The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness - Jill Filipovic (2017)

I need to start out this review with a confession.  In the past I've exhibited a few misogynistic tendencies, perhaps in part as a tongue-in-cheek backlash to the majority of my female friends who seem to identify as feminists, but more likely as a result of not being "successful" with women.  I watched  I Shot Andy Warhol about ten years ago and thought about writing an anti-S.C.U.M. manifesto, shortly before the phrase "men's rights" could cause someone to be "triggered." This was no doubt a result of the general frigidity that I felt from girls around this time, shortly after finishing college and entering the real world.  My feelings in retrospect are perhaps best summed up (as they often are) by a sketch from Mr. Show.

Girls didn't want to talk to me, and sometimes still don't want to talk to me.  There is something creepy or sleazy about me underneath.  My motives appear one-dimensional.  I am not confident enough.  I am not an alpha male (I am not even a beta male).  I do not make a lot of money.  My facial hair doesn't grow in the right way.  I am shy and do not make good eye contact.  I do not seem interested.  I seem too interested.  I have not, however, told anyone to smile, nor ever engaged in street harassment.  (Except the time my friend and I were drunk in a cab and we thought the girl in the next car over looked like Britney Spears and we tried to inform her of such as she inched away, and rolled up the window.)

Perhaps the reason most of my female friends are feminists and why I have scoffed at "typical girls" in general is, the girls that couldn't bear to waste their time on me haven't properly absorbed feminist values?  Or there is something legit wrong with me.  Probably the latter.  In any case, I think it's the type of girls that really just want to be a stay-at-home mom and have her husband provide for their family that have been most disinterested in me, followed by the girls that are extremely successful in their careers and sense that I would really just prefer to be a stay-at-home dad and have them provide for me and write in my free time.  So maybe I unfairly rejected the entire gender five years ago?  It was an immature position to take, that I could do that sort of thing in retaliation, or out of despair, and not out of a more basic understanding of orientation and acceptance of one's feelings going back to childhood.  It took a very long time to understand that all of these confusing emotions could be tidily ensconced within the "B" of LGBT.

I say all of this in the way of an apology, and to acknowledge that the reason many men treat women the way we do is wrapped up in our own issues that we haven't recognized or resolved.  That, and yes, the societal expectations that this book addresses.

Full disclosure: Jill Filipovic and I are friends on Facebook and went to NYU together.  We have a great deal of mutual friends (24 to be exact) but I am struck by a lack of independent recollection of personal interaction with one another.  We probably met briefly at a party or two.  Regardless, she is the third alum of the Class of 2005 to be featured on FH after Tao Lin (our mutual friend) and Aziz Ansari (we wish).  My short version opinion on the book is this: while it is fantastically written, and quite compelling overall, it is stymied a bit by its semi-clinical stance, teetering somewhere between a law review article and selective memoir.  And this is the right place to start the review for me, as an attorney in practice four years now that would like to leave the profession and write full-time.  If I could be so lucky!  I am not aware of where Jill went to law school, but I am assuming it was a very good one and that she did very well and that she got the Summer Associate 2L gig and made bank at a large firm and was able to retire her loans in short order, but maybe I'm misreading things or being presumptuous.  I'm sure she didn't go to a second-tier school, finish outside the top 50% of her class, and flounder from one horrible situation to the next after passing the bar, all while loans accrue at an outrageous interest rate and effectively become a perpetual burden.  But she earned it, and I applaud her for the decision.

Like the recently reviewed Letters to Felice, I have something to say about the end notes.  In this case, I say they are well-placed.  I also think if they were posted as footnotes on each page like a law review article, they would lose some of their impact.  Some of the sources are not exactly paragons of erudition.  But let's be clear about something in this law review comparison thing: law review articles have a citation for practically every sentence, and this is why their appearance becomes cartoonishly distinct.  The H Spot is sort of like a sloppily written law review article, and I mean that as a compliment.  Nobody likes to read those.  They're a perfect example of doing for the sake of doing, because it's the necessary thing to have on your resume.  Though students and professors may have a passion for the topic they write about, their composition is generally a tedious miserable exercise.  By contrast, The H-Spot is light enough to be read on a beach this summer.  Much of the time, it is very entertaining.  Sometimes it veers into preachy territory, but I was struck by the virtual absence of male-bashing for which feminism is often derided.  Jill opens up about her personal life just enough to give the reader insight into how she came to her perspective on these issues.  Something seemingly innocuous, like female partners in law firms being in charge of ordering lunch, inspires miniature outrage.  Also that most paralegals are female.  I would love to be a paralegal and be in charge of ordering lunch!  Is it a path towards assured financial success and growth?  At a large firm, probably!  But I digress.

The book opens up with an Introduction, which lays out its thesis, which is neatly summarized in the conclusion and its public policy proposal:

"One of the goals of this project was to show that there is no one definition of womanhood, no singular experience of pleasure seeking, and no individual things that will bring happiness for all women, but there are a great many commonalities, and a great many ways to improve the status quo.  My hope is that this book offered a little peak into the overlapping struggles of so many women, as well as the many joys--however unsupported and individualized." (267)

The best thing I can say about this book, I think, is that it made me want to be a better person.  It offers great insight into womanhood and all of its attendant anxieties, and it may cause men (such as myself) who have been insensitive in the past to think twice before making what seems like a harmless joke.  The only real criticism I can make is that "law review" thing mentioned above, and the statistical methodologies employed by the author.  The thing about the internet is that one can find pretty much any source to back up one's opinion, even if it's particularly odious or unreasonable (and just to be clear, this book is neither).  Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I feel like, when you sit down to start a law review article, you write up the position you want to take, and then you find your sources later to back up that position.  Maybe your initial position is informed by everything you have read and digested, but there is still sometimes that lingering feeling of padding by citation, as if you are not quite confident enough just to make an assertion without citation to any greater authority.  In law review contexts, it's because that's just not allowed.  In the context of a book, however, I feel like this book is most powerful (but also most challenging/slightly irksome) when it enters into "manifesto" territory.  I am thinking of Great Books from the past, like The Prince or Utopia, where the author simply writes down their thoughts, damned if anyone agrees with them or not.

Basically, in my opinion, the book is at its weakest when it is relying on statistical methodologies to define happiness, primarily because it makes me feel very anxious and insecure.  There are dozens of passages that made me curse my fate (but then again there are dozens of moments a day, dozens of things I see, that make me do the same), but here is just one:

"This new standard, of marrying an autonomous individual only once you're an autonomous individual yourself, is what marriage researchers call the 'capstone' model: marriage as the final marker of a solid, stable life, as opposed to a cornerstone of one.  Educated young people today see marriage as something they do after most of their other ducks are in a row: they have a college degree, they're working at a stable job, they can afford a wedding [Yes, No, No].  And most crucially, they want to marry someone who is a great match and from whom they derive emotional and sexual fulfillment [Gulp], not simply someone who plays a complimentary role--that is, an employed man looking for a woman who would be a good mother and homemaker, and vice versa.  Americans say a happy sexual relationship is one of the primary things that makes a marriage work, second only to faithfulness; more than 60 percent also agree that sharing household chores is crucial to a successful union [YES].  Of unmarried young people today, about a third say they haven't tied the knot because they're looking for the right person.  About the same number say they don't feel financially ready.
That capstone model means that women and men are marrying later than ever before [thank God], if they marry at all--and many don't.  The most well educated and financially prosperous, [fuck them] though, continue to wed, building their families like the children's rhyme: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage. [That's not all, that's not all, Jack is drinking alcohol]." (141, bracket parentheticals mine)

I could do this all day, as the book often caused me to reflect upon my own wretched state.  At the same time, however, I must admit that it felt very "cozy" and comforting at times, because Jill and I are the same age and went to the same school and know a lot of the same people and our experiences are sort of spiritually intertwined to an extent.  Moreover, Jill's own experience as a lawyer-turned-writer give me hope that a happier life is not necessarily a rank impossibility.

This review needs to be wrapped up, and I haven't given an appropriate road map of the territory this book covers.  Basically, there is an introduction and conclusion, and eight chapters in between.

The first is a sort of history lesson, which was one of my favorite parts, particularly when it was revealed that Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist pioneer (and not actually the same person, which made me feel very dumb as a person that loved Frankenstein).  The second is about female friendship, and adequately covers the topic except for maybe not addressing the phenomena of girls going to the bathroom together.  The third will probably become the most infamous in the book, and is about female sexuality and pleasure.  The fourth is about women as mothers, the fifth is about women as wives, and the sixth is about women in the workplace.  The seventh is about female body issues and food, and was another one of my favorites (as a person with an unhealthy diet and a bizarre relationship with food).  The eighth is about the (fading?) tradition of women taking their husband's last name after marriage.

Jill does devote a fair portion of the book to primary sources, interviews she had with women and couples in several different states.  Generally, these are some of the best parts of the book, but there is no more noteworthy subject than Janet.  Janet's story is brutal and outrageous, but also ordinary in many poorer, predominantly black communities.  Her struggle is not uncommon, but the specifics are extreme:

"The one thing that keeps Janet afloat is her children.  The dream, Janet said, is a combination of basic financial stability and that coveted 'balance': that she could both enjoy time with her children and work full time at a job that would actually bring in enough income to support her family.  Both time and money, though, have proven elusive, no matter how hard she tries and no matter how much she sacrifices one for the other.....She was there when her second daughter walked, but only because she was unemployed.  She had found a new job by the time she had her son, and so she missed his first steps, too.  'When I work, I get up at 4:30 in the morning,' Janet said.  'I work.  And then normally I'd do doubles and get home at about one o'clock in the morning and my babies were asleep.  This is the most time I've ever spent with my kids.  And I've been sitting here thinking about that.  I worked all of these years.'" (202)

It's pretty much a terrible world in terms of the amount of time that people are expected to spend working to make a living, but Janet's case is simply too much.  You hear about people getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night, but 3.5?  Insane.  In a way this book is also about the impossibility of time management, and that hit me particularly hard as a person that doesn't think he ever has enough of it and has no spouse or kids to consume it.  Actually, a spouse should help with that time crunch, and the idea of better equality in relationships between spouses and partners is one of the most effectively presented in this book.  While The H-Spot is not necessarily perfect, it is a big-hearted contribution to the world, and one that will hopefully play some small role (if not as large as say, The Feminine Mystique or The Second Sex) in bringing about a more just and equal understanding between the sexes.

Tales of Two Cities: The Best & Worst of Times in Today's New York - Ed. John Freeman (2015)

It's not every day a publisher or publicist reaches out to me and asks if I want to review their book.  In the past, I asked Tao Lin myself if I could get free copies of his first novel, novella, and second novel.  Once, someone from a bigger publishing house sent me a random book and I reviewed it.   A couple times, publicists sent me e-mails teasing a new book, asking if I wanted a review copy.  This is the first one where I expressed interest, and they actually followed through.  So, I'd like to say, thank you, Shannon Twomey, for reminding me that I am not yet totally irrelevant.

Tales of Two Cities is an anthology, and these pose particular challenges for the critic.  Of course, Userlands is partly responsible for the existence of Flying Houses in the first place, and no other reviews of anthologies have appeared since then.  Certain books of short stories, or essays, by Thomas Mann, James Franco, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Klosterman, Wells Tower, Jonathan Franzen, and others have spurred lengthy reviews that potentially lacked focus.  Like Userlands, there are many writers in Tales of Two Cities, and most of them will not be familiar to the casual reader.

Certainly, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and David Byrne are pretty famous, but their work is probably not the strongest in this volume.  I suppose we can start there, keeping in mind that people's attention spans on the internet are less than ideal.

We'll start with Smith because her story appears closest to the beginning.  I've never read White Teeth or On Beauty or NW but she's certainly one of the literary stars of our time.  For better or worse, "Miss Adele Amongst the Corsets," will forever remain my introduction to her.  It definitely took me  a minute to figure out what was happening in this story.  I feel weird not wanting to give away spoilers for short stories, but it feels necessary here.  Basically, this is the story of a drag queen going to buy a corset from a store run by Eastern European immigrants that may or may not be fundamental Christians.  It is about Miss Adele's mentality as she veers toward her late forties and reflects upon her situation.  It is about paranoia, insecurity, and the expectations we all have of common decency.

Parts of this story are engaging, and other parts drag a bit.  It's only 17 pages long, but it's one of the more memorable moments in the anthology.  I like in particular how Smith weaves in memories from Miss Adele's childhood, when her name was Darren and he was the twin of Devin (who is now successful/married) and their parents fought, all while she changes in a dressing room.  It also reminded me of my own work from 2003, "Autointoxication," with the insecurity, paranoia and egotistical impression that everyone is really talking about you.  While this is far from a great short story, it should serve Smith well.  It makes me want to check out White Teeth.

***

Before we move on, the theme of this anthology merits attention.  Of course, this book harps on the same themes over and over again!  Bill de Blasio and his infamous description of New York as two cities, for the haves and have-nots.  The rent is too damn high!  Those darn 1%-ers!

Income inequality is a hot topic (see the Democratic Debate on 10/13/15, see also the rapid rise of the minimum wage) and as a person that enjoys reviewing books by modern day heroes and doctoral journalists that attack the issue head on, as well as spearheading one's own faulty program to assess how much "fun" poor people are allowed to have, to say nothing of the 6+ years I lived in New York on my parent's/the government's dime, reviewing this book is a no-brainer.

Why the fuck do you need to live in New York?  Is it really that nice?  Oh, you've got Central Park---great!  An urban oasis.  You feel like you're not really in the city!  Oh, and the pizza--the pizza is just the best.  The museums, the culture!  Greenwich Village!  Brooklyn!  All the greatest artists come out of the village scene, don't you know?  The best public transportation system in the country, hands down.  Those wonderful 24 hour delis on every corner, or at least many corners.  The people, who are all in this struggle with you!  The energy--the city never sleeps!  It is the #1 biggest city in the country, and so much better than L.A.  God, who can stand to sit in all that traffic!  Oh, the food, such wonderful restaurants.  It is the epicenter of the legal industry!  All your friends live there, too.

Perhaps you can tell that I have conflicted feelings about New York.  Certainly, the years I spent there from 2001 through 2004 were some of the very best of my life and I will forever cherish such memories.  But, the years I spent there from 2010 through 2013 were different.  I was older.  I wasn't in college.  The Great Depression Part 2 happened in between.  I had to take out student loans this time.  I was in Brooklyn Heights rather than Greenwich Village.

When I was 22, I moved back to Chicago because my dad offered me a job there, and I had no job offers in New York (I hadn't really started looking for one, and had always lived in the NYU dorms, never my own apartment).  When I was 30, I moved back to Chicago because I had no legal job offers in New York, and again, lived in the same "apartment-style" dorm at Brooklyn Law School for 3 years, the rent approximately $1,000 per month for a 2 bedroom.  My room was small, but my roommate's (there were 3 different ones of varying quality, one of whom was the best roommate I have ever had, and there have been many) was only about $60 per month more than mine, and I think this place was a steal for the neighborhood.  Sometimes I see friends on Facebook moving out and posting their craigslist ad when they want someone to take over their lease, and it's usually almost $1000 per month to live in one room in a 3BR in a vaguely desirable neighborhood in a wave of gentrification.

Compare that to the $580 (up from $540 as of 9/1/15) for my room in Logan Square (say nothing of sharing that room and cutting the cost to $290), a neighborhood in Chicago that has been in a steady state of gentrification over the past 10 years.

Now granted if I could have lived in New York with a rental at $500 or $600 per month, I would have stayed.  But I would have probably needed to split a room to get that.  And it would most likely be in Crown Heights.

***

There are two stories in this collection that are focused laser-like on housing: "Partially Vacated" by D.W. Gibson, and "A Block Divided Against Itself" by Sarah Jaffe.  The latter features Crown Heights as the epicenter of the current gentrification fight in NYC and the former features South Brooklyn Legal Services and Housing Court on Livingston St.  Guess which one I liked better.

It's not that Jaffe's story is more boring.  Actually, I kept flashing back to Show Me a Hero while reading it.  It's quite compelling, but also one-sided, like many accounts of housing issues.  I am not a Pollyanna for landlords.  I used to prosecute them for bad behavior, and I currently live under one that I'd like to report.  The Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance in Chicago is quite tenant-friendly, and I'd presume a similar situation exists in New York.  Yet all we hear are stories about the bad landlords.  What about the bad tenants?  One day I will write a story about bad tenants.

Apart from the Show Me a Hero comparison, I don't really know what to say about the Crown Heights story.  It was basically average for the collection, and maybe it gets a bonus point for being so perfectly on topic.

However, "Partially Vacated" is one of the finest moments in the anthology.  Of course, I may be biased, because one does not often get to read books about things one knows semi-intimately:

"The civil courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn sits amid a cluster of bureaucratic towers, adjacent to a mix of 99-cent stores and restaurants where bartenders prefer to be called mixologists.  The Quaker-affiliated Brooklyn Friends School, $28,000 a year for pre-school, is just up the block.
Inside the rectangular building of steel and glass leased by the civil courthouse, the elevators break down year-round, the air-conditioner only in summer.  Before he was mayor, Bill de Blasio, acting as Public Advocate, put the building's landlord on his 'Worst Landlord' watch list.  The city's lease for the property expired last week, but, unable to find new housing, housing court--ironically, or perhaps not--will stay in the ailing building.
The line to get in the door--to shuffle through security and wait in a second line for the persnickety elevators--usually runs out the door and all the way down the block well before eight in the morning.
On the tenth floor, the elevator doors open onto a crowded hall, filled with the strident din of heated conversations in every direction.  Clumps of three or four people stand together: always a landlord, always a tenant, usually a landlord's lawyer, occasionally a tenant's lawyer, too.  They're all haggling, trying to reach a settlement; when and if they do, the details are immediately written on a piece of paper and taken into one of the court rooms to receive a judge's approval.  There are dozens of courtrooms--some for hearings, some for trial--and all guarantee long waits."  (63-64)

I didn't do housing in Brooklyn, but I did have a few friends work for South Brooklyn Legal Services, and I'm sure this story would be quite interesting for them.  I did work at that civil courthouse, and I had forgotten about those ridiculous lines!  In short, this story is great because it is true.  And for what it's worth, the landlord in this story has to be one of the all-time worst.

***

More generally, these stories are just about people living in poverty in New York.  The introduction by John Freeman is wonderfully written.  It teases the entry by his brother, Tim Freeman, and provides a little snippet of each story to come in the collection.  I have to say that while reading John's intro, I thought he came off as a total douchebag; after reading Tim's story "Home," much less so:

"I tell this story now because we need to change the way we talk about inequality.  The reasons it exists are as complex as the reasons why my brother wound up in a shelter.  Inequality is not an issue of us and them, the rich and the poor.  You often see these same so-called divisions within one family, like mine.  I have an instinct here to apologize for making this point, to add a caveat that my experience of witnessing my brother's homelessness was not nearly as hard as it was for him to live it, while I'm sure there are people who have suffered far more than both of us.  All this is true, I suppose, but it leads us into a cul-de-sac.  To rank suffering creates a false hierarchy of pain, as if there were a way to compare and weight grief with, say, physical discomfort, or career frustrations, or hopelessness.  It allows us, to some degree, to say that some forms of suffering are OK while others are not." (x)

"I did not want anybody's help when I was homeless.  If a family member had offered to take me in, I most likely would have declined the offer.  When I was trying to stay at Bellevue, my brother John lived less than a mile away on the other side of town.  I only saw him twice during the whole time that I was homeless.  Again, I think this is because of the awkwardness.  I also didn't want to be a burden on anybody.  I know this probably sounds like an old homeless cliche, but it is how I felt." (213)

***

As for the other "famous" writers in the anthology, Junot Diaz has one of the better entries.  It's a very short and sweet essay about an act of larceny.  However, I found it was published in 2001 in The New Yorker, so even though this had to be one of Diaz's breakout pieces, it has little to do with "today's New York."  It's a remembrance from his childhood.  It's only a few pages long, but it's as good as any single part of Oscar Wao.

Jonathan Safran Foer's is also an older piece--from 2004, I believe--and let's just get this out of the way: I don't like him.  People may think it's cruel for me to say that when I've never read him, but I just don't like him.  Once I got my mom Eating Animals from the library, and she seemed to think it was pretty good.  But I have never read anything by him before and I never wanted to, but it would have been irresponsible to skip "The Sixth Borough," which details the secret history of another borough that was once part of New York City.  It is probably the silliest piece in this book and has almost nothing to do with its theme.  I think it was included for "star power."  In any case, this was the one chance for JSF to prove to me that I should give him a chance.  I think putting in previously published work is a bit of a cop-out, but whatever.  I still liked Diaz's piece.  This one, not as much.  Sorry, I guess I am just jealous.

Dave Eggers is his typically good-natured self, and introduces an essay by a fifteen-year-old girl whose family moved into Park Slope.  She wrote the story as part of his 826 program.  While her story is certainly impressive for a 15-year-old and sits comfortably alongside all of these other writers, I still thought Eggers little anecdote about living around a certain area in Brooklyn in the late 90's was more interesting.  Both of these submissions add up to about 7 pages total, so it's not a huge part of the book.

I should briefly mention Colum McCann here, because he's "semi-famous."  At a wedding over three years ago, a younger guest who was just starting college and wanted to be a writer, asked if I had read him, I said no, and he suggested Let the Great World Spin.  Maybe one day I'll read that.  In any case, McCann writes an essay that could be a viewed as a companion piece to the film Dark Days, which is a documentary that came out around 2000 and was about the "mole people" living in tunnels beneath the city.  This is also really short--only about 4 pages--but it's another highlight from the book.

Last but not least, David Byrne's essay is wonderful.  It's quite in your face and filled with quotable moments.  Byrne does not try to pretend that the Talking Heads haven't made him rich, and openly admits that his relationship with New York may be souring:

"Many of the wealthy don't even live here.  In the neighborhood where I live (near the art galleries in Chelsea), I can see three large condos from my window that are pretty much empty all the time.  What the fuck!?  Apparently, rich folks buy the apartments, but might only stay in them a few weeks out of the year.  So why should they have an incentive to maintain or improve the general health of the city?  They're never here.
This real estate situation--a topic New Yorkers love to complain about over dinner--doesn't help the future health of the city.  If young, emerging talent of all types can't find a foothold in this city, then it will be a city closer to Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi than to the rich fertile place it has historically been.  Those places might have museums, but they don't have culture.  Ugh.  If New York goes there--more than it already has--I'm leaving.
But where will I go?  Join the expat hipsters upstate in Hudson?
Can New York change its trajectory a little bit, become more inclusive and financially egalitarian?  Is that possible?  I think it is.  It's still the most stimulating and exciting place in the world to live and work, but it's in danger of walking away from its greatest strengths.  The physical improvements are happening--though much of the crumbing infrastructure still needs fixing.  If the social and economic situation can be addressed, we're halfway there.  It really could be a model of how to make a large, economically sustainable, and creatively energetic city.  I want to live in that city."  (246)

***

Like any anthology, there are bound to be a few disappointments.  Edmund White (whom I would designate as "quasi-famous") submits a very nicely written biographical essay that seems to have almost nothing to do with the "theme" except for the fact that his subject (Lorenzo Da Ponte--a.k.a. the writer of Mozart's librettos) eventually settled in 18th century NYC.  I found it occasionally entertaining and out of place.

"Small Fates 1912" by Teju Cole (the only other writer listed by name on the cover besides Smith and Diaz, though one I would not designate as any kind of famous) starts off great, and quickly grows tiresome.  Some of these "fates" are uproariously funny, but after about two pages of them, I realized they were really all just "tweets" and I fucking hate twitterature.  I know it can be experimental in the same vein as an Oulippo-stunt, but I don't think it can be revelatory when it's trademarked by a publicly-traded company.

"Due North" by Garnette Cadogan is about walking around Manhattan, and it's pretty good.  I like walking around, too.  But it's also about feeling that people are friendlier in certain areas like the South Bronx, and more standoffish or invisible in areas like the Upper East Side.  Unfortunately it made me wonder what Cadogan did in order to have all this leisure time to loaf.

"Options" is probably one of the stronger stories in this book, and perhaps deserves to be placed in the next section (I am saving the best for the last here).  It's about moving to New York to try to get the best possible care for one's autistic child.  It's about seeing a sign for a lost child that is autistic, and reflecting on your own.  It's pretty powerful stuff, but it seems a little over the top, too.  It strikes me as being 100% factual, but ultimately foolhardy.

"The Children Suicides" by Maria Venegas is interesting, but it's not about the NYU suicides in 2003-2004, so I have trouble relating.  Then again as a former 10-year-old that confided suicidal thoughts to a teacher, it's affecting to see it from the other perspective.  Not that they didn't take it way more seriously than they needed to or anything.

I almost want to put "Four More Years" by Jonathan Dee in the next section, too, because it seems like it's the only story that's really about "the 1%" and it's about driving around the neighborhood during a horrible snowfall and navigating the horrible conditions.  This is actually a really memorable story and I don't know, I guess the characters came off as being sort of one-dimensional, and that's why it doesn't go in the next section.

"So Where Are We?" is a poem by Lawrence Joseph.  I rarely review poetry on Flying Houses.  I think I did once before.  Is it a good poem?  I don't know.  Is it a bad poem?  I don't know.  It seems like it's about 9/11.  9/11 is obviously a big topic for New Yorkers but it almost never gets mentioned in this book.  I skimmed this poem and moved on.

"Round Trip" by Akhil Sharma is certainly no failure at all, but it is slight at four pages and feels almost like Diaz's story.  It's about a guy who has money, but is super frugal anyways because he hates spending.  I can relate.  However, he quits his job that pays pretty well to be a writer.  I wish I had the luxury.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and call "Aliens of Extraordinary Ability" by Taiye Selasi a weak spot.  It's stylish and while not exactly pretentious, seems to take itself a bit too seriously as "art."  It's not bad, but it just seems calculated.  I don't remember very much about it.

"One, Maybe Two Minutes from Fire" by Tea Obreht--I am very tempted to move this into the next section, but ultimately I cannot.  It's got a great ending, on top of everything else.  It's about being a victim of a scam.  There needs to be more literature about victimhood.  Not just woe-is-me victimhood, but God, I'm-so-fucking-dumb victimhood.  Great story, and its placement in this review is faulty.

"Service/Non-Service: How Bartenders See New Yorkers" by Rosie Schaap is more like a special newspaper article or essay than an anthology essay, but most of the truisms about the service industry remain relevant.  I still don't know how anybody makes it in the service industry, unless you spend your whole life (i.e. 60 hours a week, not 60 years) at the business in question, or unless it's a ridiculously expensive place.

"Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable" by Michael Salu, I put in the same category as the Selasi story.  It's a little more ambitious than it has any business being.  I think it's actually a bit better than the Selasi story, but I would not put it in the next section.

"Zapata Blvd" by Valeria Luiselli, "Seeking" by Victor Lavalle, and "Walt Whitman on Further Lane" by Mark Doty, can round out the "yawns" for me.  As you can see, these anthology reviews get difficult because I do not want to give anyone short shrift.  Doty's essay on Whitman and Long Island does have some pretty amazing insights, and some great surprises, but overall I found its tone to be off.  Like, when literature/poetry PhDs try to make criticism interesting for the lay reader.  "Zapata" is about being vaguely revolutionary, and there was a nice image or two in it--certainly I would not call it bad, but I found it disjointed.  "Seeking" is actually quite good--though not as good as "One, Maybe Two Minutes from Fire."  It's actually an incredibly deep essay about whether or not God exists.  Worthwhile for anyone that still contemplates philosophical problems.

I'm conflicted about whether to put both "First Avenue & Second Street" by Hannah Tinti and "Traveling to Brooklyn" by Lydia Davis in this section or next.  I guess they belong in the next.

***
Because they barely make this list, the last two stories should be mentioned first.  Both of them fall squarely in the realm of creative non-fiction.  I'm not sure which one is better, but I'm inclined to pick Davis.

Tinti's is very good, but it is pretty much just about one of her co-tenants.  Kind of a character study.  But it's a building near the Library, a good dive bar at 1st & 1st, and a handful of my friends moved out of the dorms after freshman year and got places in the East Village, and the memories of the Towers being there, and then not being there, made me nostalgic for that brief time that I shared in that wonderful area (even though it was only about 10 blocks north of that corner that I almost got mugged in 2002)

Davis's is great, because it reflects upon the nature of her fantasy, and how it has changed as she has aged, and then hits on a specific incident that happened recently on the subway around South Brooklyn.  Basically, it is a personal essay par excellence, a near-perfect prototype of what one should write for a college essay, perhaps.  Okay, the subject matter would not necessarily be great, but the way it's so beautifully written would get an admit from any admissions officer (this is why I think we studied personal essays as a form in high school).

Bill Cheng's entry, "Engine," is one of the best in the collection, though two others are better because they don't end on a kind-of-awkward last sentence.  Basically, this story is a complete well of misery, with some quite graphic descriptions of medical maladies, silly jobs, and lack of self-worth.  It's not very long, but it will punch you in the gut.  For a person such as myself, that can identify quite strongly with the subject matter (even if I haven't worked in a movie theater), it is the sort of thing I need to read to remind myself that life can be just as frustrating for others:

"I don't know how to talk about money.  It's one of those things we can't seem to get shook of.  As much as we pretend it doesn't matter, it sets the stage for all our relationships.  What I have, what you don't--all of it bound up in our identity, our careers, our ambition, our self-worth.
That was the gall of this first job, the improbability of being seen, how a stranger could just look at you and shrink you down into nothing.  I was in college.  I wanted to be a writer.  I considered myself intelligent, ambitious, sensitive, with a full inner life.  But every day wore me down to the nub until I carried in me a reservoir of abiding hate.
One summer at the theater, I spotted someone I knew from high school lining up at my register.  He had gone to college upstate, and now he was back for the break.  He looked good: lean, tan, handsome.
He recognized me.
Hey, Billy, how are you?
And it wasn't embarrassment but rage prickling at my face.
I pressed the bottoms of my hands to the counter.
I glared at him.
Would you like to try our super combo? (163)

The final two stories I loved for similar reasons.  The first is "Every Night a Little Death," by Patrick Ryan.  It concerns the travails of a team of graveyard shift proofreaders at a large law firm.  The story is just hilarious and it made me laugh more than anything else in the collection.  It seems completely over the top.  I know that many of these entries are essays, or pieces of creative non-fiction, and some of them are works of complete fiction.  I really could not decide where to categorize this piece.  Certainly, it reads like creative non-fiction, but it's so extreme that it has to be fiction.

Cue person chiming in that life is often stranger than fiction.

I just don't believe someone who would come into work every night wearing a clown wig would get so upset about office propriety.  It is slightly more believable that a person would bring a stuffed chimpanzee into work with her--slightly--but not that she would use such a toy as a weapon of assault.  Frankly, I wish I worked in an office where such shenanigans were commonplace.

"I'd never had a job in the corporate world before.  I'd been a house-painter, a waiter, a stockroom clerk, an English teacher, a bartender.  The graveyard shift seemed a fitting place for me to land, given that I'd just moved from the 'sleepy' South to the city that never sleeps--an exciting change for me, though most of my friends back home had told me I was being foolish.  'New York?' one of them had asked.  'Really? I hope you have a lot of money, and a lot of tears.'
Another, pulling up beside me at a traffic light, had rolled down his window to shake his head and holler, 'That place is going to chew you up, spit you out, and piss on you.'
'I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen,' an older, chain-smoking neighbor had said as I was helping him sort his recycling.  'You're going to fuck up your life beyond belief, and you're going to be back here in six months--probably addicted to heroin.'
All of which made me more determined than ever to succeed (success meaning only my not having to move back south in six months).  I took the job.  I even decided graveyard shift had an impressive ring to it.  Responsible people worked the graveyard shift.  Guys who wore matching-cap-and-jacket uniforms and carried lunchboxes worked the graveyard shift.  Copyeditors in newsrooms, security guards who shone flashlights into warehouses, EMTs who stanched gunshot wounds--these were the secret heroes who kept the gears of the world turning while everyone else snoozed.
I was thirty-three and living in New York.  I had an illegal sublet on the upper west side that was mine for another two months, and I had employment.  To celebrate, I went to dinner with friends." (19-20)

This story isn't especially deep or dramatic, but it's just very entertaining from start to finish, and pretty original.  I am reminded of a book I've never read called And Then We Came to the End.  I guess that is the closest reference point.  It feels like non-fiction, but again, it's just a tad unbelievable.  It's right near the beginning of the anthology, which is brilliant sequencing.  Maybe it's not actually the second-best story in the collection, but the sequencing made me feel that was so.

The best story in the collection, then, is "Quid Pro Quo, Just as Easy as That" by Jeanne Thornton.

I'm not just saying that because it has a transgender narrator.  I am definitely not playing that game.

This is straight-up creative non-fiction.  Unlike Ryan's story, none of it strikes me as too absurd to be true.

Can I profess some ignorance?  I still get really confused when transgender people identify themselves.  The narrator in this story is a trans woman.  I need to think for a second to make sure I get it right.  They were born male, but transitioned to female.  Whether they have undergone hormone treatment or not is unclear in this story.  To be honest, it doesn't matter.  The transgender issue is almost secondary to the poverty issue.  Just looking at the first two pages of this story, every sentence begs to be excerpted.  Because of my obsession with monthly expenses, I must excerpt the very end of that second page, and the top 1/3 of the third page:

"It was a flush time for me in New York City.  According to invoices I still have, I was making the sweet sum of $12 per hour and working enough to clear about $1600 every month.  The rent at the time was $1100, which I split evenly with a roommate.  My share of the bills was usually about $125 total, and the Metrocard rate $100 per month.  I knew of a cheap grocery store and cooked when I could.  I smoked back then too, a hideously expensive habit at $13 a pack in NYC.  So I'd switched to smoking three of four 'lucies' a day at $0.75 per cigarette, or $2 for three, from the grocery store just down the street from me that kept lookouts.  Sometimes you could run across illicit cig pushers on the streets--especially, for some reason, on Roosevelt Island--who'd let you have a whole fat pack of Delaware-smuggled Newports for seven bucks.  A devotee of The Richest Man in Babylon, I kept back about $100 or $200 from each paycheck to put into a savings fund, though I inevitably ran out of money every three or four months--food, doctor bills, miscellany--and had to raid it back to zero.  But it all worked."  (113-114)

So it seems, finally, here is another person that makes the same sorts of observations I do, and has similar concerns.  Perhaps this is why I feel this is the best story in the collection.

This story is about the narrator herself, her boss at the publishing company where she works, and her friend that sleeps on her couch (her roommate, who paid the other $550, moved to Chicago to work for Groupon, and paid the next couple of months to be nice).  There is a footnote about "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem.  The story is about everything and nothing.  It's a story whose style, tone, structure and plot I'd like to emulate.  The only thing that slightly annoyed me about it was that the narrator would not reveal what her friend wrote on Facebook:

"Friends--without exception, female friends--began to tell me explicitly that they would not come over to see me when my friend was at the apartment.  After the Facebook message incident, my friend was not a big fan of women, and he liked to discuss this with other women whom I was friends with.  He would discuss it with me, too.  In part this was because I hesitated to defend myself as a woman to him, and because I don't think he particularly thought of me as one anyway.  (As evidence of this, the time he laughed at me and said you're a dude.)" (117)

Ultimately I think this is one of the most entertaining stories in the anthology, and while the ending may be one of failure, it feels happier than that, like the narrator will be going on to better things.

So we come to the end of this lengthy review.  I think this book makes an excellent gift for any person moving to New York for the first time.  The only question is whether it will be eternally relevant, or if NYC will completely transform itself in 20 years.  This may be sold for a buck on tables arrayed on various streets in Greenwich Village in five years, but it is a worthwhile project for capturing the city at a crucial time in history.

Taipei - Tao Lin (2013)

Taipei is Tao Lin's third novel, and his fourth book to be reviewed on Flying Houses.  There is a lot I could potentially write about here, but I think once I hit a certain number of books by one author on this site, I need to rank them:

#1: Taipei
#2: Shoplifting from American Apparel
#3: Eeeee Eee Eeee
#4: Richard Yates

Reading all of these past reviews, I am embarrassed.  This is actually a pretty significant milestone because the last one I reviewed was Richard Yates, and I wrote that almost exactly when I started law school.  Now I am done (and have been done for almost 11 months now) and I often say that law school did very little for me except gave me two more letters to put after my name and improved my writing.  So this will be the test.

I have corresponded with Tao a number of times over the past six years, but for some reason, I don't feel like going through the motions and asking him if he would agree to answer a few interview questions.  This is mainly because Taipei doesn't perplex me in the same manner of some his earlier material.  Taipei is, as I'm sure has already been noted, Tao Lin at his most "accessible."  To be sure, it is still "weird" in that it doesn't really concern itself with the trope of a "plot," but it is consistently his most entertaining work to date, and arguably the one most likely to inspire a film adaptation.  However, I don't think that movie would make a ton of money.  So too with this book.  While it is Lin's "major publishing house debut" (I wanted to write "major label debut" but it seemed like something I would do 4 years ago) and while I hope it earns him a greater following and more sales, it's not exactly going to be his big splash that puts him on Oprah's Book Club (I am assuming that still exists).  But it is a step towards that level of fame.

***

These asterisks signify that I have broken up this review into multiple sittings.  Crucially, this is my 3rd time sitting down to write on it over the past couple of weeks.  My 2nd time, I wrote a lot--perhaps 1,000 words--and for some reason it was not saved, even in this post-security world.  I will whine a fair amount about everything I lost, but I will construct a new rule out of this disaster: from now on, every review that I write in multiple spurts will be marked by asterisks.  It is unfair to pretend that I am as disciplined as it may appear from each post.

But I know I made a few points I want to repeat as I try to unearth the past.  I recounted the plot of Taipei:  Paul is a 26-year-old novelist in November 2009, who goes to parties in Brooklyn and then goes to visit his parents in Taipei, Taiwan.  He then returns to the U.S. and decides that the period between April and September 2010 will be an "interim" period which he has to get through until the book tour for his second novel begins.  He breaks up with his girlfriend, Michelle, during the beginning of the novel; then, he goes out with a girl named Laura for a little while; finally, he reconnects with a girl named Erin, and the story of their relationship is probably the whole point of the book being written.

It should also be fairly obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in Tao that this book is very autobiographical, and I would say his most "personal" book yet.  I say this even though he told me that Shoplifting from American Apparel was "100% autobiographical."  I say Taipei is more personal because, while it still trades in some of the minimalist language of Tao's earlier books, it represents a leap forward stylistically along with a willingness to examine psychological interiority.  Some of the sentences are so long you could mistake this for any number of more "mainstream" authors.

As a corollary to this last point, if Tao's books are drawn from his life, then his friends are the supporting characters.  And there are a ton of supporting characters.  Here let me try to list them, excluding the three girlfriends already mentioned: Jeremy, Kyle, Gabby, Traci,  Anton, Juan, Mitch, Lucie, Amy, Daniel, Matt, Lindsay, Fran, Walter, Taryn, Caroline, Shawn Olive, Harry, Charles, Jeannie, Calvin, Maggie, Cristine, Sally, Mia, Beau, Gary, Alethia, Rodrigo, and Peanut.  From this list perhaps you can tell that this book is primarily a collection of social encounters, which act as a framing device for the three relationships.  None of the relationships is probed very deeply either, except for the one with Erin.

Thus, many of Tao's friends appear here, though I do not.  To be fair, Tao and I have only met twice.  The first time I met him is briefly referenced:

"Paul's book tour's fourth reading--after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district--was in Ohio, on September 11.  Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who'd been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other 'internet friends' to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin's parents' 'mansion,' as Paul called it." (94)

That reading, I am reasonably sure, took place around September 9 at Book Court on Court St. in Brooklyn.  I had moved there a few weeks earlier, and one of the first pieces of mail I received was a copy of Richard Yates, which I reviewed.  I also received Think Tank for Human Beings in General  by Jordan Castro.  Many people have said that Erin is clearly Megan Boyle, but I have not seen anyone postulate that Calvin is Jordan Castro.  But those are the only two "beat" connections I can make.

Tao would not write about me because I said basically nothing to him at that reading.  He seemed to offer a glimmer of recognition when I mentioned that I ran this blog.  He was friendly, but seemed a bit distant, perhaps because he may have been on drugs.

Tao notably took magic mushrooms before a reading in San Francisco and asked readers of his blog to guess which drug he was on after posting a video of the proceedings.  This is also detailed in Taipei:

"Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eights days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel's ex-girlfriend and ex-girlfriend's sister shared.  An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets.  Daniel's ex-girlfriend'sister's boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet.  His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss 'some problems.'  He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email.  He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium.  On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul 'fingered' her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept." (110)

There are a lot of drugs in this book (primarily a lot of Adderall and Klonopin) and I noticed Tao writing more about drugs on his blog during this period.

Thus, October 1, 2011, perhaps 4 months after the date where Taipei ends, in the vestibule of the Whole Foods at Union Square, with Slutwalk and a rainstorm going on outside, I met Tao for the first time since the reading, more than a year earlier.  I asked him if he remembered me, and he said yes.  I asked him if he had really done heroin.  He said yes.  I asked him what it was like.  He said it was like a really strong painkiller.  An older woman walked by and said, "Excuse me!" I replied, "Do you know who this is?  This is the greatest writer of our generation!"  Tao said, "Don't say that."

So I am hoping that Tao will write another book (though I read an interview where he said he just wanted to write shorter books from now on) and that he will include this anecdote.  If he doesn't, then I will.

But back to this book and away from my egomania: at one point Tao mentions going to see the movie Somewhere with Erin.  For some reason, I feel this book is a lot like that movie.  It conveys a mood, a feeling, but doesn't really have much of a story.  The relationship with Erin is the main point of the book, but she doesn't appear until page 90 (out of 248).  There is a great short reference to what must be Center on Halsted, too:

"Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become 'obsessed,' to some degree, with her, anyways, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago's Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends' photos to find any she might've untagged."  (109)

There are moments of this book that seem plucked from a work of "award-winning literature," like Paul and Erin's pseudo-breakdown in Taipei, and pages 35 through 43, which recount Paul's childhood in a way that is both charming and heartbreaking.  Also, the friendship between Paul and Daniel, who seems almost like a precursor to Erin, is very nicely sketched.  Overall, this is not a perfect book, but it is definitely Tao's best.  There are six chapters, and it reads pretty quickly.  It's a good place for newcomers, but fans that have been reading from the beginning will recognize it as his strongest work, too.

Taipei may not be "about" much, but it is a pleasant story about relatively carefree days and the daily life of a quasi-famous artist.  I don't know if Tao's prose represents "the future of literature" anymore, but I still think he is at the forefront of 30 or 31-year-old authors and still writes more intellectually honest material than younger writers looking to cash in on a cinematic trilogy adaptation.  I'm sorry I didn't receive this book in the mail and review it about a year earlier, but I enjoyed reading it, and I'll look forward to whatever Tao does next.  The only question I have is why his website has been stripped back to almost nothing.

How Literature Saved My Life - David Shields

Recently I went to the post office to pick up a package, and the woman behind the counter said, "We've been holding this one since January 1, is this for you?"  It was a big, flat manila mailing package--a book.  "Oh yes, that's mine."  It said 184 Clinton St and it said Flying Houses (I live at 148 Clinton, f.y.i.)

This was the first piece of mail I received for Flying Houses from a major book publisher (Random House/Knopf/Borzoi Books).  I was expecting it to be Taipei by Tao Lin (from Vintage).  I had requested that book.  I did not request How Literature Saved My Life.

Regardless, I took this to be a moment of divine inspiration: slowly but surely, Flying Houses was turning into a reputable media outlet.  I would not pass up the opportunity. Unfortunately I wish I had because I fear this review will satisfy no one.

David Shields (not James Shields, the pitcher for the Kansas City Royals formerly of the Tampa Bay Rays, who has also written a book) has written thirteen books, the most prominent of which appear to be Reality Hunger and Remote.  They also appear to be written in a "collage" style that eschews traditional forms of character and plot development in favor of a sort of stream-of-consciousness.  How Literature Saved My Life is also written in this style.  I have many problems with this book so I will enumerate them.

#1: Shields does not really discuss how he was about to lose his life

This is not The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon.  It will not make you feel better if you are sleeping 20 hours a day and eating something and worry that you have no purpose to fulfill on earth.  He does describe some moments of ennui at a famous MFA program:

"I remember hearing my highly alliterative short story 'The Gorgeous Green of the Hedges' gently demolished in class and, upon returning to my apartment, eating bowl after bowl of mint chip ice cream until the room spun.  I remember admiring how some of my classmates (Elizabeth Evans, Mike Hutchison, Walter Howerton, Michael Cunningham, John Hill, Jan Short, Peter Nelson, Sarah Metcalf, Bob Schacochis) had figured out how to get their own personality onto the page.....I remember people saying that nothing ever happened to anyone in Iowa City and me wondering what in the world they were talking about.  I remember, above all, during the five years I lived in Iowa City, believing that what mattered more than anything else in your life was writing as well as you possibly could." (119-120)

He also later described being unemployed at age 30 and sleeping on his father's apartment couch in San Francisco and watching a uni-cyclist juggler on television, and how that had moved him to tears--and how, had he seen the feat in person, he would not likely be moved anywhere near as much.  This was a nice vignette.

The book is separated into more than a hundred of such vignettes, but the vast majority of them focus on Shields's engagement with a text or other such work of art.  In a sense this is prime material for Flying Houses because it gives us the very exciting opportunity of comparing his opinions to my own.

"Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.  The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble reading it now.  Seems sad--do I still love it, did I ever love it?  I know I did.  Has my aesthetic changed that much?  If so, why?  Does one resist that alteration?  I think not.  The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way.  Proust for me is the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust.  I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life.  His commitment is never to the narrative; it's to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument.  That thrilled me and continues to thrill me--his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces."  (152-153)

I could not read Swann's Way four years ago, and it is one of the three posts of Flying Houses that is (incomplete), though I did remark that,

"When I first heard about him, I thought it lied very close to the same aims I hoped to produce in my own work--the inexplicable singularity of a life, with all of its attendant idiosyncrasies, which thereby educates an audience more as to the total "meaning of existence." Lofty ambitions indeed, and I will say, after 60 pages, that I am sure Proust succeeds on his own philosophical level, but that 21st century American readers will find it extremely difficult to 'dig.'"

This does lead to the next topic, which is adapting literature to new forms of technology, but I would pause to remark that the above quotation may shed light on why I did not like How Literature Saved My Life: we seem to have a similar philosophy when it comes to creating literature that is "useful," but we go about it in different ways.  I do not like the "collage" method, though I did employ it in the past.  That method is popular with writing group peers and the so-called "MFA Contingent" but I prefer to take cues from modern masters and not try to invent new forms when society itself is enough of a spectacle that it bears relating in plain language, without the jumping around from topic-to-topic, channel surfing, twitter news-feed scanning, etc.  While I recently joined twitter about a week ago, and plan to use it sparingly, for marketing purposes (or to record funny incidents in my Tax Law class) I hope to fight against this urge to make literature more "user-friendly" for the "Me Generation."

#2:  This is not Taipei

I requested a galley copy of Taipei, which is Tao Lin's 3rd novel, from the author himself.  He told me that he would forward my information onto Vintage Books and that "hopefully" they would send one in January.  When nothing arrived, I cursed Vintage and major publishing houses (Melville House had sent my Tao's 2nd novel Richard Yates) and then went to pick up the package in early February.  It looked like they had come through!  Then I opened the package, incredibly, to find that it was this book and not Taipei.  Perhaps this is some elaborate trick or "test" being played on me (since Flying Houses may be "famous" for excerpting large sections of text), but I am sad that I will not be able to keep up with Tao's oeuvre.  However, while I don't necessarily disagree with Shields' statement, "I don't want to read out of duty," (167) I do want to read out of duty if people want my opinion on something.

But Tao is a good entry-way into the next point about technology.  For those unaware, Tao Lin is the foremost writer of my generation (we graduated in the same class from NYU) and has built his following entirely on his own through the various forms of social media.  His evolution as a writer has been fascinating to observe, and perhaps with this book he may actually enter some "year end best lists," as Mr. Shields apparently has. And the strongest part of this book, for me, are its comments on the current literary world:

"The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation.  Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork.  The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.  The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity.  Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains miniscule.  In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience--a few more people slide through the door--but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine.  New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away....New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and--possessing a vision unhumbled by technology--use them to disassemble/recreate the web." (188-189)

The only other point worth mentioning about Tao is usage of the term "scare quotes":
"Updike: 'I loathe being interviewed; it's a half-form, like maggots.'  Gertrude Stein: 'Remarks are not literature.'  Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate put scare quotes around what comes next.  The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter.  I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower." (133-134)

"Scare quotes" are not a component of literature that has been accepted by the public on a mass scale by any stretch.  Tao Lin is largely responsible for the excessive use of "scare quotes" (and the reason I must put it in quotes, regarding Shields's failure to do so as a "hipper than thou" mistake) in new books, but Shields point is well taken nonetheless.  I confess this is a minor quibble but "scare quotes" deserve at least a moment of clarification.

#3: Recommended Reading

In order to fully appreciate this book, I really think you have to have read all of the books that Shields references--and there are many:

(1) Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
(2) Dead Languages by David Shields
(3) The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields
(4) Spiderman (2002 film)
(5) Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus (?)
(6) Reality Hunger - David Shields
(7) Shortbus (2006 film)
(8) Laura (1944 film)*
(9) Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973 film)
(10) Le Gout des Autres (2000 film)
(11) Anagrams by Lorrie Moore*
(12) "Weekend" by Amy Hempel*
(13) Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
(14) The Last Studebaker by Robin Hemley
(15) Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
(16) Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On (1997 album)
(17) In Bruges (2008 film)
(18) Calendar of Regrets by Lance Olsen
(19) The Guardians by Sarah Manguso
(20) The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
(21) Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
(22) Zona by Geoff Dyer
(23) Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
(24) This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
(25) "This is the Life" by Anne Dillard
(26) Butterfly Stories: A Novel by William Vollman
(27) History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
(28) The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme
(29) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
(30) Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity by David Shields
(31) "The Dead" by James Joyce
(32) Sherman's March (1986 film)
(33) Speedboat by Renata Adler*
(34) Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
(35) Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky
(36) Now and Then by Joseph Heller*
(37) The entire oeuvre of J.D. Salinger
* books I actually want to read after this.

Note that this does not include the "55 works I swear by" section, along with perhaps a handful of other texts that are mentioned more briefly.

You do not need to read all of these books to "get" How Literature Saved My Life, but the book tends to function as a collection of books that inspired it.  While the book is marketed as "blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography," there is decidedly a focus on the former.

There are three parts worth noting where Shields slams Toni Morrison for complaining that her book didn't win an award and where Shields admits that he is actually kind of like George W. Bush and where Shields talks about Bryan Singer sitting next to Bush in first class where Bush confesses that he has been on Ambien "for years."  These are probably the "sexiest" parts of the book, though other parts do indulge in vague-erotica.

#4: Been There, Done That

The big takeaway from this book (for me, at least) is the "collage" as the new form of literature--and I don't buy it.  My zine "Autointoxication," (2003) flirted with this medium, and while some viewed it rather charitably, I am mostly embarrassed by it in retrospect.

Bite-size chapters (like in, oh say, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut) may be something else entirely, but blending a work of creative non-fiction by mixing in one's own patina with the aggregate of artistic cultural linguistics amounts to a book of aphorisms that may serve as a nice collection of potent quotables (things to write on a piece of paper that you tape to the wall in your "writing station") but does not compel me to run out to my friends and tell them to read.

Shields has written 13 books and has been quite successful, it appears.  However this book leaves the impression that he has given up on fiction as a method towards reaching psychological realism.  He is, as he notes, an extremely ambivalent person, and I am quite ambivalent about this book.  On the one hand, I am quite honored that someone decided to send it to me, and it has certainly opened up my mind a bit when it comes to literary experimentation (while I doubt that I will return to the "collage" form anytime soon) and there are a few nice passages, such as this one:

"Some people seemed to think I was the Antichrist because I didn't genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property (there's an oxymoron if ever there was one).  I became, briefly, the poster boy for The Death of the Novel and The End of Copyright.  Fine by me.  Those have become something close to my positions.  The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.  You can work within these forms or write about them or through them or appropriate the strategies these forms use, but it's not a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum.  The novel was invented to access interiority.  Now most people communicate through social media, and everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.  The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.  Art, like science, progresses.  Forms evolve.  Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason--or so I have to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me..." (129, emphasis mine)

Even in this comparatively pristine paragraph Shields make a comment with which I take issue: I am under thirty (for another 60 days, at least) and I think I have a notion of privacy.

There is also a nice part about him working at a law firm:

"My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father's couch for ten months.  At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case.  The lawyers hated their jobs.  I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel.  All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me.  It was Team Shields.  We also discovered something new called a fax machine.  Very exciting.  I'd arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver." (163)

That passes the LSAT Test!  A newly formulated test on Flying Houses that says any mention of legal culture on page 163 in any book passes the test (163 was my LSAT score).

But on the other hand, I just get annoyed when people write D.F. Wallace or DFW.  Sure, he is literature's answer to Kurt Cobain, but I think he's put up on a bit of a pedestal.  Sure, I've yet to review Infinite Jest here, but I will, I will...I just can't put him on the same level as FSF--and no one refers to that master as F.S. Fitzgerald.  In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is occasionally great, but more often tedious, and it can be quite difficult to derive pleasure from reading his work--he has about a 10% success rate and a 90% fail rate, though admirers of his will slap me for saying this, and I may disagree with myself whenever I get around to reading Infinite Jest (2013 or 2014--that's a promise!).

It's a petty thing but people that abbreviate him DFW are part of the larger problem of the "MFA contingent," who like to wax philosophical about Amy Hempel and Barry Hannah and maybe occasionally Nabokov but never Mann.  These are new 20th-21st century writers that have taken the short story form as far as it can go while still being recognizable as a prose piece.  I don't intend a blanket criticism of everything they've ever done--I just shudder at the thought that the new way to write is to get an MFA, get published, and just keep writing really good short stories--forget about a novel--takes too long--with the weird middle coming in "linked-short stories."

I guess I am like Kafka "who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, [and] read only a couple of pages of a book at a time" (182) and just don't have the time to go to the library, on a full stomach, and sit there for hours devouring literature in a huge chunk.  I want to check my e-mail and worry about some more "real" urgency ahead of me.

In summary, this book reads like a law review article.  It's not particularly enjoyable, there are tons of citations to authority (sadly without footnotes--but happily with a Cf. or two that I believe means "indirect support), and a reform is (sort of) proposed.  However, I am afraid that I have not gotten deeply enough into the mind of David Shields to fully appreciate his comic-linguistic asides.  Fans of his may love this, but as a newcomer and as a neutral critic, I can only regard this work as a "virginity loss" type experience--but laypersons generally don't receive galley copies.

Think Tank for Human Beings in General - Jordan Castro/Richard Wehrenberg Jr

Can someone please tell me the difference between a "chapbook" and a "zine?"

Jordan Castro sent me this chapbook after I commented on his prize-winning entry into Tao Lin's contest. My entry is here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-essay-on-tao-lin-and-our-histories.html. His is here http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jcastro/2010/08/a-comprehensive-review-of-richard-yates-tao-lins-second-novel/. In it, he reviewed my essay and gave it high marks and I thanked him. I think it was the first time anyone ever reviewed anything I wrote on the internet. He sent me a chapbook for explaining that Dakota Fanning was not in The Sixth Sense.

That movie came out in 1999, and I think he was about 7 then, and perhaps its "twist" has been ruined by everyone in the intervening 11 years so now it is no longer quite the "best picture" event that it was then. Plus, M. Night Shyamalan's cultural cache drops with each new film he makes (though everyone seems to think he "may turn it around with this one..."), though I assume that NYU is still proud to have him as one of their more successful recent graduates.

This is the grand finale, the electrifying conclusion if you will. Please note that Bob Pollard broke up GBV on 12/31/04, and now, no more than 5 1/2 years later, they are already doing reunion shows. Flying Houses will be silent for a while, but this is not the end.

In my essay on Tao Lin, I began by stating how I embarrassed myself by a certain comment on his blog made perhaps 4 1/2 years ago about all of the zines I published at NYU while we were both there. I first became aware of zines my freshman year and I put out my first zine my sophomore year. It was entitled "Xenophobia," which was probably not as original as I thought. It was about 16 pages long. There was a poem in it about "almost" getting mugged. There was an essay about meeting 3 celebrities in New York City (Thurston Moore, Carson Daly, and Janeane Garafalo, though I did not technically meet her). I think there was a poem about smoking a cigarette on bleachers in an empty schoolyard near my parent's house during one of my holiday breaks. I don't remember what else was in this zine. I sold these zines for $1.00 out of a milk crate in Washington Square Park and gave out a complimentary kiss to anyone that wanted it. I gave a copy to my creative writing teacher from the summer session of 2002, Paul Gacioch, who was an instructor that I think was about 24 then and obtaining his MFA and trying to get his first novel published. I am going to Google him now and see if he accomplished that. Here is what I found: http://www.sidebrow.net/contributors/paul-gacioch. I left him a copy in his faculty mailbox and I ran into him in Bobst Library and I asked him if he got it and what he thought of it. He said it was "short."

My second zine was a collaborative effort between me and several of my friends entitled "Honey I'm a Prize and You're a Catch and We're a Perfect Match," which is a line from a song by Pavement and in honor of the date it was published, February 14, 2003. I don't remember anything in it (except for a poem called "horse shoe crabs" by my friend Emily, which I think she later published online) but more people read it due to the nature of the contribution process.

My third zine could probably be called a "chapbook." It was entitled "Autointoxication" and it was the best thing I had done up to that point. Arguably it is still the best thing I have done because it was published. I went to a printer in Greenwich Village and asked for 100 copies. I tried to sell them for $1.00 and probably sold about 3 or 4, which is about the total of "Xenophobia." Had I a blog at the time, who knows what might have come.

There were several others but none as important as those first three (except for "Uck Ar" but I played too minor a role in that for consideration). I include this autobiography because, this is a highly symbolic gesture. Jordan and Richard are young, and they probably know what they are doing way better than I did (or do, for that matter) but I am here to warn them about the dangers of literature. But a review first.

I have never reviewed poetry on Flying Houses before, which is another reason I wanted to do this as my last post. I wanted to do something audacious. Each writer contributes 9-10 poems of 1-2 pages in length. Jordan's are slightly more experimental and Richard's are slightly more typical of poems popular over the last 20 years. Both are talented, and while their chapbook may be "short," it deserves commendation.

My favorite poems of Jordan's are "a list of things I am going to do," which I didn't like that much until the last few lines; "weak," which is the first poem I have ever read about the dilemma of autofellatio, thus worthwhile; "haiku" which is certainly topical and formal; and "last poem," which is about achieving inner-peace. Four out of ten is not bad. The other ones have moments but overall seem too "cheeky" or "cute" or "silly" to fully praise.

My favorite poems of Richard's are "excuse me," which is a lament for internet culture, "dumpster dive alone," which I don't really understand but references Scottie Pippen, so I like it; "snow-people easily identify the sun as their enemy," which is pretty original and may be the single best poem in the chapbook; and the so-called title track, "think tanks for human beings in general," which, like most title tracks in music, I usually feel are better than the majority of other songs on the album--but is the best way to end the chapbook.

I like the idea of chapbooks and zines because they are not too time-consuming. They are like regular magazines except they are not filled with useless trash about celebrities and reality stars. They are filled with serious writing by mostly unknown people, reaching out and trying to establish themselves. There is something noble about them. For some reason I do not think self-publishing a novel is as noble as self-publishing a zine.

Do I really have anything else I want to add? When I was 17 I wrote a one-act play for my high school and after my classmates told me how much they liked it (though I was unsure of its quality), I made it my life's mission to write, until every MFA program I applied to rejected me in February of 2007. I did not stop writing after that, obviously, but my confidence was shot. Here is my advice to Jordan and Richard: if you are going to get your MFA eventually, apply to a safety school. I applied to U Chicago's MAPH program, UT-Austin's Michener Center for Writers, Iowa's Writer's Workshop, University of Oregon, Columbia University's esteemed program producing writers like Rick Moody and Wells Tower and James Franco and offering zero aid in general and a $50,000 price tag (and you thought law school was expensive, and didn't offer enough career security). Every single one rejected me. Apply to a safety school. Or don't. Maybe I just suck at writing, and at life.

Do I really want to be at law school, and quitting my blog, and quitting my creative endeavors? No. I intend to work on my 3rd novel whenever appropriate over these next three years. I am 28,000 words into it. It is the best thing I have done, no doubt, but still unpublishable. Too many "fatal flaws." Everybody in or associated with law school says you have no free time and if you have free time you should be studying. Well, now I am going to start doing that and stop blogging. And I have serious doubts about my career in general. I waited too long to do this.

More advice to Jordan and Richard: never move to a random city (like say Los Angeles) because it seems fun and you have enough savings in your account-----unless you have a job there waiting for you. Had I not done that, had I applied to law school 3 years ago, or now without that stint, I'd be having a blast, not pinching every penny, not failing to leave tips for take-out orders, not feeling guilty about an endless reliance upon my parents and not feeling that I have a dubious future in general. I would feel much more confident.

Finally, that is very far in the future for them. They will be at college soon and probably have the time of their lives. I would recommend NYU but I feel as if it is changing. It is expanding, somehow, despite already having been the largest private university in the country 9 years ago. John Sexton is really emphasizing how important it is to study abroad so they can get as many students as possible out of the Village and into their other, expensive international branches in Paris, Florence, Buenos Aires and other places of which I am unaware. They are putting up students in hotels, because the new dorms they have opened since I have graduated still don't provide enough space. Faculty members would complain about their salaries. Still, I wouldn't have rather been anywhere else. Except UT-Austin or maybe Oberlin if I had gotten in there. Liz Phair and I have the same birthday and she is exactly seventeen years older than me and she went there.

Thanks to Jordan for sending me this chapbook. I apologize for using this as an opportunity to explain why this blog will be slipping into a coma and writing so many other random things. I wish him and Richard the best of luck, and hope that their method of e-publishing will work out okay for them. They are on the first-wave of this stuff, and they should ride it out and see where it takes them.

Richard Yates - Tao Lin

This will be one of the last posts on Flying Houses for a long time. A friend of mine recently told me that I should spend more time studying and less time blogging since studying involves the financial investment. But I requested this book and I am not going to be negligent when it comes to following through on promises.

Yes, perhaps a bit of personal narrative is in order before this official review begins, since it is such a serious occasion. I requested a copy of Richard Yates from Tao Lin's publicist on July 6, 2010, approximately 5 weeks before I would move to Brooklyn for law school. I knew I would receive the book in my new apartment in Brooklyn, and I knew there would be law school assignments, and I knew it would appear negligent if I blogged about underground literature instead of reading and briefing cases. But I did it anyway because I knew it was the last chance I would have to do an advance review of a relatively highly-anticipated new title.

I will not be interviewing Tao as I did for previous reviews of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. Not that I don't want to, but again, time, and negligence. I received Richard Yates in my apartment foyer on Monday, August 16. There were two packages from Melville House* and I was just out of my 2nd day of "preliminary" law school classes. I was very depressed. I was thinking that there was no way I could possibly survive the next three years. It would not be sustainable. In this depressed mood, I immediately began reading Richard Yates, which is usually the best time to read books by Tao Lin. I read for an hour and made it through roughly 1/4 of the book and then decided it was time to go get drunk and watch a movie on Netflix. It was Comedians of Comedy and I laughed very much. Sometimes I would go outside and smoke a cigarette. I would put my iPod boombox by my window and play music and go outside and sit outside my window on a stoop and listen to the music and smoke. It came time to go to bed and I began having a nervous breakdown. Sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning I fell asleep. Then I woke up around 6:30 am or so and resumed having a nervous breakdown, and I opened up my word processor and did a free-write about the inevitability of my decision to suicide. This put me in a weird manic mood, and I went to shower and then went to another set of preliminary classes around 8:15 am.

Several hours later, the nervous breakdown had been quelled, and I enjoyed a calm lunch in the school cafeteria while reading Richard Yates. Then later I smoked a cigarette in the school's gated entrance and read more of Richard Yates. I was enjoying it very much.

I did not read any more of it on Tuesday night. I watched two movies on Netflix after being at a bar for a school outing--The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The Cruise (the latter of which I had seen before and should be required viewing for anyone living in New York City), also while drinking more beer and continuing to smoke cigarettes in this manner.

This morning, Wednesday, I resolved not to smoke any cigarettes or drink anything alcoholic. I went to the bookstore and waited forty-five minutes to get my books and was very frustrated but then happy it was over. I went to a pizza place for lunch and read more of Richard Yates, but only a few pages. Then I went into the school library and read a few more pages of Richard Yates. Then I went to class, and then I came home, and I resolved to finish reading the rest of Richard Yates. I also received a chapbook from Jordan Castro today and think I will try to review it as the last true blog post for a long time.

And I finished reading Richard Yates around 7:05 PM and it is now 7:35 PM. So, I suppose we can begin then?

Richard Yates is a very narrow book. It is about one thing, and one thing only: a relationship between a 16-year-old named Dakota Fanning and a 22-year-old named Haley Joel Osment. It is perhaps worth noting that Tao Lin does not attempt to seriously recreate the lives of these celebrities. Haley Joel Osment (hereafter referred to as HJO) is a graduate of New York University who spends a lot of time in Bobst Library and lives on Wall St. Dakota Fanning (hereafter referred to as DF) is a high-school student living in Secaucus, New Jersey. They meet on the internet and quickly begin dating and take buses and trains to visit one another.

It is about that one thing only, but within that, it is about many other things: self-mutilation, bulimia, health food stores, sex, lying, G-chat, movies, emo bands, and writers like Lorrie Moore and Richard Yates--in short, par for the course for a Tao Lin novel. I don't begrudge Tao for writing about the same topics. I have written enough to know that certain themes become obsessive to certain writers, and there is no shame in repetition, so long as it offers something new.

And I have been looking forward to this book for a couple years now and I predicted that it would be Tao Lin's most mainstream effort yet, and in certain regards I am right and in certain regards I am wrong. Tao does branch out into a more detailed "consistent" "straightforward" narrative than he has in the past. It is much more focused on the characters and there are no tangents that make little sense, as in Eeeee Eee Eeee. And I think technically, the rough draft of this novel was finished before Shoplifting from American Apparel was written, and then this novel was edited heavily after that novella was finished.

And perhaps that holds the key to my feelings. In a sense, I appreciate what Tao is trying to do with this book. But in another sense, I could not get into it as much as his previous two long-form prose works. Perhaps it is because I was rushing through it because I was in law school.

Here is my problem with it, essentially: it does not need to be a novel. I do not want to say that but it is the way I feel. I think it would have made an excellent short story, or a very good novella, but as the longest book he has done yet (not sure on this, but it seems longer than Eeeee Eee Eeee) it tends to drag. HJO and DF are two of the most interesting characters he has portrayed yet, but their story is too narrowly-focused.

So I went through periods where I thought the book was great, and periods where I thought it was not so great. My opinion depended on my mood, and the book could not distract me from present circumstances. Some people have been giving it bad reviews and not even reading to the end. I read to the end but I think the strongest parts are in the first 120 pages. It is in the last 80 pages that most of the "climactic" scenes occur, but I found HJO and DF's conversations becoming too repetitive, and almost too pointless. I do like how HJO wants to help DF near the end despite his weakening feelings for her. And I like the scene where they make funnel cakes at the carnival, and I like the scene where they go to Epcot, and I like the scene where they dye DF's hair black and she "turns goth." I also enjoy the references to self-mutilation and bulimia and Ernest Hemingway biographies and Nicholas Sparks for personal reasons.

There are many little moments in this book that are nice, but on the whole, I did not find it as interesting as Lin's two previous novels. Something has been made about this book being autobiographical and if that is the case then I understand why Tao felt that it needed to be published. I do not think everything in this book really happened. Or maybe everything in this book did happen, but certain details about people are skewed. I can't tell, and it doesn't really matter either way. It is fiction. And while I would love to give Tao positive reviews from here until the end of days, I can only half-heartedly recommend this novel.

It is worth reading for its "experimental" aspect for Tao Lin personally. It is more straightforward, in a sense, but it is also just like his previous work in that description is totally eschewed in favor of maximum repetitive action with repetitious objects. The element I like most is its "realist bent."

This is a minutely-detailed (though not deeply descriptive) account of a relationship that rings true. You feel that you are reading about a "real relationship" that might prove educational in some way. But it is only educational if you are a 22-year-old going out with a 16-year-old and all of the weird things that come with it. Neither HJO or DF is very mature, but obviously HJO has a slightly more complete view of life. The tagline for this book is, "What constitutes illicit sex for a generation with no rules?" I am not sure I like it, and it does not seem like Tao wrote that tagline, but I may be wrong. Regardless of whether or not I like it, the implication is that this book is an exploration of that sort of "illicit sex" and one gets the impression that it will be "titillating." But it is not titillating at all, even with more than a few scenes of sexuality. There is lots of G-chat. I think maybe more than 50% of this book's content is in the form of G-chat. The rest is extremely dialogue-heavy, and most of the dialogue seems almost meaningless.

I haven't read any books by Richard Yates, but I did see the movie Revolutionary Road and that was a narrowly-focused narrative on one relationship. Perhaps his other books are like that, and this is Tao's homage to him. If so, that is fine, that is nice. Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring to make fun of Sherwood Anderson.

So maybe there is a deeper layer to this book that I can't quite see, but taken on its own terms, I feel that is lacking in something, or that there is too much of nothing in it. I do believe it would make a great short story, and if it were edited down to just a few essential scenes instead of an exhaustive diary of every conversation (most glaringly, the four-page paragraph where DF tells HJO every single time she has lied to him in a long e-mail, which is either the best or worst part of the book, depending on your view), I would have liked it much more. Such as it is, I am glad I read it, I am glad I reviewed it during this tumultuous time in my life, and I look forward to reading whatever else Tao Lin's next project will be. Shoplifting from American Apparel was "roughly" written after this, and it is my favorite thing by him so far, so whatever he has been working on for the last year, or whatever he will be working on for the next year, I think, will continue to improve. This does seem a bit like an object from a time-capsule despite its latter-day editing. I remember reading a blog post by Tao Lin a long time ago saying he was going to write a novel about Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment and thinking that it was a joke. Imagine my surprise when I read the plot descriptions for Richard Yates.

This novel isn't a joke though. It's a serious attempt at something different, and I respect that. One can learn something from it. Sometimes exhaustive recitation of events and conversations do not automatically make for compelling literature. I have been guilty of this (and am still guilty of this, at times) so I understand the motive behind it. But without any deeper significance, or any hints of deeper significance, the reader finds themselves lost, and wonders why this information was so important to communicate.

*I received two copies of Richard Yates because I requested one from the publicist and then entered Tao's contest, which gave a copy of the novel as an award to all legitimate participants. I have an extra copy so if anyone wants it, I will send it to them, but I would prefer for them to live in Brooklyn Heights so I don't have to mail it.