Though Flying Houses has reverted to mostly short-form reviews, there are some books that merit the long-form treatment, and one of them is Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror. Now this book is very popular right now. Obama named it to his Best Books of 2019 list. I probably would put it on mine as well, because it's unlikely I read more than 10 books per year published in that year. It is easy to say that She Said would go higher on my list; it's hard to say if this would go higher than Year of the Monkey.
Overall, this is a fine book because it's extremely thought-provoking and inspirational. Reading this book makes me want to write. It's an interesting book to talk about with other people. Not that I would know, as I've only been able to tell people about it, but at least that's what I imagine would be the case.
Trick Mirror consists of 9 long essays over 300 pages. At least one critic has compared Tolentino to Joan Didion. These essays vary in quality. For fun, I am now going to rank these essays in order of Best to Worst:
[First Blush]
(1) The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
(2) The I in the Internet
(3) I Thee Dread
(4) Ecstasy
(5) Pure Heroine
(6) We Come from Old Virginia
(7) Always Be Optimizing
(8) The Cult of the Difficult Woman
(9) Reality TV Me
The mark of what I consider a good book worthy of recommendation is whether I am really excited for lunch to get to read, or make the extra effort to read on the train while standing, or read before bed, or really during my leisure time at all (as opposed to downtime). This is one of those books. That said, it wasn't a page-turner like She Said. It was a page-turner like a book I might hate-read. In truth, it was a pseudo-hate-read for me. I mean, how does she get away with writing for the New Yorker as an active and unabashed stoner? Is it just because she went to the Peace Corps, or got an MFA, or sold her soul to the Devil?
Perhaps because she just doesn't make an ass of herself on the page the way I likely would. She thinks the right thing, and she writes it well. And to be fair, I feel that she is already something of an iconoclast, as this book could potentially reinvigorate the personal essay as an art form. Still, it feels a bit too safe for me. It would be interesting to compare it to Bret Easton Ellis's White. The knee-jerk reaction is to cast them as polar opposites. I'll submit that Trick Mirror is better than White, and that my personal politics sit somewhere between Tolentino and Ellis, though I would not consider myself a moderate.
The essay I've put on top is about the Scam Economy. This is the most important chapter in the book, and the most important idea to emerge from this book. None of the seven "scams" she writes about (Fyre Fest, 2008 Financial Crisis, Student Loans, Facebook, #GIRLBOSS, Theranos, Amazon, Trump) should be news to many. (Note: how is it not "Eight Scams?") But the way she puts them together in the same essay is quite masterful. This is somewhat bolstered by the fact that Tolentino is in the Hulu documentary about Fyre Fest, which I watched this weekend (I had only seen the Netflix one, a while back). Perhaps it's because of her appearance that I put this essay at the top, for her ideas have crystallized an issue that I've long suspected as one of the key problems of capitalism: monetization primarily via ripping off a bunch of dumb, poor schmos. And we're all dumb, poor schmos, to an almost laughable degree. There is more bullshit in the world than ever, and it is easier than ever to believe in it. And there will be untold millions that will believe total nonsense because that's what they're fed. So much of this is righteously infuriating. Tolentino, however, must humble-brag in the interest of full disclosure that she got to see Kendrick Lamar and Calvin Harris on a beach in the Bermuda Triangle, at a sprawling resort in Puerto Rico including three days of open bar, all on the dime of the Bacardi corporation. I'm assuming many Fyre attendees have experienced feelings of worthlessness after falling prey to a con, and would scoff at this: she's just too lucky--it's not fair!
Student Debt is a very important issue for me, and it was the most cursory part of the essay. When she writes for example, that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has rejected 99 percent of applicants, I'd like to know why. But we wouldn't want to lose the basic reader's attention now, would we? I kid. I do appreciate this takedown of the bullshit millennial mindset:
"In the years following the recession, I kept hearing the little factoid that people my age would change careers an average of four times in our first decade out of college. Stories about how millennials 'prefer' to freelance still abound. The desired takeaway seems to be: Millennials are free spirits! We're flexible! We'll work anywhere with a Ping-Pong table! We are up for anything and ready to connect! But a generation doesn't start living a definitively mercurial work trajectory for reasons of personality. It's just easier, as Malcolm Harris argues in his book Kids These Days, to think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market--for people of every generation--is punitively unstable and growing more so every day. I've been working multiple jobs simultaneously since I was sixteen, and I have had an exceptionally lucky professional life, and, like a lot of Americans, I still think of employer-sponsored health insurance as a luxury: a near-divine perk that, at thirty, I have had for only two years in my career--the two years that I was working at Gawker, which was sued into the ground by the dropout-loving, suffrage-hating, Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel." (169)
It is for just these sorts of run-on dramatic flourishes that Tolentino deserves much derision and praise: derision for getting away with breaking the rule; praise for evoking poetry out of it. And moreover, the themes in this essay reverberate in many other parts of the work as a whole. The Scam is the definitive topic in this book by the definitive voice du jour of millennials.
Yet there are other themes, such as female subjugation. And part of me feels like I've underrated "We Come from Old Virginia," because it seems like this is the most important essay in the book. Mainly because Tolentino basically wrote an incredible Dollop episode on the University of Virginia and its sordid history. So I would put it at #2 actually. There is a strong She Said-vibe to this chapter too, on the topic of proper journalistic vetting practices, as it delves rather deeply into the 2014 Rolling Stone story, "A Rape on Campus." If I'm continuing to design a curriculum for a journalism class on reporting about sexual assault, which I have no business doing whatsoever, this essay would also be on the syllabus. And because of Tolentino's personal experience at UVA, the essay ultimately reads as the most authoritative in the collection, and that includes "Reality TV Me," which catalogs, in excruciating detail, how she starred in an early-aughts Noggin reality show called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico when she was sixteen. I just found that this essay dragged for whatever reason. It's definitely unique as far as personal experiences go, particularly as she later goes off about Kim Kardashian, et al., and the rise of Influencing as a career. The only critique I can pinpoint is that the expository scene-setting took me out of the narrative.
"The I in Internet" sets the collection off on a high note, with a lot of energy and substance. Even though I have [more than] several years on the author, her memories of the early internet are fairly accurate. She actually got much more involved in Geocities and Angelfire than I did. But did she ever use Prodigy? I digress. Considerations about how our usage has changed over these last few decades help to account for other cultural shifts. We've lost some of our humanity. We need to engage in virtue signalling to make sure our friends don't think we're secretly xenophobic. We don't take pictures that need to be developed and kept in nice albums at home to show our visitors, we post them on Instagram for random acquaintances and strangers to judge. (Note: shout-out to the Hot-or-Not reference in the "Scams" essay; saw the site once, had no idea Facebook wouldn't exist without it.) We keep getting shit shoved into our faces to buy, even if we were just casually checking our options to see what it would cost. Our elections are compromised and voting appears more meaningless than ever, even as more people than ever are turning out. And then there's the whole every-single-person-staring-
"I Thee Dread" is the last essay in the book, and floats along similar lines to "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" and "Pure Heroines." It is about the wedding industry. The wedding industry is another fucking joke and scam. Reading these essays gave me permission to feel that it was okay to point out the bullshit that is other people calling you cheap as a pejorative. Maybe I don't get invited to weddings because people think I'll look down on them for wasting so much money, or having so much that they need not worry about anything. Actually I think it's because I have very few friends. I certainly haven't been to 44. Far be it from me to judge anyone for being popular--Tolentino should be commended for saying yes so often. She doesn't necessarily mine a great deal of profundity from this material, yet it is refreshing to read an essay about something more frivolous than say, the decision to have children (a topic that seems glaringly absent in a book about so many things, though perhaps I'm forgetting examples of friends pressuring her into having them, the way they try to pressure her into wedding her partner of 10 years). I don't remember much of what "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" was about beyond Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg and how we put successful women down. (And note: by no means do I consider this a bad essay; certain parts are as brilliant as anything else in the book). "Pure Heroines" was my favorite because it examined prominent female characters in literature (The YA canon, The Virgin Suicides, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, Days of Abandonment), and contained generous factoids from perhaps the leading philosopher of feminist thought:
"Why all the affairs? De Beauvoir, who famously stated that 'most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being,' writes that 'there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.' A husband gets to be 'first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,' where a wife is 'before all, and often exclusively, a wife.' Her conclusion is that women are destined for infidelity. 'It is the sole concrete form her liberty can assume,' she writes. 'Only through deceit and adultery can she prove that she is nobody's chattel and give the lie to the pretensions of the male.' (In 2003, in her polemic Against Love, Laura Kipnis argued that adultery was 'the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic.') (117)
"Always Be Optimizing" is a takedown of lulemon and the barre method, athleisure-wear and health food. It feels more trifling than the other essays. I'm also underrating this one because it is one of the most amusing in the book. It's sort of similar to "I Thee Dread" in its proposition that it is precisely because a service has such a high cost that it is seen as more valuable and desirable.
Finally "Ecstasy" is mostly about Tolentino's childhood attending a parochial K-12 school with a laughably obscene "campus," while tying together disparate threads about underground Houston hip-hop, spirituality and drug use. It's sort of the "kitchen sink" essay of the book, and while it doesn't come off quite perfectly, it comes close enough to round out the top 5 in the book.
Enough of this ranking best to worst. That list above is completely inaccurate. I only finished this book yesterday. My feelings are continually evolving. I see the news about Iowa caucuses and my mind explodes in miniature. It might be a conspiracy but it's likely peddling a false narrative. However, the robots tend to win these days, so why not the most robotic candidate? I can't think. I have too many other things to do. Must publish. Must work. Must influence. Must monetize. Must survive. Must figure out plan to make capitalism work for self.
[Second Blush]
(1) We Come from Old Virginia
(2) The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
(3) The I in the Internet
(4) I Thee Dread
(5) Ecstasy
(6) Pure Heroines
(7) Always Be Optimizing
(8) The Cult of the Difficult Woman
(9) Reality TV Me
Grade: A-
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