This is kind of like a French existentialist novel except set in the 1950s in America.
Here’s the gleeful narrator: “It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’ sname on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist. What satisfaction I take in appearing the first day to get my auto tag and brake sticker! I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.”
However he finds that despite his odourless armpits he is for some reason still unhappy. Even going on holiday with his friends is hollow: “The times we did have fun, like sitting around a fire or having a time with some girls, I had the feeling they were saying to me: ‘Hows about this Binx? This is really it, isn’t it, boy?’, that they were were practically looking up from their girls to say this. For some reason I sank into a deep melancholy.”
The novel makes the point that life is meaningless and happiness largely a personal decision. It appears to have been written when this was still an unusual point of view. It’s strange to think that this, so innovative at the time, is now pretty much most people’s default.
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