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