Leave Society - Tao Lin (2021)

Leave Society is Tao Lin's fourth novel. The majority of his earlier work has been documented on this blog. The only major work I did not review is Trip, which is a non-fiction book about drugs and psychedelia. I was not sure I would be very interested in it, but after reading Leave Society, which would appear to carry forward many themes from that predecessor, I will certainly be checking it out. This is because Leave Society is a triumph and will be added to the "Best Books" list.

Lin's work has always been autobiographical, to one degree or another, though most often it appears to be "strictly." This novel is about Li, a novelist in his early 30's, who goes to visit his parents in Taipei for longer stretches of time, in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. These years are broken down into the four parts of the novel: Year of Mercury, Year of Pain, Year of Mountains, and Year of Unknown. The novel is a mixture of Li's visits with his parents, contrasted with his life in New York City in apartment 4K, which is somewhere around Chelsea, I think. His third novel has just been published and will soon be made into movie. He is separated from his wife and in the process of filing divorce papers. He stays with his parents for 10-12 weeks each year and "detoxifies." He practices celibacy for a prolonged period. He becomes a mediator between his parents, suggesting changes to their diet and medical regimens and attempting to bridge gaps in communication between them. He reads many books on fascinating subjects from esoteric sources. He pitches books, then later crafts and organizes them. He records a great deal of conversations with his parents, and transcribes them in this book. He wrestles with his relationship with his older brother and comes to understand him more deeply. He takes a good amount of LSD and ingests a good amount of cannabis and experiments with a variety of health foods and homeopathic cures. He spends time writing in Bobst Library. He tentatively, slowly enters a relationship, serving as a sort of climax for the novel. Finally it ends in Hawaii, on a rather mystical and perfect note, in accord with everything that came before it. 

There is a lot to talk about in this novel but the starting point must necessarily be Li's parents (simply known as Li's Dad and Li's Mom). The relationship between the three of them is so beautifully rendered that I cannot help but feel this book should also be adapted into a film, albeit one that is more widely-seen. It would be like an edgier version of The Farewell, except about parents instead of a grandmother, and a small family that is more intimately portrayed. It would require an excellently-trained dog for the part of Dudu, who turns 10 near the novel's end. But perhaps it would be too simple and monotonous for film. Even though "Best Books" are supposedly perfect (and though Flying Houses "grades" are inconsistent, no books have gotten A+ for a reason: A+ is not given out, it is reserved for something truly extraordinary that has yet to come along), there are always weaknesses, and the only weaknesses in this book are the sections of dialogue that are nearly meaningless. Yet these may also refer back to his earlier work, serving as a type of homage, and so even what I discern as weakness may be a deeper device. For example, what I remember as the most tedious pages of the book are later referred to near the end of the book, in the process of revising that scene--"how do you know that I don't know the fish are happy?"

This is taken from Zuangzhi, which concerns a student of Laozi (whom I had known as Lao Tzu). There are several other Chinese proverbs and sayings, such as "it's easier to change a dynasty than a personality." (51) My traveling companion found that one amusing, as I read this book over the second half of a trip through Italy (context matters). Or later, in one of the several moments that made me laugh out loud:

"Putting down his phone, Li's dad said, 'Calm water flows deep,' quoting someone from Three Kingdoms. Loud, talkative people were shallow, like river rapids, he explained. Deep people were quiet and still.
'I've never met anyone who talks as much as you,' said Li's mom. 

'The saying doesn't apply to me,' said Li's dad.

Thin Uncle said a Chinese proverb--empty wheat stalks, those who 'don't know,' stand tall, while those heavy with knowledge bend in humility." (327)

There is humor, and a touching family story within it, but Leave Society is a novel of ideas, and that is ultimately what sets it apart from Lin's earlier books. Taipei certainly hinted at his growth as a novelist, showing that he could write more mainstream books if he wanted to, and though Leave Society is inherently suspicious of "the mainstream," it presents the material read by Li throughout the course of the book in an almost-professorial tone, imbuing those ideas with authority. Ultimately those are the most important sections of the book, in that they move Li out of malaise and general unhappiness into awe and appreciation for all of the mysterious elements of existence.

This is no longer an advance copy, and the promotional materials do not read DO NOT QUOTE (as they did for "Shoplifting from American Apparel") and this review could contain a multitude of excerpts (I've marked at least six that inspired awe), but we will need to cut those down to two. There should be a 3 excerpt limit on FH reviews (and 1 should no longer be a requirement). That said, they are allowed to be long, like say, the first two pages of "Thyroid": 

"Four days later, twenty tabs of LSD arrived. On LSD at dinner, Li recorded himself telling his parents about the Younger Dryas, a period of time from 12,800 to 11,600 years ago that began and ended with global cataclysms, destroying, he'd read in books by Graham Hancock, at least one advanced civilization. 

'People were as advanced as we were in the eighteenth century,' said Li, and smiled at his mom, holding eye contact with startling, slightly nervous confidence; on LSD, he could be garrulous and extroverted, sharing thoughts, looking at eyes. 

He couldn't remember his mom's pre-surgery eyes. She'd looked perpetually surprised in Barcelona and Florida but had started to appear normal when he got to Taiwan for his current visit. 
'The same as we were in like 1780,' he said, sounding somewhat accusatory, as, to his rhetorical detriment, he usually did when telling his parents paradigm-changing information.

'Oh,' said Li's mom.

'They had ships and had mapped out the planet and were destroyed by pieces of a comet.'

'Whole world all destroyed,' said Li's mom.

'It hit mostly in North America, and there was almost no sunlight for a long time,' said Li, looking at his dad, who seemed preoccupied, eating and watching TV." (109-110) 

Li later says his interests were [not diverse, but] "similar in terms of being examples of dominant models being wrong in ways that distorted and simplified and disenchanted reality," (111) and the concept of acceptance of the "dominator" model of society (as opposed to the partnership model) weaves its way throughout the course of the book. It is as if Li is attempting to remove all traces of "dominator" thinking from his psyche, and give rise to more feminine ways of thinking. There is fair mention of "Yahweh," a female deity (conceived and worshipped before before the masculine heavenly Father) that has mostly been lost to history (see When God Was a Woman). Li does not have perfect self-control but he consistently tries to broker peace between feuding parties and displace hierarchies.

Li also goes on a certain health kick with homeopathic cures and experiments with fermented foods. He reflects on their effects, which are sometimes beneficial (Thyro-Gold), sometimes counter-productive (i.e. cayenne pepper capsules for a headache); on the being & existence & ancient civilizations & spirituality front, he provides appropriate citation and support for his discoveries. For example, talking about MK Ultra has pretty much become code for anti-vaxxers at this point. (I do not want to reflect on whether Li would choose to be vaccinated or not). The government is corrupt and evil and is force-feeding us chemicals to keep us under control. Sometimes, we cannot even bear to hear a person talk about such matters. Our brain shuts off as a defense mechanism against its own washing. Yet when Li reports on Karen Wetmore's memoir Surviving Evil and her discovery "that the CIA seemed to have killed around 1,200 mental patients at Vermont State Hospital, mostly or all women, in three decades of terminal experiments," (155) it feels more believable. Situated in the appropriate context, and reported by the appropriate authority, incredible beliefs become acceptable.

Really, none of these "disagreements with the mainstream" are nefarious. It is simply a question of whether the Sphinx is 4,500 years old, or 12,000 years old. He does become rather derisive towards his dad for taking statins. These types of conjectures and beliefs are harmless, coming as they do from a person that clearly favors the partnership model, rather than the dominator. There is a huge emphasis on communing with nature. But before we get there, one other set of crazy facts:

"Tesla's funding from J.P. Morgan was cut off when, according to one source, Morgan learned that Tesla wanted to give free electricity to everyone. Tesla lived in hotels for the last four decades of his life. When he died in 1943, the FBI confiscated his papers and equipment. 

Researching modern-day Teslas, Li found John Hutchison, a Canadian who began to experiment with electromagnetic radiation in 1951, when he was six. In 1979, on disability for agoraphobia, he discovered, while trying to replicate Tesla's work on wireless energy transmission, a set of phenomena that became known as the Hutchison Effect: using thirteen tons of equipment powered by a wall socket, he was able to levitate heavy objects, make metal rods wiggle and go transparent, heatlessly combust and melt metal, transmute elements, and create aurora-like clouds of light. 

Hutchison gave around seven hundred demonstrations, including one for the U.S. Army in 1983. Videos of his effects--which seemed to be generated by electromagnetic interferometry, the interfering of beams and fields of photons, and which to Li seemed close to gravity control, time travel, and other potentially history-ending capabilities--were widespread online. In 1990, the Canadian government confiscated most of Hutchison's lab--millions of dollars' worth of electrostatic generators, Tesla coils, and other things he'd amassed from junkyards and military surplus stores.

Hundreds of people, Li read in the Hutchison biography Mindbending and other books, had worked on free energy, inventing Moray devices, Hendershot generators, N-machines, and other overunity systems, which, like mitochondria, generated more energy than they consumed, but none of the inventions had reached mass production. It seemed that four trillion dollars a year in gas, coal, oil, and nuclear power; a century of investments in pipelines, electric grids, and other leaky infrastructure; and the addiction of energy corporations to monthly payments had led to the suppression--or at least the significant slowing of the development and use--of free energy." (252-253)

This is one of the more unbelievable facts reported in Leave Society but it is not one I would dismiss outright without further investigation. The idea of Leaving Society could mean a lot of different things, but it seems to center around the idea of forgetting everything you think you know. It is a slight variation on the confrontational adage "everything you know is wrong;" it advises the reader/adherent to rethink their basic assumptions about the world, to journey inward and find one's own personal truth, along with a set of beliefs that allows one to be free, uninhibited, and attuned to the reverberations of the deeper reality beyond the bubble in which we while away our lives in the service of profit. 

Society has constructed barriers between the individual and nature that have had the unfortunate effect of restricting our imaginations and compromising our bodies. And those barriers are, actually, physical--at the very least, Leave Society made me want to spend more time outdoors:

"At a waterfall at the bottom of Carp Mountain, Li learned of phytoncides (antimicrobial compounds given off by plants) and anions (molecules with extra electrons) from a dual-language sign calling them 'air vitamins crucial to mental and physical health.'

In his room that night, he read that forests, mountains, seashores, and waterfalls had tens of thousands of anions per cubic centimeter, countrysides had a thousand, city parks five hundred, city streets fifty, air-conditioned rooms zero to twenty-five, and that below a thousand impaired cognition and slowed physical recovery.

At dinner the next night, Li told his parents a Japanese study had found that cancer-killing lymphocytes and intracellular anticancer proteins showed increased activity for a week after trips to forests, or 'forest-bathing,' as it was called in Japan. The study was more evidence that the broken human-nature symbiosis caused cancer and other diseases.

'Then we should keep climbing mountains,' said Li's mom." (171-172)

There are other pleasures to be found in this book, such as a very sensitive and tentative romance in New York, and a climactic ending in Hawaii, but ultimately Leave Society is a book of ideas. It is, to be sure, a mechanistic method of autobiography: it is as though Li simply goes through his phone, checks the time-stamps on e-mails, and reconstructs his personal history over a period of roughly four years. The amount of material (given the details Li provides about the word counts in his rough drafts of each "Year") was staggering, and Lin has managed an impressive feat in whittling it down to the necessary elements: roughly, two parts intimate family story, one part history of ideas. The intimate family story is charming, sometimes tedious, and ultimately very moving--there is a sense of bittersweet sadness that comes with aging parents and the urge to create as many strong and lasting memories as we can, after moving beyond teenage angst and into adulthood, when we understand the sacrifices they made and the unconditional love they gave (if we are so lucky). It is the history of ideas, however, that will make me want to lend this book out to friends (never mind the fact that I have an unfortunate history of "friends" stealing books I lent them, including Eeeee Eee Eeee and "Shoplifting from American Apparel"). 

I recommend all of Tao Lin's books, with the caveat that everything before Taipei could be considered an "acquired taste." Taipei was excellent, and feels like a more traditional novel than Leave Society, but I would recommend this volume above them all. It encapsulates what makes Lin unique as a writer-- it pays homage to his earlier work, and builds upon that towards something greater and more universal. The book will provoke thought and discussion, and lead readers to discoveries never previously considered. It may make one rethink their cynicism towards alternative schools of thought. And it may open one up to observing this dazzling and magnificent world with awe, and living more gracefully within it. 

Grade: A

Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul - Jamie Ducharme (2021)

I quit cigarettes and started vaping on March 11, 2020. I bought a Suorin Air. That lasted me about 6 months. I then bought a Smok Novo II, which was recommended to me by the shop Vape Daze. When that one became unusable after about 6 months, the same shop recommended the Caliburn G to me. I have never tried a Juul.

Am I ashamed of this habit? Absolutely. Is vape juice more addictive than tobacco? Absolutely.

The reasons should be obvious. Though e-cigarettes are banned in as many places as regular cigarettes, it is easy to get away with vaping indoors. This removes the necessity of stepping outside for about five minutes whenever you want a fix. Instead, one can puff on a vape all day long, maybe even every minute of every waking hour. The nicotine buzz is strong, particularly if one uses a 50 mg (0.05% nicotine) strength juice. We want to presume that vaping is less dangerous than smoking, but really it has not been used for much more than a decade. It certainly made me cough, which certainly made those early months of the pandemic embarrassing and nerve-racking. Even now, I have a sore throat that has not really gone away for about 10 days, and it's quite possible I've developed cancer in a year. It seems rather clear to me that vaping poses just as many problems as smoking, and the only reason that I started was because it seemed more cost effective. 

And true, a 30 mg tube of nicotine salt (current flavor: iced grape, VGOD) runs about $15. This may last for a month, or maybe two. A 3-pack of coils runs for $15 as well, and a 2-pack of pods runs for $10. So for $40 one can vape for about 1-2 months (the Caliburn G device itself cost about $30). By contrast if one smokes, oh, say 2 packs per week (I generally tried to stick to 1), that will cost about $192 or so. Using a Juul is a bit more expensive than using an alternative device with alternative salts, but I would still estimate that that it is somewhat less expensive than traditional cigarettes (except, perhaps, in North Carolina). 

The flavors are the other thing. As of September 2020, flavored salts were outlawed in the City of Chicago. But it is not very difficult to get around that--one may merely drive outside of the city limits. And the flavors make it extra addictive. Regular cigarettes always gave me something of a queasy feeling, and the tobacco flavored salts were not much better. Menthols, or Camel Crush, became my choice until I made the switch. While I would not claim that clove cigarettes got me started (we knew not to inhale), they were undoubtedly more appealing. So imagine a clove cigarette that you could actually inhale and that would give you a super strong buzz and that was less expensive and that you could do indoors without stinking up the place and there you have the danger of vaping. 

Kurt Vonnegut remarked that he was committing suicide by cigarette, Pall Malls were his method of choice. I am not anti-vaping; I am simply noting that one should be allowed to pick their poison. However, I think the ultimate path towards curtailing this public health emergency is an outright ban--also on cigarettes. This is problematic due to the increasing legality of marijuana, a substance very many people consider less harmful, but which experience knows cannot be a healthy thing to do (at least if smoked). Truly, life is stressful and difficult, and we have our vices to make it more tolerable. Take them away, and you will anger a great many people, and if they want them enough, they will find them. Some people say the same thing about guns, but obviously, that is another conversation entirely.

***

Jamie Ducharme examines many of these difficult questions in Big Vape, and while I found the early parts of the book to be somewhat clumsy and perfunctory, it picks up steam in the middle and ends on a strong note. It is recommended for anybody interested in vaping, or the business of commercial vice. It is indeed a strange career to run an incredibly successful business, one that is considering an IPO, built around making it seem okay to do something incredibly harmful. The primary theme of that moral conundrum is, do not get kids hooked on nicotine. 

The opening is most interesting in describing the origins of the "safer cigarette" in "Smoke Without Fire." Ducharme begins by reciting the appropriate health dangers, and reflects on some of the increasing scrutiny (ultimately it becomes clear that her leitmotif is the parenthetical mention of an impeding 2021 or 2022 trial date in federal multi-state litigation against Juul) that cigarette companies faced when their products were unveiled to be dangerous. She then describes a revolutionary researcher.

"In the early 1960's, researchers at British American Tobacco (BAT), led by a man named Sir Charles Ellis, thought of a way they could go even further. Ellis's whole idea hinged on avoiding a process called combustion. Combustion happens when a cigarette is lit on fire and tobacco mixes with the oxygen in the air, producing smoke, ash and roughly seven thousand chemical by-products, some of which can lead to cancer. If BAT could develop a product that delivered nicotine without all the chemicals and by-products that made people sick, Ellis thought, it could keep many smokers from quitting. Nicotine, he reasoned, was relatively harmless on its own. Yes, it was a mild stimulant, and yes, it was addictive, but it had some benefits, too--like increasing concentration and focus while simultaneously soothing the nerves. Why not get smokers hooked on that alone, instead of on traditional cigarettes? Ellis's project was known internally as 'Ariel.'" (13-14)

First, a word on combustion. Does that mean every time we burn something with a lighter and inhale it, that's combustion? And people still think it is safe to smoke weed? I must be missing something. Perhaps its something in the tobacco or the filter, I digress. 

The "Ariel" failed because the company didn't see a way to sell it--but eventually R.J. Reynolds ("Premier" and "Eclipse") and Philip Morris ("Accord") each attempted to manufacture a safer cigarette as well. There is a brief mention of the snus phenomenon in Sweden, and there is no mention of any negative health effects of that product. Then, she describes the Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik, who gave birth to the modern e-cigarette in 2003. 

She then returns to the Juul team, which early on had started under a different name: Ploom. So maybe it is just the chapters with "Ploom" that I found less compelling. Regardless, it is an interesting story. The company was run more like a Silicon Valley startup than a tobacco company, and a great deal of this book deals with that dichotomy: when (spoiler alert) the company sells a good stake of itself to Altria, one of the largest cigarette companies, many of the employees consider it a betrayal, because they wanted to be part of something less morally-ambiguous. The two principals, Adam and James, seem to me like "startup tech bros," like the guys who started the HQ App, or the WeWork guy (both subjects of interesting podcasts and a solid documentary), amongst others. It's an interesting story but for some reason less compelling than some of the other later material.

But maybe this is just because I was reading the later part of the book while traveling, and had significantly more downtime in which to read. In any case, many sections tended to make me doze off. It was hard to read about this stuff, and when I told my traveling companion just a couple of things about the book (the later stuff, about the deaths, and Vitamin E acetate), they grew increasingly concerned about my habit and began to chide me for it. 

***

There is a certain comparison I want to make between this book and Grass Roots, though it is difficult because they are very different books. Both of the authors appear to be roughly the same age and are working in similar territory, but one is a journalist at Time, and expanded a long article (or several of them) into this book, and the other is a scholar with a Ph. D. in American Studies. I am no academic elitist, but I am inherently suspicious of "professional" writers. They exist in an incubator and have all the means at their disposal. I have no doubt that Big Vape has been a great success, though I tend to wonder whether the ultimate payout is any better than what I have been led to believe is the norm for almost all writers. But Grass Roots makes it onto the Best Books list and this does not, perhaps because it can't, because the story on vaping is happening so fast. 

Grass Roots walked a fine line between advocating for better marijuana reform laws and giving a fair (and non-condescending) voice to those against it entirely. Big Vape also walks a similar line between pro-vapers and anti-vapers (amusingly, most of the pro-vapers seem to be employed by NYU), but the issues are more clear-cut: are they just like cigarettes, or are they better? Do they make you die? Many people say no one has ever died from smoking weed (I doubt that can truly be the case) and many people believe that vaping is very bad for your health--maybe not quite as bad as smoking cigarettes, but certainly not harmless. There are many gray areas, and Ducharme does her best to assemble them in an accessible package, but the book feels oddly distanced, and focused on details of the company (rather than details of the industry/culture/phenomenon) that I found less compelling .

Don't misunderstand! There are great character portraits in each. The best in this case comes in Chapter 10, "The Boss," which is about Kevin Burns:

"Burns was a gregarious, straight-talking guy in his fifties, the sort of person you could easily picture holding a beer and flipping burgers at a backyard barbeque. He was a good-humored family man, married with two teenage children, but he also didn't take any bullshit. He didn't sugarcoat anything. His language colorful, peppered with choice words like idiots and mo-fos. He was also a workaholic with a reputation for building brands into winners.
Burns had most recently worked at the Greek yogurt company Chobani, by way of his private equity firm, TPG. In a financially desperate moment in 2014, the yogurt maker had turned to TPG for a $750 million loan. It also got Burns, who was known as a turnaround guru for struggling companies. Chobani's founder had reportedly called Burns to ask for his help while Burns was at an Easter Mass service with his family in April 2014. Burns not only picked up the call during the service, but also said yes. He spent a couple years at Chobani, helping improve its back-end processes and distribution capabilities. When he stepped down at the end of 2016, he left behind a booming business." (126)

Or in describing Siddharth Breja's whistle-blower complaint:

"The legal complaint painted Juul as a lawless company operating with no regard for public safety, under the authority of Kevin Burns, a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered CEO who proclaimed himself the 'king' of Juul. In the world described in Breja's lawsuit, Burns ruled with fear. 'Tell that motherfucker that I'll take him out of the room and shoot him with a shotgun if he challenges my decisions,' Burns once barked during an executive meeting, according to the complaint." (243)

Ducharme later contrasts Burns with his replacement in the CEO position, K.C. Crosthwaite, after the Altria takeover:

"If you had to draw a picture of the stereotypical American businessman, it would look an awful lot like K.C. Crosthwaite. The career Altria executive looked at home in a crisp suit, and he kept his brown hair cropped short. In his midforties, with wrinkles just starting to appear around his piercing blue eyes, he spoke as if reading straight from a media training document, rarely saying anything controversial. He was the polar opposite of colorful, casual, cursing Kevin Burns, who had frequently walked around Juul headquarters in jeans and soccer jackets. 'K.C. is a fundamentally boring person,' says one former Juul employee--and that seemed to be exactly the point. 'You don't want to have any personality about any of these people, and you don't want them to be in the news at all.' Crosthwaite would be the adult in the room, helping Juul right itself and win back the trust of regulators and the American public." (239)

Juul also owned Pax, which is a popular vaporizer that most people use for marijuana, and all of the details of the company's acquisitions and sales--along with founder James's plans for an app either to help people quit or to achieve the greatest possible cloud of vape--are minutely noted. Much of it concerns avoiding the appearance of impropriety--namely, marketing Juul to kids, which was incredibly difficult to avoid. Yet they also kind of sort of wanted kids to use it--but they could never say that. This is the conundrum that the tobacco industry faced, and continues to face, and it is a difficult moral question to assay: when can we sacrifice some element of public health in exchange for profits?

The answer should be "never," but there are a great number of industries (pharmaceuticals chief among them) where the answer is "always." Opioids are initially prescribed to help a patient through pain after some sort of operation, or as a response to a chronic condition, not unlike medical cannabis (though one is covered by insurers). It is permissible under certain conditions. So too is vaping generally preferred to smoking cigarettes. Yet Juul's founders made problematic statements early on: that they were just a replacement for cigarettes, that the company didn't create it to help people quit, but just to make a cigarette--which had declined in popularity for the younger generation--"cool" again. 

The founders did not address the possibility that vaping could become more addicting than smoking, and the book does discuss that in some detail--i.e. the very high nicotine content, 0.05% of the nic salts--and in this respect they are similar to opioids: the "cure" can sometimes be the greater harm. Just as vaping is viewed as "harm reduction," there is right now someone, somewhere, that is attempting to create a harm reduction product for vaping. 

***

The book picks up speed in the fateful year of 2019, and particularly in September of that year, which dealt multiple blows to the enterprise. Most insidiously, the EVALI crisis (E-cigarette or Vaping product use-Associated Lung Injury--a clumsy acronym, but rolls off the tongue) led to several deaths. Those became linked to so-called black market THC carts, and the specific ingredient of Vitamin E acetate (used to "water down" THC concentrate), and though Juul's nic salts do not contain it, the industry experiences a cataclysmic event. Cigarette sales went back up because people now thought they were safer than the alternative. And the scrutiny that D.C. lawmakers had been giving to the industry ramped even further up, to the point that President Trump made an address from the Oval Office declaring vaping an epidemic and public health emergency. There was not much follow-through on this vow to ban all non-tobacco-flavored vape juices, though, because Trump did not want to lose any voters.

It is hard to end a review summarizing this book, because this book is still being written. The last events detailed must have happened within months of publication. This is not unlike the slew of books written and released within months between 2016 and 2020 of various inner-dealings in the White House. I wasn't much interested in those books, though I thought I should have been for the purposes of this blog. The problem is that we can't fully contextualize something until we have seen it play out to its endgame. Vaping may, or may not, be here to stay. Vices shift. Tobacco is now much more expensive, and the age to purchase is now 21, and it is 100% harmful to health, we all seem to agree. There is more ambiguity about vaping, and it does appear that eventually all flavors will be banned (this is undoubtedly a selling point, a feature that essentially turns the product into clove cigarettes with a buzz). The price point for Juul is in line with current cigarettes (they did not market it as a less expensive alternative, but that is certainly the case for many non-Juul devices). Taxing them even higher is a possibility, but so is a partial or permanent ban. Much research is likely being done in this area, with many studies with many volunteers, and perhaps in a few years there will be more uniformity of opinion. The myriad lawsuits mentioned in this book from various states' Attorneys General should also test the industry. 

Perhaps then, this book may end up being more popular than Grass Roots because it is a live and current issue, and vapers are surprisingly passionate about their habit. It is something of an arts and crafts project (to design one's own mod), the addiction runs fierce, and one can still claim that it is less harmful than smoking. Marijuana regulation, to be sure, is still playing out in a different field, and there are distinct differences. Nicotine does not have positive health benefits, apart from mental concentration and temporary stress relief; there is less hostility towards THC and/or CBD, which most agree can be beneficial. Given the difficulties of writing about such a loaded topic, Ducharme deserves to be applauded. I might have done it differently--not quite as laser-focused on Juul, more about the industry than the company--but we see the whole of the industry through its most notorious player. I do not think this book will hold great interest for those without a vaper in their life, but it is a good starting point for an education in the industry. It will not tell you whether it is safe, but it will show you that, yes, now that e-cigarette companies are being taken over by Big Tobacco, Big Vape is simply an offshoot of the same.

Grade: B+

Fake Accounts - Lauren Oyler (2021)

It is important, now, that I re-listen to Ms. Oyler's appearance on the NY Times Book Review podcast. Because that's why I checked this book out--or maybe it was an interview on "Fresh Air," or some other outlet ("The New Yorker Radio Hour?"). Even though I only knew its trope--girl snoops through boyfriend's cell phone, discovers he is a MAGA conservative, or an online conspiracy theorist--one which did not strike me as terribly interesting, given the bounty of material on QAnon, et al.--the novel seemed "zeitgeisty" and given the perpetual mission of Flying Houses, which is to "sense" the direction of the culture in literary publishing, I had to place a Hold on it immediately (it took a while to get it, many others reserved it before me). Finding the episode from 2/26/21, Fake Accounts is framed as a debut novel by a person pretty close to my age that made her name as a literary critic. So of course, I couldn't just simply ignore it.  

Before I re-listen, what am I re-listening for? My sense of this book is as follows: it is not autobiographical, but it is extremely autobiographical. So much of this could have been taken out of every day life. Some of the details are just too unique to have been plucked out discretely from the ether of the imagination. Oyler lives part-time in Berlin and New York. There is a lot about Berlin in it. Near the end, there is a biblical rain and flood in Berlin. Last night (as of 7/19/21) there was apparently massive flooding in Western Germany and so I was reminded that I needed to work on this review. Because for all its flaws, its prescience feels illuminating. That said, this is an extremely particular book and so this will be an extremely particular review. If Oyler is able to write a book like this, then I am able to write a review like this. 

*

To begin with literary criticism, here are a few things I re-learned from the interview: she's 30 (younger than I thought), got her start writing "listicles," and forgive me, but I have to quote: "in the process of researching this column, I read a lot of book criticism, I read a lot of weird, sort of book websites, and I learned a lot about what was going on in contemporary literature, and I learned a lot about what I liked and what I didn't like, in criticism as well."

Pamela asked, "What were the weird book websites?" Oyler then refers to alt-lit and Tao Lin--but a large group of internet-inflected writers and poets and novelists who were doing sort of experimental literature that was very much inflected by the internet. She got her style as a critic from reading old articles from the LRB, London Review of Books........

Of course, in reviewing a book where there is so much about the "I" in our online communications, so much about knowing another's entire online presence, so much about Twitter interactions and the weird sorts of archetypes that emerge (particularly in response to women, generally), and if one happens to have amassed a not-insignificant body of criticism hovering on the perimeter of so called "alt-lit" (FYI, it is unlikely I will be able to review Lin's Leave Society prior to its August 4th publication date, particularly as Big Vape stands before it, but it is coming...), one happens to wonder, do I exist, do I matter, why am I here, etc. Oyler obviously intuited a silver bullet and grabbed a brass ring that I have been watching pass by for years. I am secure in the knowledge that at least Jeffrey Toobin appreciated what I had to offer. 

"Their sort of signature combination of very sort of cheeky--not cheeky, but in-depth, and a long review, and the books are viewed from many different angles, but ultimately there's a real perspective that's gone into those pieces that I really connected with." 

That is about the London Review of Books, and perhaps those critics are better than this critic, but this is always what I have tried to do--that is the r'aison d'etre of FH--a serious perspective, yet cheeky, often from the bitter standpoint of a have-not. Perhaps these are the worst sorts of reviews--I could write a better book than that!--but I like to think I understand the enormous complexity of the undertaking. And I am sure that Oyler spent years toiling as a have-not as well, and so has some sympathy for my position but also may consider my perspective, what with its clouded view of merit or ostensibly unearned success, to be almost irrelevant. 

She also does her customary disclosure which is that she went to Yale. So obviously, she is well-educated, and must have been very bright to be accepted. I don't take away points for humblebrags because we have to look at the book itself (and I would be guilty of the same) but sometimes I get triggered, okay, by elitism. But the Yale English Department is less personally offensive to me than Yale Law School--and we all know that toiling away at literature very rarely results in financial reward--so mostly, I am happy for Oyler. She made it happen, probably by writing for other outlets other than her own poorly-trafficked blog stuck in 2008, and maybe I could do the same, but then again there is very little substance to my perspective, and I am not a great writer. This is not false modesty but snippets of truth I've sensed from the limited few that have provided honest and constructive criticism. 

She says that she goes into a review thinking about what the other's goal is, and says some people don't do this (note: I don't, though I do think about that when I am trying to end the review, to come to an overall assessment). If she senses a misguided goal, then that is one kind of a review, or a noble goal, that has been executed more or less successfully. Pamela asks if she avoids reading other reviews and she says that she does not. 

Is this review about her style of literary criticism, or the book itself? I haven't read her reviews so that is really dangerous, and I'm just going to say that, I thought about this A LOT as a film critic, and it was because I was afraid of looking like a charlatan. Not because I wanted to think about the conversations that people were having about the product; because I was 18 or 19 and didn't feel comfortable participating in such conversations. I have one friend that asked what I thought of Fake Accounts and when I told him I finished it on Saturday (two days ago), and it was OK, he said he saw it had gotten bad reviews and heard a lot about it, but hadn't read it. I have not read any of them but I am very interested to read the NY Times Review. Because there is a weird sort of "scratch my back" mentality with that publication (to say nothing of other highbrow outlets based in New York City) where criticism intersects with marketing. Of course, this is unavoidable: I would not be given copies of It Never Ends or Leave Society (or the half-dozen others in the past) if publicists and publishing houses did not think "all press is good press." So I might read that review before I finish this one. But to be clear, I do not do that, and I do not recommend doing that unless you are afraid of saying the wrong thing. And that is sort of my criticism of Fake Accounts, which is not that bad, nor that great, and which I cannot recommend, nor dismiss. That is, I recommend you read this book if you care about literature and publishing. Also, if you want to go to Germany. Or do a lot of online dating. I do not expect you will have the most enjoyable of experiences, is all. Regardless, there is so much truth in this novel, that there is much to admire in it. The truth hurts, all too often, and I really need to finish listening to this interview to make sure I am not totally off-base.

* 

But before that, I really wanted to give this book a bad review just because there is a section of it that is clearly ripping of Jenny Offill, almost making fun of her (even vaguely referencing an interview on the NY Times Book Review podcast), and to me this is almost a Camille Paglia-Susan Sontag throw-down, and just as most would side with Sontag, I think most would side with Offill. Because there is something beautifully humble about her work, and the main character in this novel tears her aesthetics to shreds. Yet perhaps in reality, Oyler is a fan of Offill's work, and realizes that the long section of the novel deeply-indebted to her, is actually its strongest part (which I felt). Here we veer into the autobiographical nature of the literary debut, as the character has no name, but this is premature. I won't reprint the offending paragraph, I will just re-state my (dumb) perspective that I consider Offill a true artist. I feel this has to be a tell--that the protagonist dislikes Offill-esque writing because she can't even try to be concise. 

*

Nothing further from the podcast interview. That isn't the book. The only other relevant consideration was, "how much of you is in this novel?" And apparently, there was a lot of her in it, and this bothered me, most likely for the wrong reasons. That is, the protagonist comes off...not so well in my opinion and I am wondering whether I am a bad guy for thinking that, but she is just a snarky b**** and she has to come off badly to others too, not just me. You don't write yourself to be a monster, but perhaps, sometimes, this is quite a brilliant trope. Or if not monstrosity, at least honest, brutal truth, shorn of any societal constrictions of "being nice," for the character is very straightforward about her fakeness in this regard.  

The literary style of this novel is unique. At one end, there is a beautiful mellifluousness to the language. If you read it out loud, the strength and force of the words are apparent. But so are the run-on sentences. Now there are basic literary principles, one of which is avoiding passive voice, and another of which is avoiding run-on sentences. It appears that the former is still in vogue and the latter is a relic. I often do both, egregiously. And here, Oyler does run-on sentences egregiously. It is worth noting that there is a great literary tradition of the run-on sentence when it is deftly executed. To me, this entire book was full of run-on sentences. Some of them were good, such as the opening (which clearly must have wowed in the pitch, and further underscores that the first 5 pages may be the most important part of the novel, at least with regard to agent queries--though I suspect a connection or two was made by virtue of critical endeavors). More than a few times, these sentences made me scoff and dislike the character. The first such instance I recall is this, because it reinforces depressing stereotypes as an apparent reflection of reality.

OK I can't find that passage because the book is a miasma of rhetoric, but it has something do with Pursuit-Evasion Game Theory and so I guess if there is a theory for it it must be true. But it is depressing as hell to think that the person going through the trouble of pursuing, doing all of the hard work, is deemed the less attractive by society. I digress. As does she:

"OK, get to the point, my ex-boyfriends are saying from the audience, not unkindly but not kindly either. They will listen to me talk about other men, but you can tell they really don't like it; they use any excuse to cheapen the experience. You take so long to tell stories. It's hard to say what it is they saw in me if they didn't appreciate this crucial aspect of my charm." (31)

As a person given to the same impulses, I can empathize with her. But also the ex-boyfriends. Because, I don't know, this book is like a red herring. Granted I didn't want to read a book about MAGA and chem trails and inside jobs, but I did not know I was reading a book about online dating and putting on fake personas. Of course, there is a fair amount of material on "American anxiety" circa 2015-2017, but ultimately this is a very personal book about a young woman's experiences living by herself in Berlin, for reasons she doesn't totally understand, doing some writing but also nannying for two kids and trawling OK Cupid like it's her job. She has a sweet German roommate, and the mother of the children is sweet as well, but there is an air of condescension about the protagonist that makes her seem like a brat. The "anti-hero" was a big thing about 15-20 years ago, and maybe it is coming back, I don't know. Of course I like the idea of the "anti-hero" because that's realistic, that's real life - none of us are perfect heroes 24/7, nobody is flawless. Still, even with anti-heroes, we root for them to succeed (I am thinking of three major television properties). Here, the reader does not so much sympathize with the narrator as hope that her ruse is uncovered. Perhaps not in the scene in the Visa office--we don't want to see her get in real trouble--but perhaps in the many scenes of first dates, we hope that one person will call her on her BS (this does happen, once, I think, with the chain-smoking American Leo--when she is attempting to either date a person from each zodiac sign, or put on the persona of someone born in each zodiac sign, I couldn't tell--but nothing of consequence comes of it).  

And then there is the plot, which as noted above, is very loose. The novel effectively serves as a way for Oyler to make her pronouncements on the world, many of which feel wrong-headed, unfair and immature. This is the character, maybe--not Oyler--but the character that writes snarky internet articles--not "listicles" or actual book reviews. We could imagine such a writer living as such a character. We hope that Oyler has presented an "evil twin" version of herself.

But it is patently obvious that she (like many of us) have run the gauntlet of online dating and have a great number of amusing stories to cull from that experience. So there may be elements that are extraordinary--I haven't even given away the first "spoiler" which shouldn't be avoided in a review because it comes early enough--but these are just framing mechanisms for the long middle section about the narrator alone in Berlin. 

The ending..................well, it's not as bad as The Art of Fielding. But it's a deus ex machina. I watched Adaptation a couple nights ago for the first time in many years. As the screenwriter-guru tells his pupils, "for Gods sake, don't use a deus ex machina!" That made me think of this book. Of course, there are different rules for screenwriting.  

The ending isn't as bad as The Art of Fielding--but what made that ending so frustrating was that the rest of the book was very good. I'm sorry to say I did not have as good a time reading this one. But I do feel that I have been plugged into the zeitgeist after reading it, and that zeitgeist is depressing as hell (as if I didn't already know that). 

I haven't included enough quotes, and I've been rather dismissive here, which isn't fair. Because I admired a fair amount of this book, and truth be told I did move through the parts that were "easier to read" rather quickly. Oh, fuck it:

"The author said she thought having children contributed to the form and style of her books, written in stolen moments, necessarily short sections [Ed. I am thinking, too, of Raymond Carver when I read this], simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel at times. Lots of women were writing fragmented book like this now, the interviewer pointed out. Having read several because they were easy to finish, I couldn't help but object: this trendy style was melodramatic, insinuating utmost meaning where there was only hollow prose, and in its attempts to reflect the world as a sequence of distinct and clearly formed ideas, it ran counter to how reality actually worked. Especially, I had to assume, if you had a baby, which is a purposeful experience (don't let it die) but also chaotic (it might die). Since the interviewer and the author agreed that there were something distinctly feminine about this style, I felt guilty admitting it, but I saw no other choice: I did not like the style." (164)

From there, she hits pause and listens to the Savage Love podcast instead, and then later delves into the online dating portion of the book, written in this same style. Having written several failed novels, I know this experimental facade when I see it--we try to come up with a new angle when we feel we aren't connecting with the reader enough. In fact there are multiple references to the reader themselves, which I also tend to enjoy just because I have done it myself (as have Thomas Mann, Donald Barthelme, and many others, no doubt). This is a generous act to readers--reminding them that the book doesn't exist without them--but unfortunately it is one that critics might like to savage. Not this one, though. I respect self-consciousness, but not "easy-outs."  Perhaps one more representative quote will give a sense of how this novel reads (with strengths and weaknesses both emerging out of the same sentences):

".....In the past I might have also sent Felix text messages through periods of inner turmoil, e.g., 'Help, I'm trapped in my body!!' He would usually respond with something I interpreted as tough love, telling me to read a book, or write one. 'What are you doing' I'd always ask afterward, no question mark, because I didn't want to seem more desperate than I already did, and he would reply, lying. The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me. I'd gotten used to using people I'd never met, or met a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotions I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it. It was compared to white noise so often for a reason: so many people, talking, mumbling, murmuring, muttering, suggesting, gently reminding, chiming in, jumping in, just wanting to add, just reminding, just asking, just wondering, just letting that sink in, just telling, just saying, just wanting to say, just screaming, just *whispering*, in all lowercase letters, in all caps, with punctuation, with no punctuation, with photos, with GIFs, with related links, Pay attention to me! Saying something as irrelevant to the wider world as 'I'm in a bad mood' or 'I can't get out of bed' elicited commiseration, and offering commiseration to similar expressions made me feel I had participated in a banal but important ecosystem. There were so many people in bad moods at any given time; all we had to do was find each other. We could pretend something good, connection, had come of our turning to technology to deal with boredom, loneliness, rejection, heartbreak, irrational rage, Weltschmerz [Ed. "a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness," she knows this but not much other German...perhaps like many non-Germans knowing the meaning of Schadenfreude], ennui, frustration with the writing process. We were all self-centered together, supporting each other as we propped up the social media companies...." (116-117) 

*

This is all growing pains, I imagine. It's the literary debut of a fresh new voice. We have to accept a certain amount of autobiography, if not categorized as a memoir, and I know from experience that it is very hard to pull deeply meaningful experiences to us out of thin air - if something strikes us with pure, singular detail, it's fake to make something else up in the name not having any shred of autobiography, nothing to connect the author with the character. That feels manufactured, and this feels real. Certain parts of it, at least. And that is what I admire about the book--the bravery and courage in it, if the reader senses those embarrassing details that writers might prefer to disconnect from their real selves. Oyler is somewhat obtuse about how much of her is in this, and perhaps those "monstrous" qualities are the way we all are underneath the surface. But I don't want to believe that. At least for me personally, I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don't like making fun of people and sometimes it seems like that's happening quite a bit (not just in this novel, but on social media--making fun of people that can't defend themselves). Maybe this is okay if the narrator makes fun of themselves--portrays themselves as a train-wreck of sorts, as here--but the apparent immaturity and lack of compassion tend to overshadow the self-analysis. The narrator says she likes bad guys. That should be a tell, but I still don't really understand why. 

Grade: B

It Never Ends - Tom Scharpling (2021)

I have been a relatively loyal listener of The Best Show for about 3 years. I got into it because I got into podcasts because I got into a line of work that was extremely boring and tedious and called for mental distraction and amusement. I'd heard rumblings about it. I knew a box set of "greatest hits" from the show had been released to glowing reviews, and is now very hard/extremely expensive to obtain. 11 years ago (nearly to the day!), I took a girl I happened to be dating at the time (one of the very few!) to a free Superchunk set at a street festival in Chicago. The show was incredible and afterward my date messaged Jon Wurster on Twitter and told him she was about to shout something (some reference from the show that I can't recall because I wasn't yet familiar) to him and he wrote back, "You should have!" But yeah she was super cool so I had a positive impression of The Best Show and its audience for many years. 

So 3 years ago I actually started listening, and I didn't know what to make of it. For one, it was very long-- three hours, sometimes even more. There were longer stretches of dead air than anything I had been used to. The subject matter was generally obtuse and a bit outre--there are a lot of inside jokes--but Scharpling and his co-hosts and guests all had good taste and it grew increasingly hilarious to me. After calling in, I signed up for the Patreon so I could get two stickers from them. 

I called in for the Top 50 Weirdos. Now there are many weirdos, but Scharpling was looking for something very distinct--it had to be his type of weirdo. So I called--and it was busy the first few times I called, until it rang, and the voice I recognized as AP Mike asked what I wanted to talk about on the air and then said "okay" and put me on hold, for an hour or so--until Tom picked up my call and proceeded to make me feel extremely vulnerable and embarrassed.

This is just my general tendency towards feeling that I have nothing of value to say, that I am completely unoriginal, that everything I say has been said before, that I am not very funny, that I do not have a good voice for radio, etc. I really wanted to be one of the good callers and I doubted myself, feeling that I lacked the poise and understanding necessary to amuse him. 

So I offered my suggestions--J.D. Salinger and Mark E. Smith--for the Top 50 Weirdos list. Neither made it. He had nothing to say about J.D. (an eccentric recluse, but not a weirdo, I presume) and he said Mark E. Smith was a maniac, not a weirdo. Somehow from the there situation devolved into my talking about "the first punk song" and I was droning on about it maybe being "Helter Skelter" or something by the Kinks or Sonics - and he said no, the first punk song was "Shaving Cream" by Benny Goodman, and he proceeded to play a snippet of it on the air. Not a bad call until he asked if I had anything else, and I said I wanted to wax his car a bit.

Now I have gotten blowback for this phrase from at least a couple people and all I can say is that I know it sounds weird but I once heard Paul Thomas Anderson use the phrase on a commentary track of the Boogie Nights DVD, in relation to himself (i.e. "I'm gonna wax my own car a bit," or "Sorry but I'm gonna wax my own car again"). Maybe it only works if you say "wax my own car," but I digress.

So I told him that I appreciated what he did, yada, yada, and I could tell he was getting impatient, wasting our time on the air with sycophantry, so I told him I was going to see "F'd Up" (no swearing on the air) that week at the Metro (date of call was April 24, 2019) and told him I saw the video of him singing "Precision Auto" with Damian Abraham of Fucked Up while Superchunk played it. I asked what song by Fucked Up would he cover, and he said, characteristically, "Oh, probably "Year of the Ox." Immediately after he hung up, he kind of mocked me for the "wax your car" thing, but whatever--this is still one of the highlights of my life and that is sort of sad, but maybe one day I will reach out further...

***

I pre-ordered this book a month or so ago, and after hearing one or two of the little promo interviews he did on WTF, I felt that I should use my status as a book critic-hobbyist to get an earlier start because I wanted to read it ASAP. Even before it arrived, I created the post below, because I was pretty sure that it was going to make the list, and this is not just me being a fanboy. Of course, Girl in a Band and Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and The Rise, The Fall and the Rise did not make it, and all three were excellent. I am not going to compare apples to oranges here (they are all memoirs by women in bands; this is a memoir by a man who might have played bass in similar bands, but whose deeper passion was for comedy).  Trouble Boys did make the list, and I probably would not have checked it out had Bob Mehr not been a guest on the show. Just from hearing enough on the air about it, and knowing Scharpling's standards, I had faith that it would make the list, and of course it does. 

This is a unique memoir for a couple reasons. For one, it is by a person that is far from a household name, but really should be, and I would not be surprised if more people started paying attention to him as a result of this publication. I was surprised to read that The Best Show had reached some 200,000 listeners, because it is so unusual and will test the patience of most people (like myself, an "acquired taste"), and I don't know if Patti Smith (whose memoir did make the Best Books list) is aware but I really hope she finds it and sends him a nice message, absolving him of the shame he felt after sharing an elevator with her and asking her an awkward question:

"I stood there in the wake of my blunder and pressed the button that returned me to the lobby. I stepped out like the human manifestation of the blood pouring from the elevator in The Shining and sat back down with Jon." (8)

This was the first of several times that I laughed at loud, and the second was also a Kubrick reference:

"Billy Joel is like a shitty version of the monolith in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of teaching monkeys to beat each other to death it coaches a sea of dunces to scream 'AND CAPTAIN JACK WILL GET YOU HIGH TONIGHT!' on command." (20)

This is a difficult book to review because I am wary of spoiling too much. There are many mysteries to Tom, and this book truly does pull back the curtain (though I am wary of referencing, even vaguely, a film he has no love for, but also sets up one of the "qualified triumphs" of this book) and I think it may bisect his life--before and after this book--because it is a great work of emotional honesty, empathy and inspiration. I do not think it will win the Pulitzer Prize but I do think it deserves an honorable mention, at the very least. There is ultimately a fair share of silliness in it, as would be expected, and while it certainly detracts nothing for me, and while there are plenty of explanatory paragraphs to contextualize everything, it is probably too nonsensical for the Pulitzer Board, though I could see David Remnick and Nancy Barnes supporting it (for hipster cred and NPR/WFMU enmity, respectively). Bob Dylan did win the Nobel Prize and strange things happen all the time and who knows what the future holds. 

***

It Never Ends charts Scharpling's life in such a way that it feels inappropriate to summarize. There are his memories, and lack of them. There are things that he had only told a handful of people, until now. This is a memoir, as opposed to an autobiography. Scharpling wanted to write his story; nobody commissioned him to do it. Or that is at least how it seems. This is a confessional, and in a way similar to Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech. It exposes his humble origins, his rise through adversity, and his ultimate domination of "a not-inconsiderable portion of the axis between alternative comedy and independent music." (255) It also calls out certain individuals for past indignities suffered. In fact, there a few pages about stand-up comedy that should speak to anyone that has sat in the front row of the Boston Comedy Club or The Comedy Store:

"This was also the show where a comedian named Nick Di Paolo decided to make fun of me for sitting in the audience with a heavy winter jacket. 'Look at that coat,' he said derisively. Stupid me, wearing a coat in February! I guess I should've opted for the cheap leather jacket he was sporting, as if he was on his way back from an audition for a Lords of Flatbush reboot." (130)

Shortly thereafter, Marc Maron makes a joke onstage, trying "to convey the gulf between one person he considered legitimate and another he marked as a no-talent fraud. To this day I still cannot believe it, but Marc literally said, 'The difference between these two guys is like the difference between working at MTV and working at a music store.' The audience laughed. I just shrunk into my seat like the loser I was. At that point, Marc had no idea that I was drawing air on the planet, so it wasn't aimed at me specifically, but somehow he summed up my existence with one offhand joke. If he had been hired and coached to write a joke that would reduce me to a pile of defeated goo, he would've fallen short of this bullseye." (131) At the time of this show, Scharpling worked at a sheet music store, and his friend with him at the show worked at MTV. As a person who has, at times, operated under the mental delusion that total strangers are speaking to his innermost paranoid thoughts, I could relate. Unfortunately no such incident has lit a similar fire under me, as it gave Scharpling a driving determination to become a full-time writer. Shortly thereafter, he quits his job in service of that. 

Ultimately, this is an inspirational and life-affirming book about believing in yourself and finding your passion. So often we are told do what we love for work, because then all work is play. This is a nice idea in theory, yet it is incredibly difficult to achieve. For every Tom Scharpling, there are ten million (or more) would-be comedians living quiet lives of desperation, seeking out in vain a proper profession that makes actual money and doesn't make them want to kill themselves. Or the untold millions moving to L.A. with dreams of "making it" in Hollywood. Breaking into showbiz, as a writer for television without connections, can be incredibly difficult if not impossible, and Scharpling explains exactly how it happened to him. The chapters on Monk and "the art of pitching" should be instructive for any readers harboring such ambitions.  

The personal highlight, for me, is Chapter 15, "My Life as a Player," which is twenty-two pages long and feels much longer. There are other chapters like this one--the three "Unqualified Triumphs" and "An Afternoon with Papa Roach"--and they are my favorite parts of the book because they blend confessional storytelling with the ridiculous observations that make The Best Show such a unique and meaningful platform. 

It is in this chapter that Scharpling explains how his mother instilled him with a deeply competitive spirit. Earlier on there is a section about a specific Sex in the City slot machine, which foreshadows this chapter in which he essentially comes out as a gambling addict, albeit a mild one. He has not lost tens of thousands of dollars to this addiction, but he has spent a great deal of time pursuing pyrrhic victories. I might say "wasted a great deal of time," but that could never be true when it results in gems like this chapter, which details his obsession with a pinball machine, and a certain Wizard of Oz "coin pusher" game:

"Well, let me tell you, dear reader. Coin pushers are an arcade 'game of chance' with two horizontal coin-covered levels (called 'brooms') that rhythmically heave forward and backward like the ocean itself. These tiers are covered in valueless coins, with a sprinkling of poker-type chips and game cards scattered throughout. The chips and the cards are the prizes, not the coins. The coins are nothing more than the means to move the game forward. The player manipulates a trigger that spits out more coins, and the goal is to get these coins to land in spots that force everything to tumble downward when the broom recedes. Which in turn hopefully causes the coins on the lower level to fall down into the chute, taking some chips and cards with them. There is definitely some skill required in the coin pusher racket. You need timing to strategically maneuver the coins to sweep the cards and chips down into the chute. After playing you take the cards and chips to the arcade counter, where they can be redeemed for prizes that cost a fraction of what you spent on the game. And there you have it, the most boring paragraph ever written! You broke the spine on the book, too late to return it!" (214)

If I ever happen to make it to the Jersey Shore boardwalk, I will be seeking out this machine. And this idea itself is a theme of the book: life is meaningless, and we are expected to earn our keep, and we can spend our leisure days trying to cultivate our souls and reach for a higher purpose, or we can make fun of ourselves for our most foolish endeavors and provide amusement for others. We can aim for profundity, or we can acknowledge that what we are doing is incredibly dumb, but we do it anyways, because it's good to have goals and make people laugh (both at us and with us). It would be impossible not to learn at least one new thing from this book. There is at least one lesson for everyone. 

The best literature both informs and entertains the reader. They should learn something about the world, or themselves, and they should enjoy the process of that discovery. It Never Ends is constructed out of truisms, and though Scharpling has had his share of unimaginable experiences (see 11/8/16), each of our lives are filled with such moments. Cycles repeat themselves. People can change, but they are unmistakably themselves. Failure is an inevitability in life, and feared too often. Hard work and persistence pays off (a cliche, but a running theme here). It's important to set goals. "Ideas are cheap" and action is necessary. There is much to learn in this world, and it is important that we are able to laugh as our mortality looms and the world burns around us. We can all do better and be better, and after reading this, one may learn how to begin that quest for a higher self. 

Grade: A 

The Best Books

Generally while writing a positive review, I consider whether it falls into the category of one of the Best Books I have read, which effectively have been memorialized since 2008. Best Books read prior to 2008 are not included. Certainly there were many excellent books over the first 25 years of life, but they may only show up on this list on a re-read (these are generally disclosed). It is certainly not a comprehensive list of "essential" literature, or "great books." They are necessarily idiosyncratic (mixed in with a few obvious inclusions); Ulysses, for example, is hardly a favorite of mine, and yet is included for its mythological status. Regardless, I highly recommend each of them, and invite you to peruse each review and comment. I'm doing this because I recently started updating my Goodreads and I wanted to put this list in a more prominent place than my Blogger Profile. This post will be updated as the list grows, and it is organized chronologically; therefore, please do not judge me for the early ones... - JK

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann - Flying Houses: Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov - Flying Houses: Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Flying Houses: This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Try - Dennis Cooper - Flying Houses: Try - Dennis Cooper

Desolation Angels - Jack Kerouac - Flying Houses: Desolation Angels - Jack Kerouac

Buddenbrooks  - Thomas Mann - Flying Houses: Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
                                                      Flying Houses: Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann (original review)

Dead Boys - Richard Lange - Flying Houses: Dead Boys - Richard Lange

Lexicon Devil - Brendan Mullen - Flying Houses: Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs - Brendan Mullen with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann - Flying Houses: The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Flying Houses: The Annotated Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr.)

Underworld - Don DeLillo - Flying Houses: Underworld - Don DeLillo

The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Flying Houses: The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann - Flying Houses: Death in Venice and Other Stories - Thomas Mann (Transl. David Luke)

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger - Flying Houses: Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

Ulysses - James Joyce - Flying Houses: Ulysses - James Joyce

American Pastoral - Philip Roth - Flying Houses: American Pastoral - Philip Roth

Ada, or Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov - Flying Houses: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov

The Nine - Jeffrey Toobin - Flying Houses: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court - Jeffrey Toobin

The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller - Flying Houses: The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley

The Brethren - Bob Woodward - Flying Houses: The Brethren - Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong

Watchmen - Alan Moore - Flying Houses: Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

The Oath - Jeffrey Toobin - Flying Houses: The Oath - Jeffrey Toobin

Wild Bill - Bruce Allen Murphy - Flying Houses: Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas - Bruce Allen Murphy

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen - Flying Houses: The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen (2001)

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami - Flying Houses: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami (2008)

Please Kill Me - Legs McNeil - Flying Houses: Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk - Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life - Carol Sklenicka - Flying Houses: Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life - Carol Sklenicka

Just Kids - Patti Smith - Flying Houses: Just Kids - Patti Smith (2010)

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt - Flying Houses: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (2013)

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris - Flying Houses: Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris (2007)

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut - Flying Houses: Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1968)

Grass Roots - Emily Dufton - Flying Houses: Grass Roots: the Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America - Emily Dufton (2017)

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut - Flying Houses: Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1963)

Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azzerad - Flying Houses: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground - Michael Azerrad (2001)

Trouble Boys - Bob Mehr - Flying Houses: Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements - Bob Mehr (2016)

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway - Flying Houses: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (1926)

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain - Flying Houses: Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain (2000)

Sabrina - Nick Drnaso - Flying Houses: Short Form: The Four Agreements, The Impossible Fortress, Sabrina, Garden State (redux), Beastie Boys Book, Rock Steady, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), Asymmetry, Go Tell It on the Mountain

The Night of the Gun - David Carr - Flying Houses: The Night of the Gun - David Carr (2008)

Let's Play Two - Ron Rapoport - Flying Houses: Let's Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks - Ron Rapoport (2019)

Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill - Flying Houses: Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill (2014)

Sontag - Benjamin Moser - Flying Houses: Sontag - Benjamin Moser (2019)

Trust Exercise - Susan Choi (2019)

Trust Exercise is yet another book I checked out from the CPL after hearing about it on the NY Times Book Review podcast. There was also a promotional spot for it that played at the beginning or middle of various podcasts, for about a month or so. That promotional blurb communicated something to the effect of, "a single incident told from multiple perspectives, examining the nature of truth, and how we frame it." That is about close enough, and when I casually mentioned to a friend that I was reading it, they said DO NOT READ ANYTHING ABOUT IT ONLINE, which piqued my interest a bit more, though I was around page 30 at the time and not feeling especially excited for the rest. Owing to this friend's warning, I would hate to spoil it for others, and so as we did with another great book compromised by an absurd conclusion, we will append this review with a spoiler discussion after the asterisks. 

As such it may be difficult to review this book, for even describing its structure is to spoil it, and ruin the experience of having this story peel back, layer by layer, slowly as intended. I will only *hint* that there is a Pale Fire element to it, a Bret Easton Ellis vibe to some of it, and further "formless" books without chapters (and there are not very many asterisks here, either--just an extra line in paragraph breaks, to mark stopping points). 

It is not a spoiler to introduce the cast of characters or its plot. Briefly, Sarah is the main character, and the story is set sometime in the late 1980's, I think, or perhaps earlier. Even with that sentence, I have unfortunately spoiled something, as this may come as a surprise to readers. That is, I thought it took place in the present-day, despite the absence of phones or texting, and it was only when one character was revealed to later appear in an Aerosmith video for "Love in an Elevator," that I realized this went further back. Perhaps it is the early 1980's, I'm not sure.

It is a High School Novel. Sarah attends CAPA, which is a school for the performing arts, I think somewhere in Atlanta, or nearby. There she meets David, their freshman year, and the story concerns the summer between that freshman and sophomore year, and then sophomore year (briefly) and then the "event," which is an exchange program with students from London coming into town for a theater production of Candide. David is her love interest, and they are both very engaged in theater, and there are a number of other smaller supporting characters, Joelle, amongst them, who was Sarah's best friend, but who has been abandoned after the summer. CAPA's theater program is very prestigious and is anchored by Mr. Kingsley, who is a guru known for untraditional techniques, such as trust exercises, and repetition tests. 

It should be said that, while I found the beginning of this novel rather tedious, it did do something special for me. That is, sometimes novels can appear as if they are speaking directly to us, describing experiences we had personally. This may be a cliched plot, or overused tropes in high school ephemera (i.e. the cliques of jocks, nerds, stoners, theater kids), but though this was not a boarding school, this book cut me deep. (It is perhaps also worth noting that tonight is my 20th high school reunion, via Zoom, and this book may have taken me back to the past in another way.) 

Mainly this is because we had a theater director not unlike Mr. Kingsley who also, on our first day orientation as freshmen, had us all lie down on our backs in a dark room, listening to the sounds of his footsteps as he instructed us to imagine an "ooze" of sorts, making its way from the crown of our head to the tips of our toes, and to feel a sense of calm and rejuvenation, seeing the world a different way, when we came out of it. We also had Eton Academy (I think, or perhaps a 2nd tier prestigious English boarding school avatar--I don't recall talk of Prince William) travel to perform Twelfth Night at our school (we had performed it the previous semester, if memory serves). There also was a radical stage performance, cancelled after dress rehearsal due to sexually dangerous overtones. All of these were part of my own experience. So too, did I imagine the sort of romance that Sarah and David share over the summer--they are young, they have their lives stretched before them, summer seems endless in the best possible way, they go about their lives and they find each other, riding bikes and doing teenage things but also experimenting and becoming "more experienced" than their peers, late into the night, until going home to their parents. This was part of my experience, but in fantasy alone. (Also they perform Guys and Dolls and our school performed that in 8th grade, which felt eerily familiar.)

There is a long party scene towards the end of the first "chapter" and this reminded me of Less Than Zero, or else my own earlier work, where party scenes were heavily workshopped (I was not alone in this). Some of this felt blindingly dumb. It felt like when I try to write a Shitty First Draft and I become ridiculously descriptive and tedious, or branch off in random directions without any sense of story, or not knowing what the story is, perhaps for how characters move through space and complete tasks:

"In the shower she turned the water by increments from very warm to very hot until she thought her skin would burn, and felt the microscopic Liam--where he had floundered his chest against her leaving streaks of hot sweat, where he had tongued his spittle through the grooves of her ear and down the cords of her neck, where had greased her with his fingers and stuffed her with what she'd hoped to forget he referred to as 'spunk,' another nursery word connoting sickly stench, unlaundered linen, hidden stains, and shame--scoured and rinsed away like so many hairy little organisms from a cleanser commercial, protestingly sucked down the drain. No part of her body did not crave the annihilation of hot water and soap. She found the body wash, but didn't want to use the crinkly pouf that went with it and was obviously often used by Elli and seemed too personal, so in the end she poured the body wash into the cup of her hand and tried to get it over as much of herself as she could. She washed her hair twice, clawing hard at her scalp. Then it seemed she might have been in the shower too long." (128-129)

This is like if I try to describe a character's workout routine, all the different machines and weights they use in the gym, in the interest of fleshing out detail, because every little element is a window into the character's psyche. Or not. As may be apparent, there is a lot of flowery prose that stops just short of turning purple, almost a certain grandiloquence in its run-on quality.

There are paragraphs like these, and then there are these exchanges, which take up a good 10 pages of the novel:

"'Your eyes are blue,' Sarah says, perhaps the least observant observation she could make. Almost hostile in its insipidity.
'My eyes are blue,' says David, with such perfect neutrality he cannot be charged with indifference. He might have said, 'One two three four,' or hummed notes. No: humming, by the nature of the song, would be far more expressive. 
'Your eyes are blue.' She's learned if she stares straight at him he goes foreign to her and she no longer sees him, yet Mr. Kingsley cannot accuse her of avoiding eye contact.
'My eyes are blue.' Perhaps David's doing the same, staring at her so that, like the sun, she blinds him. 
'Your eyes are blue.'
'My eyes are blue.'
'Your eyes are blue.'
It's been weeks of the same. A punishment everyone shares, for neither of them will give up an inch, not a flush nor a flinch nor above all a tear. It exalts Sarah almost, this death of her heart, this drought of her tears. Perhaps she is actually getting somewhere: at least, she's learned something from David. An utterly passive, compliant resistance. In the beginning, their rigid impasse fascinated their classmates. Now, it's a purgatory. Their classmates hate watching them even more than they hate sitting there. They never fulfill the objective. They never win praise. They are never allowed to advance. Unlike everyone else, they're exclusively paired with each other.
'My eyes are blue.'
'Your eyes are blue.'
'My eyes are blue.'
'Stop,' Mr. Kingsley barks, flicking a hand in disgust. They are both now persona non grata. In unconscious tandem they stand up, turn away from each other." (62-63)

As this was relatively early in the novel, I feared this kind of "word padding" would go on for the remainder. Thankfully this was not so, but it gave the impression of a debut novel that is rather limited in its scope, and delves into the psyches of its characters with no real deeper understanding of them. 

The novel does get better as it goes along. So that is the first bit of advice I have: I don't think this experience of feeling bored is mine alone, and if you feel like quitting, keep going. I am not sure if this is a particularly rewarding novel, but ultimately it concerns itself with memory and art, and dealing with the thorny inevitability of the so-called "thinly-veiled autobiographical debut novel." Susan Choi does thank her school, "emphatically the right-side-up to my fictional upside-down CAPA, and a place of dreams, not nightmares," in the acknowledgements, and one wonders how much she pulled from that experience. 

This does take the prototypical High School Novel in a different direction. The beginning could almost be considered YA Fiction, but by the end it is something differently entirely. I'm sorry for playing so coy but I am trying to protect you and your reading experience.

***

Now then, if you are one of the many people that asks for it to be spoiled, because you aren't going to read it anyways, this novel is broken up into three parts. Each of the parts is titled "Trust Exercise." In this sense, it reminded me of Asymmetry, the tri-partite structure, with seemingly unconnected narratives that gradually dawn on the reader as parts of the same whole. However, this is a bit more obvious in part two. Part three is nearly perfect. 

Part 2 concerns Karen, who is an incidental figure in Part 1, which is revealed to be Sarah's debut novel, who is showing up at Skylight Books (a real place!) to shock Sarah and call her out for writing a novel that brushes all the unpleasantness under the carpet and that reframes the unpleasantness they experienced in an offensive way, for Karen. Names and sexual orientations have been changed, and teenage melodrama has replaced highly questionable conduct on the parts of people in positions of power, i.e. Martin. In Part 1, Sarah gets into a car with Martin and Liam (who are the older director and lead actor traveling from England, along with the regular high-schoolers), who then pick up Karen from TCBY, and then go to the big party that serves as the climax. 

Karen is Joelle, and also not Karen, who is portrayed as more of an incidental acquaintance, rather than a best friend. To the point that they travel to England together to see Liam and Martin, their respective older boyfriends, and Karen realizes that Martin never really cared about her like he pretended to, and then there is this part which made me feel kind of confused until I realized what was happening (i.e. the "Hills Like White Elephants" effect):

"Her father was waiting in the airport for her with his belly buttoned into his work shirt and his big hairy hands gripping each other in front of his crotch. Elli sometimes called Karen's father 'a fucking hick' with great scorn but Karen's father had command of the resources. That first night he said nothing to her, just let her sleep in the small, sad room that was always reserved for her and Kevin's rare visits and that wasn't decorated with anything but their school portraits, every single year but one (Kevin first grade/Karen third grade--Elli had forgotten to order the packets), framed and lined up on the wall. Paneling on the walls and shag on the floor Karen's father had nailed up and tacked down himself. Military-style bedsheets Karen almost couldn't wedge herself into, they were tucked on the mattress so tight. Then their strong detergent smell gave her a headache and kept her awake. This kind of thing had never bothered her before. The next day, the trip to the doctor. Back home again Karen's father tanned her bare butt with his belt the way he'd done when she and Kevin were very little, before the divorce. All of this had been expected and hoped for. Karen's father let her get back in bed afterward, brought a folding chair in and sat on it, watching his knuckles until Karen stopped crying. Eventually he said, 'Who's the guy?' (215)

I almost don't want to spoil Part 3, but I will just say that, for me, it was a special experience, because it gradually dawned on me what was happening, and who these new characters were, and the actual nature of the "incident" (though that is still confusing for me).

Because yes we learn that Martin and Karen's relationship was more predatory than December-May, and so Karen now lives in the same town as David, where they grew up, and Mr. Kingsley still teaches at CAPA, and Martin has recently been "cancelled" from his school, leaving in disgrace, and there is room for doubt as to the nature of his behavior, and so David champions him, believes in him, and stages a play that Martin has written and will star in, and they need one female for the one female part, and it ends up being Karen, her first acting role in ages (she was often in charge of wardrobe backstage, with Sarah) and Sarah comes in to do the dress change as a special occasion. Sarah finds out she is pregnant, and there is an awkward moment where Karen mentions that she was, once, and....look Part 2 in general is not that great either. It's definitely a step up from Part 1, because it makes the reader completely rethink the narrative, and "the real narrative" feels more important or meaningful. My issue is that sometimes the writing slips into devices--i.e. Karen is mentally unstable--and I will say, the ending of Part 2 may or may not be a homage to The Art of Fielding, in that I don't believe it was the right way to go. I think it's going for shock value. And I think that may even be the point, that Part 2 is also "fiction," or at least stylized non-fiction, with a couple key changes, perhaps a fantasy based in regret for not doing what she should have done. However, it's probably just real, and so I can play the cynical critic and say that it garbles whatever "lesson" should be imparted. It is to its credit, however, that "mentally unstable Karen," mines the divide between victim-blaming and the murkier realities of decisions made in the moment when teenagers believe themselves to have agency, and only later realize they did not:

"But this was love, a crazy clamor to receive recognition. Did it matter that the person who unleashed Karen's floodgates was much older--even older than she knew? [40, btw] Did it matter that he was a liar? Did it matter that he had practice, and she had none? Did it matter that after he opened Karen's floodgates Karen's 'lake, river, reservoir, etc.' never refilled, to stick with the floodgates metaphor? Karen has thought about this, believe her. She knows she's not a special kind of victim, for having gotten shown the ropes by a much older man who, it turned out, did not care about her. She knows this is perfectly common; just look at all the stories/plays/movies about it. She wanted him. In her ignorance and inexperience she thought he was handsome, worldly, earnest, and reliable, and now, with her knowledge and experience, she can see that he was ugly, provincial, duplicitous, and untrustworthy; even cruel. The fact remains that she wanted him. Her wanting him means that she chose. She doesn't have a case here, she's fully aware; this would be why she's kept her mouth shut and kept her problem to herself. Martin's 'witch hunt' is made up of women who insist they have a case, but what's different about them, exactly? Karen's attitude toward them is violently mixed. She might defend them to David, but in her bowels she scorns them, these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else." (205-206) 

Perhaps this is because she feels that she has experienced something more shattering than any of the other accusers. The real tragedy of sexual abuse is the effect upon the victim, for the rest of their life. Many may go on to lead relatively conventional lives, and find some way to cabin the trauma they have experienced, to the point that it does not control their life. For Karen, who has not really been in a serious relationship or been in any sort of place to have another child, it's like her life ended, and what came after is making peace with the idea that she is irrevocably broken, to the point that she requires vengeance. In a certain sense, this is a fantasy chapter.

And that really is the magic trick that is this book. We know that Part 1 is Fiction, but is Part 2 Fiction, and what of Part 3? It seems obvious that Part 3 is the true reality--we know Mr. Kingsley is not gay, and that he has predated on students such that he will be cancelled, after Martin was cancelled, but Mr. Kingsley is still Mr. Kingsley in Part 2. Perhaps then, the author of Part 3 is also the author of Part 2, or perhaps Part 2 is a novel written by Karen (complete with shock ending). None of this is clear or meant to be, and Trust Exercise may be one of those rare books that people will start again after finishing. I did not have the patience to do this as I must move forward with this project, but because of this, it is the perfect selection for a book club. Moreover, it is instructional for writers, in terms of deciphering those things in life that we deem meaningful enough for fiction. It offers thoughts on protecting incidental figures in vaguely autobiographical books, but I would not trust any of it. Some people want their story white-washed, and some people want their story exactly as it occurred, as by an objective journalist. Writing about trauma is a good way to begin the healing process and I would imagine this book will mean a lot to any readers that have been subject to this particular type of abuse, or premature sexual experience. My friend said this was probably the best book they read all year. And while I do not believe it rises to the level of Sontag or belongs on the Best Book list, I would have to concur that it is the best work of fiction I have read this year--so far!  

Grade: A-