Tag: USA

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman

In this book, a girl at university gets all het up about the philosophy of language, about whether words have meaning, and if so if we can ever understand them.  Of course it all boils down to some guy.   

She meets this guy in Russian class, and he begins to write her terribly clever emails. She replies with terribly clever emails.  It is all very intellectual but also very boring, just like it always is to be up close with someone’s crush. 

The things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal.  It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.  Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom.  And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about.

Eventually it emerges that he for real has a girlfriend, but somehow all this suffering carries on, and this is when she starts to have problems with the structure of reality and what it all means.  The solution is offered to her on a plate, by the crush.  Here he is, talking to her:

“My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly towards you.  He said I was – what was it, it was a funny expression.  Leading you on.  He said I was leading you on.” 

It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. 

.. . .”I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but was really dismissive.  He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”

Like seriously what is up with this girl?  Words do have meaning, and here he is explaining everything pretty clear.  No need to worry about the structure of the universe, this guy just an asshole.

Sidebar, the epigraph of this book is Proust on adolescence.  I’ll just end by quoting it at length because it is so fantastic:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality.  In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind.  There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.  Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.  In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. 

GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

GONE WITH THE WIND is a book both profoundly woke and un-woke.  The un-woke part is very famous.  The main characters are slave owners and slave apologists, and it is fascinating to see how they construct a world in which they can still live with themselves. It’s wild to see people living their daily lives while committing atrocities.  The woke part I rarely see discussed, but for me it’s pretty woke: and that’s the character of Scarlett O’Hara. I can’t think of a book previous to this that has a female character who clearly and explicitly manipulates being female to her advantage.  I also can’t think of an earlier female character who makes her own money and is proud of it.

Also interesting, and I think something you rarely see written about, is the really horribly mean act of keeping someone dangling.  Ashley Wilkes does it to Scarlett O’Hara, and it’s really sad. I think this happens a lot: you enjoy someone else having a crush on you, because you like the attention, so instead of doing the kind thing (making it clear they have no hope, so they can get over you), you keep it going, enjoying the validation, and making them go slowly crazy.  Meanwhile you act all innocent like they are the pathetic one.

EMPIRE OF PAIN by Patrick Radden Keefe

A thoroughly depressing book about what money can buy. It tells the story of the Sackler family. They are personally and primarily responsible for the opiod crisis, and have faced no significant penalty for it.

The story begins with Arthur Sackler, born early 1900s, the only one of them who could be said to have earned his money. He was smart, inventive, and pathologically hard-working. He basically invented modern pharmaceutical advertising. He generated the idea of marketing directly to doctors; of data management, so they knew who was prescribing what (for better advertising); and of advertorial. He got very rich off Valium and Lithium.

One of his many business ventures was a small pharmaceutical firm. They produced a kind of covering that allowed a slower release of medicine. They used this covering on a very strong opiod, twice the power of regular morphine, called Oxycodene. As everyone has known for centuries that opiods are extremely addictive, the demand for this drug was naturally limited. Once Arthur was dead, Richard took over and directed his team to a) claim, without any proof whatsoever, that <1% of patients would become addicted to it; b) incentivize reps to always push doctors to prescribe the absolute highest dose for as long as possile and c) ignore the data systems of his uncle which clearly showed exactly what doctors were massively over-subscribing because they were selling direct to the street

More people died from opiods in America last year than from guns or traffic accidents. Despite clear and extensive evidence of criminality, the Sacklers have managed to pay <1% of their fortune in reparations. I won’t go into it, it’s a long story, but basically it’s a lesson for all of us: you can do whatever you want, as long as you have the right lawyers

LUSTER by Raven Leilani

This started off pretty well, being a story of a young black woman who gets involved with an older white man who is in an open marriage. Here she is, making out with him:

For a moment, I’m sure I’m going to cry, which is not unusual, because I cry often and everywhere, and most especially because of this one Olive Garden commercial.  I excuse myself and run to the bathroom, where I look in the mirror and reassure myself that there are bigger things than the moment I am in.  Gerrymandering.  Genealogy conglomerates selling my cheek swabs to the state. 

She loses her job and then in a not at all believable turn of events is invited by the wife to live with them. We then get into that beloved territory of recent novels, which is the aimless narrator. She hangs about not really looking for a job, doing weird aimless things like taking photographs of their stuff. I gave up with about twenty pages left to go. The book like the narrator where both going nowhere.

DEVOTION by Madeline Stevens

DEVOTION is okay for a beach read, which is lucky, because I read it on a beach. It tells the story of a nanny who becomes obsessed with her employer. It is another of what seems to be an entire new genre on income inequality. Eventually it all blows up when the employer is extremely intoxicated, and her husband and the nanny force her into a threesome. I got the impression we were supposed to think this was some kind of crescendo of obsession, but mostly I just thought it was rape. Like, check it out, you don’t get to have sex with someone who is too drunk to consent, no matter how obssessed you are or how rich they are.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED BY F Scott Fitzgerald

I have not read this book for about thirty years, and it certainly has changed.  It tells the story of a married couple who spend a lot of money and have a lot of fun.  They claim this is because of some life philosophy they have about living for the day and damning tomorrow.  In fact, it is because they expect a large inheritance. I used to think this was wondefully romantic; now I just think it’s amazing how many philosophies you can come up with if you expect to inherit.

It begins to look as if they will not receive the inheritance, and they descend pretty quickly into drinking too much and cheating, having now boxed themselves into a corner.  Here is the husband, having made the mistake of looking at the alumni magazine of his university (always a mistake when you are feeling low):

He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. . . (In the past) he would as soon become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the competition would have kept him from unhappiness.  But at present he had no such delicate scruples.  This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things, to avoid prying deeply into motives and first causes, and mostly to long passionately for security from the world and from himself. 

Then they sue, and get the inheritance after all; but by then they have already learnt some rough lessons about what happens when you damn tomorrow. I mean on the one hand I feel sorry for him but on the other hand BOO HOO I AM SO SORRY YOU ALMOST DIDN’T GET AN UNFAIR GODDAMN ADVANTAGE. 

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by Jeffrey Eugenides

I like Jeffrey Eugenides’ MIDDLESEX, and to a lesser degree THE MARRIAGE PLOT, so I was a bit surprised to be so underwhelmed by this one.  

On the surface it seems like it should be interesting, being the story of how five daughters in one family came to all commit suicide.  Somehow however, from this promising material, a very boring book is written. I think part of the problem is the attempt at formal inventiveness in the narrative voice.  The story is told by some undefined ‘we’ who are apparently the neighbourhood boys, who are apparently recounting this story many years later. I just found this dumb.  Also I didn’t really like the heavy emphasis on how inscrutable females are, that inevitably came with it.  No doubt that is what teenage boys really do feel but so does most of western literature, and so it is a bit SNORE.  Probably they had mental health issues or were being abused or something, like Jesus guys it’s not that complicated.  Anyway I did like this sex scene, so I’ll leave you with that.  Don’t say I never do anything for you:

Two beasts lived in the car, one above, snuffling and biting him, and one below, struggling to get out of its damp cage.  Validanlty he did what he could to feed them, placate them, but the sense of his insufficiency grew and after a few minute, with only the words “Gotta get back before bed check,” Lux left him, more dead than alive. 

THE BEST OF ME by David Sedaris

Some writers create books. David Sedaris does this, but first he had to create a genre, in which his books could fit. I find this amazing. It puts him in the illustrious company of historical romance writer Georgette Heyer. (THOUGHT: Am I the first person ever to compare Sedaris and Heyer? I hope so. Let’s not google it though, becuase the inevitable outcome of that, is finding out you have nothing new to offer. FOLLOW-ON THOUGHT: Maybe this is why baby boomers are so insufferable, because they did not spend their youth finding out that every ‘great’ idea they had had already been had by somebody else)

THE BEST OF ME is a collection of what Sedaris thinks are his best pieces of writing. As I have read (I think) all of Sedaris, it was a re-read for me, but it was interesting to see this cut of what he thinks is good. Here he is in the introduction:

I’ll always be inclined towards my most recent work, if only because I’ve had less time to turn on it. When I first started writing essays they were about big, dramatic events, the sort you relate when you meet someone new and are trying to explain to them what made you the person you are. As I get older, I find myself writing about smaller and smaller things. As an exercise it’s much more difficult, and thus – for me anyway – much more rewarding.

I found this sort of interesting, becuase I am often struck by how much meat he manages to find in his one life, and I wonder where it comes from. Surely, so much of life is like grocery shopping and brushing your teeth, I would have thought by now he was down to the bits of the bird where there is mostly gristle. But still he keeps them coming.

He notes that the “pieces in this book – both fiction and nonfiction – are the sort I hoped to produce back when I first started writing, at the age of twenty. I didn’t know how to get from where I was then to where I am now, but who does?” I found this sort of inspirational. Imagine being able to say, this is what I wanted at twenty, and I have got it! Typically, in myexperience you don’t get it. Or if you do, the odds are you no longer want it.

SOMETIMES I TRIP ON HOW HAPPY WE COULD BE by Nichole Perkins

Despite the fantastic title, I did not enjoy this. I had high hopes too, because Nichole Perkins podcast THIRST AID KIT is brilliant. It examines what makes dreamboat men dreamboats. The one on Joshua Jackson (always Pacey from DAWSON’S CREEK) is revelatory. It’s rare and liberating to hear women discussing sexiness. Depressingly, their conclusion is often that x person is sexy because ‘they are a good guy’ or ‘would be a good dad.’ I would like to deny it but I kind of see it, and Pacey is a case in point. LADIES WE NEED TO BE COOLER.

This is a series of essays about Perkins’ life, mixed up with her observations on pop culture. Perhaps they just suffer by comparison to the wonderful essays I just finished by Samantha Irby, but I was kind of amazed by how boring Perkins manages to make her own life. Most people’s lives are interesting, if only because I am nosy. This really was dull. The only interesting point I can recall off the top of my head was that she had this guy where their only relationshp was him giving her head, which routinely would go on for over three hours. Perhaps I am an innocent, but . . wow, that’s a lot.

Anyway, all this detail aside (he used to pull up at her crotch, seated in a chair, as at a table), the reason it all comes off as rather bland is I suspect because she is not actually sharing anything truly vulnerable, or anything she has really struggled with. Not that anyone has to share any such thing, of course, but if you are going to write a memoir it’s kind of what you are signing up for.

DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown

Here is a famous self-help book that I decided to give a whirl. The first three chapters were kind of good, but then it got kind of repetitious. The insight is basically that we often do not reach our full potential because we are too afraid of taking a risk, and espeially the risk of what other people will think.

This is a painfully true observation. The worst part I think is that probably we are often not even aware that we are limiting ourselves. If it was conscious, it would be easier to change. So I guess we have to continually challenge ourselves to remember it. I could tell you a lot more about what’s in the book, but the idea is best expressed in the speech by Theordore Roosevelt after which it is named. If you’ve never read it, here it is, you can thank me later:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.