Tag: USA

A TIME TO BE BORN by Dawn Powell

This book is viciously hilarious in a way that suggests it is absolutely personal. Apparently, it is, written specifically as satire on a woman who was perceived as having (as the patriarchy likes to say) slept her way to the top.

In this book, the woman comes to a bad end, but Wikipedia tells me the actual woman never paid her dues. This makes sense: some of us have to pay so many dues it makes sense that some others must be skipping out.

Mostly this book is notable for the hilarious descriptions. On a busty woman’s blouse:

. . the yellow print now gracing her form, strained in a taut line across her back and then across her front so that bosoms popped out behind and before, above and below as if there were dozens of them, all crying for freedom

Or on this guy, who almost went bankrupt:

It was this snarling pack of debt which speeded (him) into the first World War and unquestionably caused him to become quite a military hero. He distinguished himself at Belleau Wood, and in Chateau-Thierry he went over the top as if he were chased by six process servers

Or an old man, with

surprisingly red hair that sprouted gaily from his ears

I ordered another book by Powell right after I finished this one.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.

I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).

The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.

In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.

IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz

In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York.  It does not go well.  It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune.  Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’  Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast. 

On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus.  And so begins a bizarre odyssey.  He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop. 

On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely.  On the other hand, perhaps not so.  You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket.   You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today.  Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden.  Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book.  The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street.  Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again. 

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.