False Positive

by Harold Jaffe

Each of the Fifteen Fictions in False Positive originated as a nationally known newspaper story, which Harold Jaffe has "treated" to bring to its prosaic surface a maniacal subtext. The original stories cover the familiar American postmodern grotesquerie: high school mass murders, sexual molestations, internet ambushes, serial killers on the loose. Jaffe Enters Each published version, and through rearrangement, nuanced rewriting, and strategic interpellations,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573660981
• ISBN13: 9781573660983
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: F2c
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Ripping off the mask

If you like you fiction dumbed down, ho-hum, or feel yourself easily confused, Jaffe's fiction is not for you. But if you enjoy witty dialoge and intelligent writing with a purpose, be sure to read "False Positive." Jaffe's post-modern docu-fictions rips the mask off of media dis/misinformation and addresses it with a witty style and radical esthetic. In "Zealous Hysterectomies" Jaffe combines a "news" story of radical Islamic insurgents with a "follow-up report" on unnecessary hysterectomies. Jaffe is writing between the lines here, teasing out what is embedded in sensational terms like "distrubing new phenomenon" and "preventative procedure par excellence." Radical Islamic insurgents are allinged with radical hysterectomy procedures. Jaffe's "treatment" of these offerings exposes the absurdity of what we the reader have been told what we are to believe. In Jaffe's hype-reality show news media and popular culture are scrutinized under a high -powered microscope and strategically rearranged in an artful fashion to expose their grotesque subtexts. These "found" stories seem short but you will be thinking of them as Jaffe's fiction tends to stick with the reader long after the mine has been planted

A Deliciously Skewed take on American Culture

Jaffe's subtle hand works magic with fifteen real news stories, and creates from them an absurd, yet incredibly believable world which is a very close parallel to today's Jerry Springer society. The opening story, "Geeks Dream" displays the undercurrent of insecurity and vengeful feeling of the so-called "geeks," those that were punished for expressing their understanding of the Columbine shootings even though their original tormentors were not. This story is subtle compared to the rest, with the author making a few overt stylistic touches. The rest of Jaffe's alterations are invisible. Throughout the collection, Jaffe's stories are woven together with small details and the repetition of names, images, and phrases. These include Jesus figures, unnecessary surgery, child abuse, and Larry King. Throughout the collection, Jaffe is careful to maintain a journalistic voice, and only deviates from that when appropriate, such as during the pseudo-interview segments of the book. One of the most strangely haunting stories, "Carthage, Miss." is strikingly haunting. It is a contrast of two stories about the same event, with slight details altered between the two, making them appear almost as completely separate texts. While reading, one begins to wonder if one story is the source material and the other is Jaffe's "prosthetic text," or if these are both derived from the same text. If these stories were to stand on their own, they would not work nearly as well as they do collectively. Even though Jaffe did publish some of them in several anthologies, the stories by themselves lack the interplay of the repeated images, and lose the impact of the inherent insanity of modern American culture. It is very interesting to note that Jaffe does not include any references to his source material anywhere in this book. That forces the reader to take the stories included at face value instead of comparing them to their original. That allows these stories to be almost taken as actual articles, and force the reader to reconsider the events around him.

Jaffe's Magic

Many people read the newspaper. Harold Jaffe dissects it, deconstructs it, retools it, and transforms it. Jaffe is the author of numerous groundbreaking works of fiction, including BEASTS, STRAIGHT RAZOR, and SEX FOR THE MILLENNIUM. In all his work, Jaffe makes us think and re-think about we see, what we hear, what we know. Among its diverse attributes, Jaffe's work constitutes a brilliant form of postmodern epistemology. His latest volume, FALSE POSITIVE, his tenth book of fiction, takes Jaffe's reconstruction of reality to new heights.The starting point for each of the 15 fictions in FALSE POSITIVE is a salacious news story -- an execution, Columbine, a mass murder, assisted suicide. Jaffe then "treats" each story, bringing out inherent assumptions and implied meanings.In "Geeks Dream," young people muse on both the torment and the killings at Columbine High School. Wally Cox of Boston passes on an offer of a 9mm semi-automatic because he "couldn't cough up the sixty-five bucks," while Adam R. from Moscow, Idaho, is remanded to seven mental health sessions at Kaiser for saying out loud in class that he "could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers." Jaffe adds: "Seven was the maximum allowable number of sessions underwritten by Kaiser Permanente...the school district HMO." It is just this kind of touch -- the deadpan addition of a fact about limited health care -- that makes Jaffe's treatments so brilliant, and thought-provoking. Many of the pieces are chilling -- both in the physical details Jaffe adds and in the social implications of those details. "Karla Faye," Jaffe's account of the execution in Texas of Karla Faye Tucker, includes a list of inmates put to death by the State of Texas on February 8, 1924, the first time the state used electrocution to kill prisoners. All six on the list were Black. The piece goes on to describe the malfunction of the electric chair during the execution of Velma Jean Barfield in 1984. It took 19-and-a-half minutes to kill her. The tale does more to make you think than a dozen Amnesty International reports.Jaffe's stories can also be funny. The closing piece in the collection, "Dr. Death," recounts a talk show interview with Dr. Jack Kevorkian of assisted suicide fame. The show's co-host is Charo, who sang and danced with Xavier Cugat, the "original coochie-coochie girl." Other pieces are moving. "Salaam" is a Rashomon-like telling of several outcomes of an encounter between a Palestinian would-be terrorist and an Israeli shopkeeper. When their debates (suicide bomber vs. freedom fighter, etc.) end in stalemate, one version ends the debate in final fashion -- with detonation. Jaffe then adds an alternative. ...FALSE POSITIVE is, in short, a tour de force that gives a vigorous, mind-rattling, extreme sport workout to our frenetic, violent, lascivious culture. A truly great book for our time and beyond.

You won't be able to read the news in the same way.

Harold Jaffe's new book False Positive I found to be both great and unsettling. Each narrative takes an article of our collective official culture, a news story, and creatively blends it with embellishments, refigured parallels, and other innovative techniques into new kinds of fictional structures that at once hide the author's hand and reveal the non-objective quality of the news. Jaffe's stories have the power to startle, enlighten and remind us. The pieces, containing elements of truth, make a detective out of a reader. Trying to figure out the method of each new form and looking for the "real story" within each piece sharpens the reader's focus. With captive audience, Jaffe traverses a horrific landscape that most people spend a lot of time and money trying to ignore. In doing so, he renders the insanity of some of our national policies and tendencies. The privatization of prisons, the lack of national health care, the crazed profit-lusty practices of rabid corporations, the wide spread transmission and acceptance of "expert" testimonial, the intense obsession with sexuality (especially deviant) and the attempt to simultaneously consume it and repress it, and the abandonment of our kids to inept schools unable to control the cruel, darwinistic cliquishness of the teen age level of development are just some of the themes and issues that Jaffe takes up in his latest, great book.

Strong medicine for a media-beleaguered culture

Darkly comic-and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious-the fifteen texts in Jaffe's False Positive are also deceptively potent infections, injected into the bloodstream of institutionalized media. Each fiction in the volume works like a rogue phagocyte, undermining the tissues beneath the telegenic skin of the infotainment corpus, delving deep into the genetic structure of the poisonous cells. Jaffe's virus reconfigures the genome of official mediaspeak, rendering the dark ideologies visible. The patient wakes with boils on the flesh.In the tradition of the Dada surgeon, the Fluxus healer, the guerilla artist, Jaffe uses the found object of the information age, data-the nightmarish constant flow of data that daily passes beneath our deadpan gaze--and turns it by varying degrees. So that it may be seen. Seen perhaps for the first time.Jaffe's fictions evoke emotions from every part of the spectrum-laughter, anger, sorrow, disgust. False Positive is a strong remedy for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Hard Copy. It is not innocuous medicine, but is recommended for those who wish to remain awake, alert, and engaged.