What's Really Good
a whack at some "literary criticism"
If there’s a neon sign hanging in the dining establishment, chances are, you are in for the most middling meal of your life.
Bonnie and I have been friends for over a decade, and a lot of the time we’ve spent together has been time spent eating. One of our running jokes as teenagers was: if you’re not about to vom, did you eat at all? As we’ve gotten older and our disposable income has grown in proportion, we’ve also spent hours becoming increasingly distressed at “fancy” dinners in trendy restaurants.
The pinnacle was probably whenever we were in Paris six years ago. We had Cosmopolitans (Carrie Bradshaw moment!) and croque monsieurs (???) at a gastropub, much to the amusement of our petit and handsome server. The next night, we endured a four hour dinner at the hands of another very amused French server. I’d ordered something like pâté to start, the rabbit entrée, and millefeuille for dessert.
I remember all of this even now because I remember everything and because our server told me I’d ordered well. I will carry this compliment to the grave. It’s important to add that I do not identify as a foodie.1 Most restaurant food is fine.
My grandfather was a formative influence on my palate, just because we hung out so much when I was too young for school. I can only eat apples cold out of the fridge because he prefers his the same way. Half the time, I’m idly mulling over why I am Like This, trying to reverse engineer my personality, the things I like, what I like to do.
I picked up Early Work by Andrew Martin on a whim awhile back and had to stop myself from finishing it in one sitting. In retrospect, I should’ve just read it all because after picking it back up, he failed to stick the landing. I was still compelled by the book, and I was trying to articulate why, when it was so devoid of plot. If you asked me what happened, the answer is not a lot. The protagonist teaches part-time at the local women’s prison and cheats on his fiancée with a writer he meets at a party. Martin and I seem to have overlapping sensibilities, and the two of us would likely get along well for at least fifteen minutes.
Rom-coms are a nice reprieve, but on the whole, my genre is contemporary literary fiction, and I never re-read books, with the exception of Elif Batuman.2 I slogged through Middlemarch and Anna Karenina four years ago — I have done (at least some of) my canonical time! Cormac McCarthy writes boy books, and I’m too squeamish for all that. I read The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis last summer and couldn’t sleep after finishing it, it was so scary. One could say I’m conducting long-term market research, and I like to see what’s being sold nowadays. Air Mail reported last December that the buzz isn’t translating into dollars, like it used to.
Sally Rooney, on the other hand, never has to type another word on her MacBook for as long as she lives, if she so chooses. (Probably? I think Dublin has a high COL). I, unfortunately, have never once enjoyed any of her novels, and her most recent work, Intermezzo, was released on the 24th. Bookstores were having midnight release parties like it was the last book in the Twilight trilogy. The prose is as technically dialed-in as ever, and I’m just a few chapters along, marveling at the inventiveness of her plotting and positively stewing. She fills me with an uncanny, low-level dread; her style grates.
Critics praise her ability to render three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood characters, but I’ve always found them generally bloodless and surreal. If everyone is sad and beautiful, no one is sad and beautiful! Could it be chalked up to cultural differences? I don’t know that I’ve ever met an Irish person from Ireland.
It’s not a content thing, I’m not so literal. I’ve read more about less. A Sally Rooney cam girl is light work compared to, say, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, the last thing I read. One of the stories is punctuated by a 4,000-word description of a custom-order porn video. I had to put the book down a few times because it was so wrenchingly visceral, unlike the hot, Xanned-out, woe-is-me Intermezzo lawyer. Tulathimutte reminded me that, oh right, you can write whatever you want, however you want, in the weirdest way possible. For now, I will suffer through another sadsack cast of characters3 and absorb some vague gesturing about Marxism to participate in the zeitgeist.
I fretted that I was missing something, subtextually maybe or else I lacked some key component of emotional intelligence, that Rooney heads were picking up on, but several hundred pages later, she just doesn’t speak to me. I’m as navel-gazey as one of her heroines, and I feel nothing. Lately, I’m more concerned that I can’t stop listening to The Dare4 and wondering what that says about me, if anything.
Usually, if someone describes themselves as such, I know we have nothing in common.
Kelly, friend of the letter, said once that The Idiot reminded her of me :)
It’s the same sensation I had when I was 17, reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I was so annoyed, I wanted to throttle the kid.
Harrison, I am free on Thursday.