathetic character, but Austin has avoided making Sam the staple of coming-of-age novels, the "good bad boy." Morally rudderless, Sam is a thief, liar and con man, whose has bankrolled his coolness, street smarts and raw intelligence into a string of lucrative petty crimes, including the most recent, a break-in that has provided Sam the money to escape from his father and a second monster, Sam's hometown.

Port Beach is a faded resort where the children's playground is a polluted bay and a garbage dump that spreads across the town`s marshland like a cancer. Taverns outnumber grocery stores 20 to 1, unemployment is astronomical and hope is in short supply. Most ominous is the town's one source of jobs, the Perfume Factory, an industrial complex that "... spilled out the sickly sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of an old woman's handbag," an irony not lost on Sam, who views the Perfume Factory as a mocking reminder of the town's unchanging ugliness, oppression and empty promises.

On the night we meet Sam, he's nearing his 18^th birthday, and finalizing his plans for escape, but this night will prove pivotal. Cruising the shore, Sam and Leo, a tough, worldly, middle-class friend, meet Julie, a pretty, vivacious young woman from the city, miles above Sam in sophistication, who takes an unexpected interest in him, heightened by the lies he tells about himself to match Leo's authentic resume. Though the night ends with a falling out between Sam and Julie, Sam obsessively pursues her, setting aside his habitual caution, altering his escape plans, and experiencing his first romantic love and sexual experience, pain and joy in tow. Sam's efforts to keep the world of Julie and the world of Port Beach and his father separate provide some much appreciated comic relief from the dominant, harsher scenes of the novel. It's also through his efforts to move between these parallel universes, that Sam grows as a character, finding a moral compass and discovering his own identity, even as both worlds collapse.

A novel of social realism, in the camp of Frank McCord, Jim Harrison and Pat Conroy, and its subset, dirty realism, a term coined to describe the works of American novelists Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Jayne Anne Phillips, The Perfume Factory uses a matter-of-fact tone, blunt, realistic dialogue and graphic descriptions of violence and grim, small-town life to reflect Sam's world. But the above are threaded with lyrical descriptions revealing an introspective, poetic streak in Sam that grows with the story's unfolding, like the following description of a night with Julie: "With the darkness came the fireflies, which Julie wanted to catch and put in a jar. We ran around the yard, cupping them and depositing them in the jar until we had thirty or forty. But though they continued to glow in the jar, the magic had gone out of their light and what started as a quest for something extraordinary turned solemn. Julie opened the jar and shook them out. As they spread across the night, I watched her face, lost for a moment in their flight and regained magic."

Numerous colorful, inventive characters inhabit Austin's central New Jersey setting, but Austin shortchanges us with several of them, including Sam's siblings, who are intriguing but not fleshed out or fully integrated into the novel. However, several characters who briefly come on stage leave indelible impressions. Archler, who buys the underage kids liquor, "... smelled of smoke, which had soaked into the two gray sweaters that he took turns wearing. He walked with a limp, favoring his right leg. There may have been a time that he didn't limp, but no one could remember it, nor had anyone bothered to ask how his lameness had come about. The limp didn't reduce his pace, though, and when he walked, he always had his lips set in a smile that never varied, as if it were painted. What he was smiling at was anybody's guess.... After graduating eighth grade, he had gone to high school for awhile, everyone was sure of that, but no one was sure when he dropped out. I followed him out of Jack's, wondering at his hair, which was black as a pocket comb, jelled and parted in the middle and never varied in length, though no one had ever seen Archler at the barber's. Archler was a mystery that nobody cared to solve."

The Perfume Factory's local is specific, the time frame is unspecified. It could be the sixties, it could be the nineties, perhaps a strategy to emphasize the unchanging nature of the small, blue-collar towns in which the story takes place. Against this setting, Sam, disaffected, distrustful, disillusioned, brings to mind the working class youth that have appeared in British fiction, plays and rock music, from John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, to Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, to the songs of British rockers The Clash, Sex Pistols and Squeeze (and closer to home, Bruce Springsteen). The Sex Pistol's Johnny Rotten sang, "No future for you or me," which resonates in Sam's search for employment: ".... After going to a dozen or so places, I saw that no matter how big they [factories] were or what they manufactured, the offices that you applied in were all the same. Maybe fifteen feet wide, with a little couch and fake wood walls. In the fourth wall, they'd cut a hole to shove the application through and behind the hole a row of women my mother's age tapped out stuff on typewriters. On the walls would always be a couple of government notices in small type and a poster advertising government bonds, as if maybe one wall was given over to the government. A fluorescent light would always be blinking as if it were about to go out. The woman that stuck her hand through the hole to take the application would have horned rim glasses and her hair bunched on top and she'd be smoking. She wouldn't say anything when she handed you the application pinned to a brown board with a pencil, and she wouldn't say anything when you handed it back. The first couple of places I applied to, I asked what would happen next, and they always said they'd call if they thought I was right for the job. I stopped asking after awhile. Sometimes behind the walls, I'd hear noises, lathes running or the sound of a conveyer belt, and I'd imagine what was going on back there, but that was as close as I got to the work."

A first novel, The Perfume Factory is notable for its strong sense of place and stamp of authenticity, and timeless in its evocation of monstrous fathers and hapless sons. Sam will navigate through some harrowing seas to leave his father and the Perfume Factory behind. Brave readers will accompany him.