Tag / books

by Edward Champion

The Catcher in the Rye (Modern Library #64)

As a teenager, I loved Salinger’s classic. But I can’t get behind it as a middle-aged man. I don’t hate Salinger. What is it about Holden Caulfield that rubs me the wrong way?

(This is the thirty-seventh entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A Clockwork Orange.)

Like many semi-literate members of my generation, I first read The Catcher in the Rye at the age of fifteen, following the ethereal rites and cadences of older kids turned on by the same seductive anthem to nonconformity. At that angsty teenage time in my life, Holden Caulfield appealed to my rebellious and anti-authoritarian streak. This reaction, in and of itself, is not especially unusual. Salinger has continued to be assigned to high school English curricula in large part because you can inveigle kids into reading by making the titles forbidden. (Witness how Art Spiegelman’s Maus became a surprise bestseller last year after some boneheaded martinets banned the evocative Holocaust graphic novel from Tenneessee school libraries.)

I am now in my late forties and I still remain as iconoclastic and as boundary-pushing (though a tad less loutish) as I was when I was a mere stripling, although I’d like to think that my temperament has been made more palatable by my greater commitment to pragmatism. In that intervening time I avoided rereading Catcher until last year, dreading the disagreeable revisitation when this classic at long last emerged on this insanely ambitious project like some former crush at the twenty year high school reunion inviting you to a hotel room after spilling the tatters of her doomed marriage. You instinctively know that you’re better off chatting up some comely and perspicacious stranger at the hotel bar, someone without a loose thread dangling from a varsity sweater in mothballs. Because who you were when you knew nothing is quite different from the middle-aged person you are now who knows slightly more than nothing. There’s enough cognizance in the tank to suggest that a freeform hookup consummated long after your adolescent lust has shriveled up is a very bad idea. Particularly one in which you aid and abet nuptial dissolution by your own selfish spasms.

And while I will stand by most of Salinger’s Nine Stories and, in particular, the far more interesting thoughts of the precocious Glass family (I’m even willing to stump a bit for the problematic “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which is far more interesting in its uncompromising stance than anything gurgling from Holden Caulfield’s mouth), I can no longer hold up The Catcher in the Rye as great literature — not that it was ever really my goto choice. (James Baldwin, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller (yeah, I know) proved far more formative to me in my younger days than Salinger ever could.)

I find Holden Caulfield to be an insufferable and entitled monster, a budding sociopath who can only find joy in snow and his younger sister Phoebe when he’s not breaking windows and getting into dust-ups and treating everyone around him (particularly the poor girls who have the misfortune of dating him) like shit, which could explain in part why John Hinckley, Jr. took to Salinger like a box jellyfish flocking to corral shortly before trying to gun down the Evil Gipper. Upon rereading Catcher last month to take assiduous notes, I was astonished by my hate-read glee and how loudly I cheered during the moment when the pimp/elevator operator Maurice storms into Holden’s room at the Edmont Hotel, trying to collect an additional five dollars from this monied and mottled brat. Given Holden’s precious olfactory sense (even while smoking?) and the way he sneers at everyone around him, the detestable little bastard had it coming.

Holden is not even a proper punk because he cares about nobody other than himself. I felt sorry for the poor taxi drivers who had to contend with Holden’s facile riddle about where the ducks in Central Park go during the winter. His ties to his family only exist as pretexts to defend his braggadocio and his dubious victimhood, which Salinger feels the need to cram down our throats with Holden’s dead brother Allie. His ethos, if it can be called that, revolves around relentless narcissism and feigned sybaritism. What does it say that I found myself wanting to spend more time with Alex in A Clockwork Orange rather than this infernal sixteen-year-old misanthrope with his hideously obnoxious “I really did,” “phony,” “goddamn,” and “crumby” (to say nothing of Salinger’s annoying tendency to italicize the first syllable of a word, a stylistic practice that has fortunately not been picked up by his fiction-writing sycophants). At least Alex was committed to classical music and “the heighth of fashion” (the word “heighth” appears three times in Catcher and one can’t help but ponder how much the novel may have influenced Anthony Burgess) when he wasn’t busy raping and murdering ten-year-olds. What does Holden Caulfield even stand for? His Weltanschauung is little more than a collection of easy shots at obvious targets. My views on Holden Caulfield are quite similar to film critic Glenn Kenny railing against Ferris Bueller. But unlike Kenny, I actually like Ferris Bueller! In fact, I’d argue that the difference between John Hughes and Salinger is that Hughes loved his characters. Whereas Salinger didn’t really find that type of auctorial love until he wrote about the Glass family. (Joyce Maynard informs us that he protected the Glasses like jeweled treasure.) And if David Shields and Shane Salerno’s quirky and engaging Salinger bio is anything to go by, Holden Caulfield represented Salinger himself far more than any of his other characters. (Salinger insisted that he was the only person who could play Holden in any dramatic adaptation.) Given how broken Salinger was after battling in the Hürtgen Forest and witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust death camps, an argument could be made that Catcher represents more of an artistic exercise in self-loathing rather than a free-wheeling celebration of anarchic adolescence.

The way I see it, The Catcher in the Rye is more of a myth than a literary achievement. The vainglorious rush to throw a risibly wide net of influence from Catcher — simply on the basis of the novel selling 65 million copies over the years — is best epitomized by a surprisingly myopic assessment from Louis Menand on the occasion of Catcher‘s fiftieth anniversary. Menand cited Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as “Catcher in the Rye rewrites.” Never mind that — even accounting for his Salingerphilia — Eggers’s book was a memoir mining from lived experience rather than a novel. (Did Eggers deliberately live out his twenties like Caulfield? For all of his ignoble public image management, I greatly doubt it.) In 2010, writing on the occasion of Salinger’s passing, McInerney confessed that he had been “baffled” by the comparisons, pointing out that he not read Salinger for years while working on his debut novel.

Now some of you, knowing how outspoken and take-no-prisoners I can be with my little essays, probably came here for a salacious hit piece. Maybe you’re gleefully steeping your fingers awaiting a knee-jerk drive-by on the long dead Jerome David (or Jerry, as his closest pals called him). But I don’t want to write that. I am just one hardcore reader trying to be honest here. And nothing that I say will diminish Catcher‘s immense popularity. Its stature and its legacy are safely preserved. Additionally, the highfalutin thuggery of clickbait doesn’t interest me. It’s far too easy to write. As it so happens, I actually like Saligner’s writing. In my reread of Salinger’s oeuvre, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Franny” (which anticipates the dangers of toxic masculinity by decades), and “Seymour: An Introduction” spoke to me far more in my middle-aged years than ever before.

No, I’m more interested in interrogating why I despised the novel so much as a grownass man. Where did things go wrong between Holden and me over the last thirty years? I certainly don’t feel this way about such troublemakers as Huck Finn, Ignatius J. Reilly, Bart Simpson, Calvin and Hobbes, Peeves, A Fan’s Notes‘s Fred, Sam Lipsyte’s Lewis Miner, or Denis Johnson’s Fuckhead — many of whom were arguably more plagued than Holden Caulfield. I cannot gainsay that Catcher remains very well-loved (my girlfriend’s teenage daughter speaks highly of it) and that there was a time (sort of) when it spoke to me. If I were a hopelessly moronic and hubris-riddled hack like Dan Kois — who recently learned his lesson the hard way — then I’d probably cleave cheaply to this enmity and arrogantly take my lumps without learning a goddamned thing. The truth of the matter is that I wish I could love Holden Caulfield more. Because much of Salinger’s other work is amazing.

I think it is Salinger the person who I cannot stand. His grooming and victimization of Joyce Maynard, Jean Miller, and many others. His savvy manipulation of New Yorker editor William Shawn (just as private and as isolated as Saligner). The strange contradiction of his reclusiveness and his exhibitionism. Saligner outed people and details when he was alive and wrote letters and unpublished essays to control the narrative (particularly in relation to Tom Wolfe’s notorious hit piece on The New Yorker) rather than allowing the world to pass him by. The gruff meanness to “intruders” and the lack of grace or humility about his success. Small wonder that the likes of Alfred Kazin and John Updike started lobbing rocks at him when it came to the Glass family. Salinger’s biographers will tell you that this was a case of envious competitors using their gatekeeping advantages to keep Jerry in place. But I think it had more to do with the more toxic qualities behind the talent that they innately detected but could not quite pinpoint until Catcher had become a classic. (Even an endearing oddball like Ron Rosenbaum, no stranger to Salinger enthusiasm, confessed that he suffered from “Saligner fatigue,” even as he wrongly impugned anyone (including Shields and Salerno) from reading Catcher as a symbiosis between author and fictional creation.) Kazin rightly points out that Holden Caulfield is “cute” only because we expect boys of his age to be “consciously appealing and consciously clever.” Updike notes how Salinger’s post-Catcher work has the author “never rest[ing] from circling his creations, patting them fondly. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

So if you’re in the “Salinger’s Glass family stories are better” camp like me, you have no problem with an author who was willing to steer the reader a little harder to get to a more Zen-like artistic place. If you’re in the “Catcher is better” camp, I would contend that you are more willing to be captivated by Holden’s “cute” and “loving” charms without considering the problematic scaffolding that props all this up.

But for the Catcher stans, consider how much more pointed and playful Buddy Glass’s nonconformist missives are in “Seymour — An Introduction”:

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped…

And so on. This beautiful rant from Salinger — which rhythmically evokes Goethe’s idea of “the whole, the good, and the beautiful” sans one syllable — is as punk rock as it gets and has greater crags to cling to than any of Holden Caulfield’s cheap and tedious nihilism:

Grand. There’s a word I hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

Or:

God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.

Or:

It isn’t important, I know, but I hate it when somebody has cheap suitcases. It sounds terrible to say it, but I can even get to hate somebody, just looking at them, if they have cheap suitcases with them.

At times, Holden’s complaints about the world read like a very rich and incredibly elitist standup comic who isn’t very funny — someone as detestable as Bill Maher.

We know that Salinger worked very hard on Catcher, impressively writing the bones of Catcher in the World War II battlefields, sending these early stories off to New York (some getting published), and, years later, holing up in the New Yorker office and other hermetic Manhattan foxholes for a year to polish and perfect Catcher. Catcher can certainly be commended as the work of an artist baring himself completely in ways that — much like Kerouac — were unprecedented at the time, only for Salinger to bury all these truths behind ambiguities that feel a little too on-the-nose, such as Mr. Antolini patting Holden on the head (awkward drunken tenderness or molestation?). But it’s also a study in a tormented man running away from his demons (i.e., Holden refusing to grow up) rather than confronting them head-on such as he did so well with the trauma of World War II veterans in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

And that, to my mind, is the great tragedy of Salinger. Here was this master of the short story and the novella who wanted to grow beyond what he was best known for and become an even greater artist. But he was curtailed from publishing anything beyond “Hapford” by a reproachful and imperious literati who ultimately wanted more of the same. He beguiled readers with a beatific looking glass that, upon closer study, reveals more than a few fissures. And when he tried to reinvent himself, it was much too late.

Next Up: John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle!

by Edward Champion

The House of Mirth (Modern Library #69)

More than a century after its publication, Edith Wharton’s masterpiece remains a brutally honest and emotionally devastating novel that tells the truth about class trappings and peer pressure. That we haven’t learned a goddamned thing from it is one of many reasons to read it!

(This is the thirty-second entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Alexandria Quartet.)

“But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate.” — The House of Mirth

Our universe has become more hopelessly transactional. Vile narcissists with limitless greed and an absence of smarts and empathy have taken over the landscape with their blunt bullhorns. At every socioeconomic level, you will find a plurality of mercenaries who will push any bright and promising head beneath the waterline with ruthless cruelty. Perhaps I’m finally understanding, at an embarrassingly late age, just how commonplace such self-serving treachery is in our world. But what’s the alternative? Cynicism? At times, I have a sense of humor that is darker than the nightscape above the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, but no thanks. I’ve always been a cautious optimist with a healthy handle on reality, but I still detest this state of affairs. I will still speak out vociferously against it and fight the business-as-usual cowards who uphold this great sham known as the status quo at any personal cost. I stump for the outliers and the misfits. The people who have authentic and vital voices. I don’t care who they are or where they come from. I will stick up for the gas station attendants and the baristas. I will listen to their full stories rather than judge them from a fleeting glance or a superficial and supercilious position. I despise bullies and opportunists. I believe in affording everyone basic dignity. I believe that everyone has it within them to grow and to learn and that inquisitive efforts should never be mocked, especially when genuine curiosity is now in such short supply. Reprobates who use their positions of power to denigrate the marginalized and the underprivileged are scumbags who need to be fought and, if necessary, destroyed.

So you can probably imagine how much The House of Mirth means to me. It is one of the best books on the Modern Library list and it should have been ranked much higher. This is my favorite Edith Wharton novel, although The Custom of the Country is a close second. Just this year, I have purchased four copies of this book for friends, urging them to read it with every ounce of exuberance I can summon. And you need to read it too, if you haven’t already. This book is vivacious and brilliant and funny and utterly heartbreaking. I rooted for Lily Bart. I wept for her. Even when I knew her fate. She did not deserve her downfall. She is one of the great tragic heroines in all of literature, right up there with Emma Bovary, Dido, Anna Karenina, Ophelia, Bertha Mason, and Francesca da Rimini. Much like Muriel Spark’s masterpiece The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, you can read this novel multiple times and always discover a new angle. That the rules of the game haven’t changed all that much in the one hundred and seventeen years since this classic was published is a great testament to Wharton’s sagacious and prescient genius. And if you finish this novel and you’re not in the “ride or die” wagon for Edith Wharton, then I’m sorry, but you simply have no literary taste.

Should Lily Bart be blamed for her fate? Conservatives (and privileged neoliberals) will likely condemn her for her apparent financial irresponsibility, but the peer pressure from her rich friends to gamble away vast sums she doesn’t have at bridge will be deeply felt by anyone who can recall the youthful horrors of trying to fit in. (In fact, I’d say the only contemporary writer today who could be an Edith Wharton in the making is the ferociously talented Adelle Waldman, whose excellent novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, mined similar territory. MacArthur people, are you listening? Award her a fellowship already! We really need to get her writing more books so we can find out!) And Wharton is exquisite in communicating to us precisely why Lily is so susceptible to social pressure from these higher-ups and hangers-on:

Her naturally good temper had been disciplined by years of enforced compliance, since she had almost always had to attain her ends by the circuitous path of other people’s; and, being naturally inclined to face unpleasant facts as soon as they presented themselves, she was not sorry to hear an impartial statement of what her folly was likely to cost, the more so as her own thoughts were still insisting on the other side of the case.

More than a century later, with the Dobbs Supreme Court decision and the Democrats’ failure to revive the Equal Rights Amendment serving as disheartening signs that a Handmaid’s Tale future could be in store for us, women are still pressured to be “good” and compliant. And while women have a lot more freedom today than they did in 1905, patriarchal conformity upheld through peer pressure has ensured that a lot of women silently endure such internal and external conflict.

Lily is lucky to have true friends like Carry Fisher (initially described as a “professional sponge” and “a mental habit corresponding to the physical titillations of the cigarette or the cock-tail,” but she turns out to be a hell of a lot more than this) and Gerty Farish (an indefatigable charity worker who doesn’t easily buy into any of the false charges eventually leveled towards Lily) when she eventually slips, but the affluent allure of the Trenors and their circle amaurotizes (and thus amortizes and possibly amouritizes?) her to the deadly puppetry of the Trenors and, most diabolically, the repellent and calculating bedhopper Bertha Dorset, whose doctors, we are informed, forbid “her from exposing herself to the crude air of the morning.” (Such a beautifully compact way of foreshadowing Bertha’s vampiric nature!)

Wharton was a master of gentle ambiguity nestling just beneath the surface of narrative clarity. The first time you read Mirth, you don’t buy Simon Rosedale’s mercy near the end. With his “small stock-taking eyes,” he’s little more than a bean-counting arriviste and his despicable tabulating also applies to people. (When Rosedale says, “I can’t help making love to you” to Lily near the end of the book, he’s basically every vulpine loser hitting a singles bar at 3 AM, scoping out the remaining women who haven’t gone home with anyone.) But the second time you read Mirth, you’re not so sure. Rosedale says, “The wonder to me is that you’ve waited so long to get square with that woman.” Can Rosedale be forgiven for simply being socially clueless? Is he a product of the system? And does his gesture actually mean anything? I’ll leave it to the capable writers of Jezebel and The Cut to argue the culpability of mediocre men.

Mirth‘s vast cast of characters tend to glom onto the split-second flourish of a socialite’s physical gesture to fuel gossip and umbrage. Consider the way that Mrs. Peniston is described as “the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast.” But Wharton’s meticulous study of mercenary manipulators is far from vapid. She hoped to show that “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers…can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

Perhaps one of the reasons why The House of Mirth is so authentically devastating is because Wharton was undergoing a great deal of stress as she wrote it. Her husband Teddy had just experienced a nervous breakdown and his erratic behavior was worse than ever. Her fiction was in demand and was being published everywhere, but her social calendar was spiraling out of control. Scribner’s editor Edward Burligname needed a serialized novel at the last minute after another writer had dropped out. And amazingly, Wharton produced this masterpiece in ten monthly installments, with Mirth appearing in publication before Wharton had even finished it (although the tale had gestated in her notebooks for at least five years under the working title “A Moment’s Ornament,” taken from a Wordsworth poem).

Scribner’s knew that it had a big hit on its hands and promptly placed sensationalist ads on the cover — packaging that Wharton objected to — when The House of Mirth hit bookstores in October 1905. The publicity forces also talked up Wharton’s social movements and, while Wharton was happy to have her novel read, she feared that her work would be seen as nothing more than a juicy gossipfest.

She need not have worried. The book was fiercely debated in various letters sections, with many wondering if Wharton was accurately portraying the leisure class or mercilessly skewering them for her own gain. And the robust discussion lent greater credibility to Mirth‘s considerable literary merits.

In her excellent Wharton biography, Hermione Lee has suggested that The House of Mirth can be defined by the presence of books within the book: largely decorative and untouched by few outside Lawrence Selden, the young lawyer who toys with Lily Bart’s need to land a husband. But Mirth can also be epitomized by the actors recruited to entertain the wealthy at Bellomont:

Indeed, so skillfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.

If all the world’s a stage, why then are we still susceptible to objectifying people? It’s actually quite astonishing how effortless it is to transpose the cruelty of class trappings to the casual character assassination that now passes for “truth” on social media. (As Wai-Chee Dimock has observed, Lily Bart spends most of the novel marketing herself, attempting to appeal to the highest bidder. This is not unlike the behavior of a comely Instagram influencer or, if we want to take Gus Trenor’s sinister insinuation on its face, an OnlyFans model willing to say or do almost anything to extract money.)

Many disgusting creatures in high places fancy themselves Lily Barts — even as they stab with the fierce sociopathic duplicity of Bertha Dorset. (On literary Twitter, there can be no better contemporary parallel to Bertha than the monstrous bully and largely mediocre writer Jennifer Weiner, whose relentless attacks on other writers are quietly circulated among those in the know and whose odious demands for “literary respect” were smartly captured by The New Yorker‘s Rebecca Mead in 2014.) They jockey for precarious perches to cleave to their careers while piling onto the week’s “main character” with gossip and lies. An otherwise innocent figure’s glaring mistake is used to perpetuate further prevarications and even those in the know, like Rosedale, will not lift a finger to salvage their own shaky ascent into a perceived predominance. Indeed, as someone who has been the target of multiple smear campaigns, I can report that a literary man of modest renown — a figure who once maintained a blog inspired by Wharton — treated me, when I was homeless, with the same false solicitude that Rosedale tenders to Lily Bart in the final crushing pages of The House of Mirth. He strung me along with phony plaudits about my writing talent and he offered me the sham promise of a prominent magazine gig that I would have killed to land at the time. He was not unlike Rosedale. Indeed, like all of Wharton’s socialites, he inevitably deemed me invisible — likely with a cognizant irony. It is doubtful that I will ever forgive this motherfucker for tinkering with my dignity and my then shaky self-respect to delude himself into thinking that he was a “kind and decent man.”

So Lily Bart’s awful and needless plunge into the abyss resonates deeply and painfully with me. Today I am tremendously grateful to be gainfully employed, doing what I love, tackling new creative mediums, and to be very much alive. That there are so many “influencers” who hold this book up without comprehending or practicing its emotionally instructive lessons about the need for empathy says everything about the vicious myopia of the contemporary literary world, which now thrives on stubbing out noisemakers and ruining outliers. They cancel anyone with an even remotely disagreeable opinion and they murder anyone who stands in their way of their self-serving and meretriciously earned “success.” Cutthroat capitalism and opprobrious opportunism at its finest! Edith Wharton had her finger on the pulse of 1905 life. And sadly 2022 life.

Next Up: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street!

by Edward Champion

The Alexandria Quartet (Modern Library #70)

Lawrence Durrell’s four-volume masterpiece is a literary marvel that reminds us why it’s so important to follow the flagstones of the ambitious misfits and find inspiration to seek your own path.

(This is the thirty-first entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A High Wind in Jamaica.)

In a previous life, when talent and bonhomie mattered more than sad resentful ciphers dedicating their wasteful energies to demolishing rivals on social media, I had the great privilege to interview authors. I once made a northeastern trek by train to talk with a literary titan — a formidable essayist, a first-rate fiction writer, and a mischievous wit with a bright high voice who is still blessedly alive and who remains quite undersung today. After I pressed the square STOP button on my bulky black recording unit, we got to gabbing for two more hours off-tape — an act of generosity that stunned my companion and me. The author surprised us by confessing that she had played the then-in-vogue Angry Birds and we discussed the literary classics that young people read (or, more frequently, neglect). She was very likely picking our unweaned and less wiser brains in that pre-Trumpian epoch when, even then, declining erudition was a growing pestilence, as it wasn’t all too often that she had the company of young strangers at her long refectory table, which was punctuated by a plate of store-bought cookies that no one touched. The first name that this author mentioned was Lawrence Durrell.

“Does anyone even read him anymore?” she asked.

Neither my companion nor I had read a single word of this almighty author at the time. As I was to learn only in the last few months, I missed the teenage ritual of diving into Durrell by about five to ten years. Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. These were the four volumes read by an impressionable generation just before me. My older literary friends describe soaking up Durrell’s words with wide and voracious eyes around seventeen — just before they joined the less exclusive liturgical practice of tossing their tasseled caps into the heavens preceding the uncertain foray into higher education and the newfound duty of negotiating injurious capitalism (clearly not redeemable by taxation these days, contrary to sentiments expressed by the novelist Pursewarden in Mountolive).

Now that I have finally read the mighty quartet — with its gorgeous sentences, its exotic vernacular (which caused even a rhapsodic word nut and undefeated Wordle regular like me to make repeat trips to the dictionary), its bold meditations on “modern love” (a term of art regrettably coarsened by the New York Times‘s often vapid essays and an even more vacuous television offshoot) and intertextuality (most notably, Balthazar‘s Interlineal), its vast tapestry of unreliable narrators and colorful characters (many marked by disease and disfigurement and, most tellingly, the absence of eyes; the number of one-eyed characters throughout the Quartet greatly overshadows the sum of spastic dancers you’ll find in any Brooklyn nightclub on a Saturday night), and the hypnotic and baleful city at the center of all these proceedings — I am frankly kicking myself for not getting around to it much earlier. My reading experience was a true coup de foudre.

This tetralogy is clearly one of the 20th century’s greatest literary achievements. I suspect, as I crest closer to the age of fifty and reckon with surprising strains of unsummoned maturity that have often bemused me, that this was the last possible moment of my life in which I could have supped upon Durrell with an eager appetite. There are only a handful of living writers whose command of the written word beckons you to slow down and imbibe the text ever so delicately — much like a pied crested cuckoo leisurely supping on drops of rain water. Of Alexandria itself, we learn of warm winds that strike against the cheek as “soft as the brush of a fox” from an enchanting near-phantom city “whose pearly skies are broken in spring only by the white stalks of the minarets and the flocks of pigeons turning in clouds of silver and amethyst; whose veridian and black marble habour-water reflects the snouts of foreign men-of-war turning through their slow arcs.” Even if one is blind and cannot see the Nile’s adjacent estuary, there is eldritch life within the “gloomy subterranean library with its pools of shadow and light,” where “fingers [move] like ants across the perforated surfaces of books engraved for them by a machine.”

Shallow word-wasters have abseiled down the other side of once robust parapets with evermore ubiquity these days, emboldened by the narcotic allure of likes and follows rather than the purer and more rewarding journey set by the instinctive tempo of their distinct voices. But Durrell (whose name rhymes with “squirrel” and not the inexact “laurel,” as I have unknowingly mispronounced for decades) is very much on the level. Given the astronomical prices of his non-Alexandria volumes online — despite a well-received four season television series on the Durrell family in recent years and an enthusiastic nonprofit society sustaining a cheery and active Twitter presence — it appears likely that Lawrence Durrell is fated to be forgotten. All writers, of course, have their time and eventually fade into the sunset. Very few of today’s readers speak of Naipaul, Ford Maddox Ford, John Dos Passos, or even Anthony Burgess anymore. For some of these plodding stampeders now collecting well-earned dust in used bookstores from here to Gehenna, there is sturdy raison that only a handful of graying hangers-on will dispute. (Besides, what kind of giddy and obsessive bastard reckons with ancient canons when one is regularly unsettled by the cannonades of apocalyptic headlines and the high probability of a third world war? An increasingly shrinking number these days, easily a hundredfold more minuscule than the combined tally of all who still collect vinyl and Beanie Babies.) But in Durrell’s case, this feels like a notable criminal oversight. Particularly since crossing the four book Rubicon was, not so long ago, a vital rite for any stripling with unquenchable curiosity.

It all starts with an unnamed Irishman (whose name is revealed to be Darley a few books later) in exile on an island with a child, recalling his passionate affair with a woman named Justine.  Justine is married to a distinguished Copt diplomat named Nessim.  Before that, Justine had been married to a tyrannical French national and that life has been captured in a book called Moeurs written by some guy named Jacob Arnauti. Intertexuality and the struggle to make sense of ineffable feelings through words (or even the words from another committed and capricious chronicler) is very much a Durrell motif.  Darley has abandoned a devoted and far too patient dancer named Melissa for the sake of this seemingly distinguished affair.  There is also a mysterious painter named Clea, who smartly tells Darley, “Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people.”

But what if the “love” that Darley feels has not been reciprocated in the way that he has believed? Durrell’s second volume, Balthazar, calls into question all the events of the first volume, with Balthazar himself (a mystical Jewish doctor who is involved with the Cabal) arriving by sea with an annotated version of Darley’s manuscript.  The third volume, Mountolive, not only expands these angsty escapades to the vaster canvas of surprising espionage developments that often crackle with the griping momentum of a John le Carre novel, but reveals the tableau from the third-person vantage point of the titular diplomat, where we not only learn that Nessim has an unhinged brother named Narouz, but that Mountolive himself is mad about their mother, Leila. Finally, in Clea, we return back to the narrator Darley, five years after the Rashomon-like events of the first three volumes. The Second World War now unsettles the city. And the characters we have been rapturously following are still trying to make sense of the events that have happened, but what living now encompasses. Which is not all that removed from today’s practice of doomscrolling, dodging new variants, and submitting one’s deltoid for yet anther booster shot. As Darley himself puts it:

I am hunting for metaphors which mighty convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself.  Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world’s sorrows.

Amazingly, Durrell wrote Clea in four weeks.

It may seem from my description that Durrell was merely a relentless brooder, but he was often quite witty with his pen. Biographies from Ian MacNiven and Gordon Bowker both depict Durrell’s obsession with the great P.G. Wodehouse.  And Durrell fueled these comic energies in humorous stories about a diplomat named Antrobus.  While the tableau of Scobie cross-dressing as Dolly Varten in Balthazar possesses the dowdy feel of an entry in the Carry On film franchise, Sir Louis’s eccentricities in Mountolive could almost be interposed to an Evelyn Waugh novel:

Within the last year, and on the eve of retirement, the Ambassador had begun to drink rather too heavily — though never quite reaching the borders of incoherence. In the same period a new and somewhat surprising tic had developed. Enlivened by one cocktail too many he had formed the habit of uttering a low continuous humming noise at receptions which had earned him a rather questionable notoriety. But he himself had been unaware of this habit, and indeed at first indignantly denied its existence. He found to his surprise that he was in the habit of humming, over and over again, in basso profundo, a passage from the Dead March in Saul. It summed up, appropriately enough, a lifetime of acute boredom spent in the company of friendless officials and empty dignitaries.

One reason why Durrell’s voice is so distinct on the page — and why it has been so inimitable since (only Malcolm Bradbury and Roger Angell have attempted Durrell parodies, with unsustainable and ineffectual results) — is because he needed a fellow outlier (specifically, Henry Miller) and a commitment to impropriety and originality to get there. Indeed, as Durrell himself observed in a January 12, 1972 appearance at UCLA, his febrile dilettantism was his lodestar:

But it seems that every writer need a kind of placental relationship with another writer to approve of him and to help him. To reassure him. And it seems very curious how they come up in doubles in such very dissimilar people. I’m very frequently asked, “How could a writer like you admire Miller? And what on earth could he see in you?” The second question is difficult, I know. But a friendship is not qualified by the actual material one produces. And in our case, what we had in common was an unprofessional attitude to literature. In other words, neither of us were really interested in literature. Nor was Anais Nin. We were interested in other things. That is to say that we were not professional litterateurs. And we didn’t think professionally about writing. Writing, for us, was a kind of windscreen wiper which might help us to look ourselves in the eye a little more clearly. To liberate ourselves or to realize ourselves. In other words, our occupation was not literary, but philosophic really.

The journalist Peter Pomerantsev has suggested that Durrell only appeals to “the ‘cross-patriates,’ the hyphenated.” And he may very well be right. As a writer, audio producer, journalist, theatre producer, radio dramatist, sound designer, performer, voiceover man, TikTok microinfluencer (this still puzzles me),  and (just weeks ago) soundtrack composer, it’s becoming increasingly harder these days to find people who aren’t so singular and unadventurous in their passions and interests. As Cormac McCarthy has said, “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t. Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.” Those of us who find joie de vivre in living as widely and as fulsomely as we can are increasingly becoming exiles like Darley.

It’s also difficult to fathom the lion’s share of today’s emerging writers being driven by the same impetus. One’s individuality is now drowned out by the unceasing firth of social media’s brackish tide, its morass of groupthink. The urge to please, to install one’s self as some influential pinnacle who plays it safe, is diametrically opposed to the noble pairing of future artists who can provide mutual succor, possibly shaking the very foundations of an increasingly stodgy medium that rewards uninventive bougie hokum and shameless mimesis. Inimical idiocrats with such stultifying surnames as Athitakis, Ulin, Kellogg, Kachka, Kreizman, Miller, Grady, Romano, Freeman, and Schaub regularly stump for what Durrell identified (through his novelist character Pursehaven) as “the ancient tinned salad of the subsidised novel.” All of them, unlike Durrell, will scarcely be recalled by anyone fifteen years after they pass. They will live out their dull and unadventurous lives and take out their parasitic resentiment on true originals with pablumatic “hot takes” that are largely mercantile and self-serving. Having abdicated their sense of humor sometime in their thirties or forties, and expressing little more than a perfunctory interest in other things, these egregious weasels continue to wage war on any dazzling lights casting a lambent heat upon their cold and cozy conformity. And contemporary literature is lesser for it.

So it becomes increasingly urgent these days to not tuck true talents like Durrell into the granules of forgotten history. Literary achievement is consummated by puckish punks who stand against the boring norms, by young writers who pay close attention to the dazzling output of all the eclectic outliers who presaged them and who summon the instinctive effrontery to pick a crucial and principled fight in the mystifying battles against misfits.

Next Up: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth!

by Edward Champion

The Great War and Modern Memory (Modern Library Nonfiction #75)

Paul Fussell’s famous book on cultural developments that emerged from the First World War remains eerily applicable to today — particularly as we consider how present international affairs will disrupt human expression.

(This is the twenty-fifth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The City in History.)

The men went to war. Their psyches were scarred and sotted by the sights and sounds of death and dreary dissolution — all doled out at a hellish and unprecedented new normal. Machine guns, mustard gas, the ear-piercing shrieks of shrapnel and shells, rats gnawing on nearby corpses. The lush fields of France anfracted into a dark flat wasteland.

The war was only supposed to last a few months, but it went on for more than four years. Twenty-two million lost their lives in the First World War. Many millions more — the ones who were lucky to live — were shattered by the experience. Their bodies were bent and their souls were broken. As Richard Aldington observed in his bleak comic novel, Death of a Hero, the trauma that the soldiers carried home became all too common, unworthy of commiseration and often received with scorn.

But, despite the scars and notwithstanding the cruel homeland rebuke, these men somehow sustained a culture during hard-won moments when they weren’t fighting in the trenches and when they weren’t watching their close friends mowed down by the newer and deadlier weapons. Their noble commitment, their fervent faith in some lambent hope plucked from the maws of a mottled landscape, forever changed the way we saw, heard, and expressed ourselves. As Paul Fussell nimbly argues in The Great War and Modern Memory, we are indebted to these soldiers in ways that most people today cannot appreciate.

* * *

While The Great War and Modern Memory doesn’t contain the intoxicating sweep and ambition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough in identifying the underlying rituals that have come to define the manner in which we reckon with disruptive and often inexplicable quagmires, it is nevertheless a remarkable volume, one quite essential in charting the trajectory of how humans expressed themselves through poetry, letters, fiction, and even postwar mediums. I first read this book in my early twenties — many years before I would stumble onto sound design as a method of communicating feelings often untranslatable through words — and, even then, I was startled by how Fussell identified early phonographic recordings as a liminal theatre sprinkled with sounds of attack. This was evidenced not only in the hit novelty records scooped up by supercilious aristocrats comfortably ensconced in cushy sacrosanct parlors without a care in the world, but further immortalized in such unlikely texts as Anthony Burgess’s underrated dystopian novel, The Wanting Seed.

There are so many bones baked into the silt of the Somme that human remains were still being exhumed in Fussell’s day. Forensic experts have continued to make efforts to identify skulls in more recent years. But beyond all these history-shattering casualties, there were also significantly influential linguistic precedents derived from these disfiguring events. The “us vs. them” vernacular that was to become a regular feature of all subsequent wars began with the Great War’s “we” and the xenophobia that was swiftly ascribed to the other side through epithets like “Boche,” as well as the cartoonish pastiches that no soldier in history has been immune from assigning to a mortal enemy. Germans were depicted as giants, memorialized in Robert Graves’s “David and Goliath.” Blunden’s Undertones of War described German barbed wire with “more barbs in it and foreign-looking.” Whether John Crowe Ransom explicitly derived his notion of the other from Blunden, as Fussell imputes, is anyone’s guess. But Fussell’s confidence and deep dive into phrases and terms of art is strangely persuasive. He has, unlike any other scholar since, made a vigorous and spellbinding examination of how language pertaining to division and the unshakeable sense that the war would go on forever influenced the Modernists (and even the postmodernists) as they rolled out their comparatively more peaceful masterpieces to the literary front lines in the 1920s.

Contrary to the cliches, life on the front wasn’t just about poetry and gardening. There was the unappetizing perdition of stale biscuits and Maconochie stew, a hideous tinned concoction (which at least one YouTuber has attempted to recreate!) involving bully beef that reminded the men of meals tendered to dogs. There were startlingly brave figures like Siegfried Sassoon, who not only took a bold stance against the war, but evoked the sordid memories of the trenches and a forgotten England in his Sherston trilogy (which dropped just as autofiction practiced by the likes of Dorothy Richardson and Proust was being quietly celebrated and, in turn, inspired Pat Barker to write her terrific Regeneration trilogy). The stertorous gunfire on the front was so loud that, as Fussell helpfully notes, even Pynchon was compelled to memorialize the idea of shells being heard hundreds of miles away in Gravity’s Rainbow. There was even a series of Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battlefields that made the rounds after the Treaty of Versailles. Fussell repeatedly points to maps as shaky palimpsests staggered with thick wavy lines and often wry notations, but the lack of tangible geography had to spill over somewhere. Poetry was fated to account for the ambiguity.

Fussell makes a strong case for a tectonic shift in expression being practiced even before the war began. Indeed, the war gave E.M. Forster’s famous “Only connect” sentiment some completely unanticipated momentum as the landed gentry attempted to reckon with the period between the two world wars. If the Great War had not happened, what would be the trajectory of literature? Fussell doesn’t mention Rebecca West’s 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier, but this was one of the first Great War novels to explicitly deal with shellshock and one can read this book today as a fascinating glimpse into a period between frivolous prewar innocence and the stark and gravid sentences that were to come with Eliot, Hemingway, Woolf, and Fitzgerald. Fussell suggests that the young Evelyn Waugh was emboldened in his poetic and often brutal satire by much of the lingering language that the war had extracted from the patina of once regular summer comforts. The charred scenery on the front lines caused soldiers and servicemen to look upward into the possibilities contained within the sky — itself a predominant fixation within Ruskin’s Modern Painters — and not only did Waugh mimic this in the opening pages of his later novel, Officers and Gentlemen, but one cannot read John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” without being acutely aware of the “sunset glow” or the sky serving as an anchor for the poppies blowing beneath the crosses or the singing larks still “bravely singing” amidst the destruction.

It’s possible that Fussell may not have arrived at his perspicacious observations had he not gone through wartime and its preceding ablutions himself. In his memoir Doing Battle, Fussell notes that he could not have unpacked Wilfred Owen’s veiled sensuality had he not been smitten himself with the looks of boys in his adolescent years. He also writes of identifying strongly with Robert Graves’s sentiment that one could not easily be alone in the thronged throes of battle. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell sought to unpack irony and poetic elegy as it became increasingly expressed during the First World War. He claimed his study to be “an act of implicit autobiography” and “a refraction of current events.” In Fussell’s case, he had sickened of the Vietnam War’s overuse of “body count” and perceived perspicacious parallels between Owen’s “Insensibility,” a poem which suggests that expressing “sufferings” is simply not enough to understand real loss. One must have palpable experience of warfare’s devastation in order to reckon properly with it.

And perhaps The Great War and Modern Memory is more serious than Fussell’s “stunt books” (Class, which The Atlantic‘s Sandra Tsing Loh rightfully described as a “snide, martini-dry American classic,” and Bad) because Fussell could not find it within himself to betray his own personal connection to war.

Even so, Jay Winter, Daniel Swift, and Dan Todman have rightfully censured Fussell for leaving out or even demeaning the contributions of working stiffs. Make no mistake: Paul Fussell is an elitist snob and more than a bit of a sneering egomaniac. To cite but one of countless examples, Fussell overreaches and reveals his true colors when he suggests that all letters home from the soldiers adhered to what he calls “British Phelgm” (“The trick here is to affect to be entirely unflappable; one speaks as if the war were entirely normal and matter-of-fact.”). War censors certainly created a creative smorgasbord of workaround phrases, but, as someone who has reviewed World War I letters for research, this is an unequivocal load of bollocks — as a cursory plunge into the National Archives swiftly reveals. Fussell is much better tracking idioms like “in the pink” and using his mighty forensic chops to expose undeniable lexical influence.

As our present world moves ever closer to a potential third world war — with Ukraine standing in for a “trouble in the Balkans” — The Great War and Modern Memory reminds us that all the trauma on our shoulders — whether endured by soldiers or civilians — is destined to spill somewhere. We may not have five centuries of democracy and peace to give us the cuckoo clock that Orson Welles famously snarked up in The Third Man, but there are certainly plenty of unknown Michelangelos and da Vincis waiting in the wings to make sense of the ordeals of 2022 life. History, to paraphrase Stephen Dedalus’s famous sentiment, is a nightmare from which all of us are trying to awake.

Next Up: Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale!

by Edward Champion

Jami Attenberg: An Insufferable Narcissist for Insufferable Narcissists

Jami Attenberg is one of the most mediocre and self-absorbed writers in America today. And her latest book — a “memoir” — reveals her solipsism in truly hideous ways.

I CAME ALL THIS WAY TO MEET YOU: WRITING MYSELF HOME
by Jami Attenberg
(Ecco, 272 pages)

Jami Attenberg is easily one the most narcissistic and least interesting writers of our time. She literally contributes nothing to literature other than wanton displays of privileged navel-gazing. Should there come a time in which this insufferable solipsist is precluding from publishing any further books, I will write ruthlessly joyful ballads for the many trees that are spared from massacre to spew out her deranged and self-serving lexical offerings. She is truly that awful. There is so much conceited drivel to quote from in her latest book (of which more anon), but I’ll start here:

“I was allowed to stay there for free as long as I walked the dog, an enormous Tibetan mastiff, which I did, diligently, even though the dog didn’t like me all that much and sometimes snapped at me. I felt a little bit like I was the help, there to accomplish a designated task, even though no one actually made me feel that way.”

Maybe because dogs are usually reliable at sniffing out leeches and sponges? The truly atrocious people who boast about their hollow lives and take take take from those who have earned their stature through hardscrabble years of real work? Maybe because even animals have an intuitive sense of sussing out human garbage complaining about being the “help”? (I’ll refrain from the obvious Kathryn Stockett parallel here, but I cannot help but be angered by Attenberg’s casual slide to white privilege as she boasts about traveling to Italy, Sicily, Portugal, England, and Australia without having anything particularly insightful to say. Most of us, of course, simply do our duties and never complain about it. Such are the hard knock realities of living under late-stage capitalism while subtly participating in the “great resignation.”) A few hundred pages later — because self-aggrandizement is the Attenberg formula (and it works! she has the 38,000 followers on Twitter to prove it!) — she trots out her privilege by noting how she and her merry narcissists “leave our towels on the floor for someone to pick up after it is time for us to go.” I’m guessing that this amorphous “someone” is a hell of a lot more interesting than Attenberg. This — combined with Attenberg’s frequent references to being “alone” — is the language of a drug addict and, as Attenberg is so keen to remind us throughout her dreadful dirge, she did drugs, folks! And not only that. She even named one of her chapters after Henry Rollins’s moving memoir. She’s so punk rock! Even when she appropriates from more fascinating and selfless lives for her own gain. Much as she once made a token appearance at Zuccotti Park while the rest of us Occupy Wall Streeters dodged the nets and tear gas from New York’s finest on a daily basis to stand up for the greater good. Because for Attenberg, like many two-bit con artists who confess their shallow “vulnerabilities” on social media in an attempt to win followers and clout, friendships and human relationships are purely transactional:

I knew who my people were, even though I didn’t see them that often anymore. The ones who had stuck by me in my worst moments. The ones I hoped I offered something to in return. Craving collaboration, a shared sense of something bigger than myself, and finding people seeking the same. I had been lucky. I had lost some friends in my life, or sometimes they had lost me. The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late. Forgiveness and understanding? Regret and apologies? Not in this economy. But I had sustained a life with the ones who counted, the ones I could talk to for hours. The ones I would build something new with every time we met. When I got to meet them.

If you think I have an axe to grind, please know that I do not make these statements lightly. Jami Attenberg is part of a strain of “literary” writers who are destroying our culture with their relentless commitment to unearned amour-propre. I read 162 books last year — many great, some bad, some striated with the usual solipsism that one expects from authors. Such is the price one pays for finding the real truth-tellers, the literary outliers who hold a mirror to our souls and truly humble us with their voices. The writers who remind us why selfless empathy is so important in an age in which caring about other people has become increasingly (and needlessly) politicized. I also had a mother who was a wildly manipulative narcissist, a sister who turned into a cruel and self-serving narcissist who left me for dead and who I will never forgive, and, just last month, ended a relationship with a wildly manipulative narcissist who I had the misfortune to fall for until I cut the cord with great succor from a dear friend (a woman, incidentally; most of my close friends are women). I offer all this not for you to feel sorry for me (that would be an Attenberg move), but to cement that I do know what the hell I’m talking about and I am very much committed to being real. Gratitude, humility, and positivism have been dependable bellwethers in my ongoing quest to be a better person. But these three vital characteristics are clearly beyond a spoiled and wildly overrated braggart like Attenberg, who thrives and subsists because Isaac Fitzgerald (once an inveterate wastrel who was thick as thieves with the abusive Stephen Elliott in his alcohol-smeared Rumpus days, a biographical detail that entailed many years of his life that he, like Attenberg, has nimbly managed to storm past) declared a Dave Eggers-style “No haters” policy when Buzzfeed commissioned this equally shallow opportunist to steer its book coverage, thus securing an agora in which tripe like the below passage is allowed to pass muster without righteous and appropriate pushback:

“Instead, I have become a superior dinner guest. I am wonderful to have at your side while you cook, particularly if you give me a glass of wine, and also to have sit at your table, because I will appreciate your food in a deep, emotional, and highly verbal way, perhaps, in small part, because I did not get to experience that kind of cooking growing up. I’m just always so appreciative of being fed a delicious, home-cooked meal; genuinely, puppy-dog-eyes astonished by the food put before me. Invite me over and feed me. I will be your best companion.”

Puppy dog eyes. Feed this voracious do-nothing dunce, dammit! She’s staring at you!

Sometimes I get so frozen in my feelings, though, or perhaps it is that one feeling is stronger than the others and that’s the one that commands me. I have multiple feelings going on at the same time within me, all day long. This is why I can appreciate a room full of old bones chattering at me silently. This is the makeup of my soul. A room full of bones, a multitude of voices, all at once.

Do you hear that? You’re all nothing more than bones. What a deeply pleasant person!

None of my friends would visit me except if it was my birthday party or the like; there had to be the guarantee of a good time. Williamsburg was too far, it seemed, but from what? The familiar.

Or maybe — and this is easily corroborated by how easy it is to travel out to Williamsburg on the L line — your “friends” just didn’t like you? Speaking as someone who lives off the ass-end of the 2 and 5 lines — a far greater subway crawl than heading to Williamsburg — I’ve never had a problem persuading pals to stop by. Largely because I am fun, giving, firmly committed to secular humanism, genuinely effusive, and I deeply and genuinely care about people. Having visited Attenberg’s loft on Kent Avenue a few times, I can personally attest that every trip felt very much like coercion. A publicist who I will not name once informed me that she “didn’t want to cross Jami.” And this was well before The Middlesteins secured her “literary worth.” Others have reported to me how Attenberg would slice them out of her life if she couldn’t use them. I interviewed this meretricious writer twice back in the days when I had a literary podcast and I only did so because Attenberg — an adept and accomplished narcissist — had a knack for guilting you if you didn’t pay enough attention to her. She preys upon anyone who feels an altruistic instinct to include people. And she had a way of making you feel bad if you declined her invite. Speaking for myself, I deeply regret that I fell for her boorish egotistical act for so long. But being a true-blue empath is often a double-edged sword. And I’ve fallen on my own unscabbered blade far too many times to secure my own obscurity. Perhaps I was just as nonessential as the poor neighbor Attenberg describes in her cluelessly self-absorbed and vile volume. Your apartment floods and here’s that narcissistic writer who only hangs out with you to cadge cigarettes and does fuck all to help you. The next thing you know, you’re dead. “We looked out for each other,” writes Attenberg in a blithe manner that reminded me of Evelyn Waugh at his nastiest, “but sometimes people fall through the cracks.” Written like a true sociopath. A manipulative impostor who also writes pages later, “[I]t helps me to be of service to the universe.” Well, only in the most Brahmin of ways. Then there is risible atonement here:

I don’t regret any of it, except for how much money I spent on drugs. And also, sometimes I was an asshole. And for that: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

You’ve never been sorry at all, Jami Attenberg. You’ve hurt many good people. They’ve told me the details. You’re a terrible person. And no amount of pain that you’ve experienced gives you the excuse to be an asshole.

I am sure the easily triggered peanut gallery, all of them so eager to cavil and find fault with a middle-aged dude taking a necessary stand against an unmitigated narcissist and hubris-fueled mediocrity inexplicably bound in print, will look to my biographical details and my attack dog approach here as evidence of a bias that I may have against narcissistic women. And they may very well be right. But I have also publicly denounced a vast panoply of male narcissists (some of whom have turned out to be abusive) that includes Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, almost every writer named John or Jonathan (though Ames and Wray are both good eggs and I will defend both of them to the death), Philip Hensher, Stephen Elliott, Blake Bailey, Dave Eggers, and scores more over the last twenty years. 88% of male cultural critics are narcissists. In my time, I have feuded at some point with nearly all of them. Because I hate narcissists. They are the cockroaches who crawl in your kitchen that you feel an overwhelming desire to crush with a ball-peen hammer. Never mind the damage to the lino and the kitchen island. There’s a greater pestilence to eradicate. A higher duty, so to speak. And any amount of collateral property damage that bites into your security deposit is worth your noble efforts at genocide. Narcissists have lied about me, blatantly mischaracterized who I truly am and attempted to ruin me with bold prevarications on social media, abused me, and hurt me in a myriad of ways. And, as we saw with the last guy who inhabited the Oval Office, narcissists can damage the nation. So when it comes to narcissists, I am an equal opportunity assassin. Let them all be sent to the gallows. They are the true scum of the earth.

But I digress.

“I am interviewing my father because I am trying to figure out why I am the way I am. The daughter of a salesman, now a salesman herself, in a way.”

Let’s talk about Jami Attenberg — an insufferable narcissist for insufferable narcissists. In other words, what now counts as a “writer’s writer” among all these self-absorbed Bookriot-reading dweebs who boast about their galleys on Twitter. An abject salesman. A repugnant and talentless asshat who really wants you to like her! I am sure she is busting out her Hitachi Magical Wand reading my words (that is, if she made it this far). Because Attenberg is one of those shameless schmucks who gets off on her own press. She’s even willing to promulgate a bullshit “ghost story” (the ghost is in the form of a man, of course) because, deep down, she thinks that little of the intelligence of her reading audience.

“Product knowledge is the big thing,” [Attenberg’s father] continues. “That’s what makes a salesperson successful, is that the salesperson can convey the knowledge to the customer. If you feel confident, they will too.”

Attenberg continues to be adulated by fawning and uncritical book nerds across the nation in large part because she has adeptly and indefatigably marketed her public image (a pug-beagle named Sid, constant shoutouts to other writers who are usually as mediocre as she is, relentless invitations to movers and shakers that are more networking opportunities than genuine social bonhomie, et al.). She is, in short, the Establishment. A completely dull and unremarkable figure who makes up for her creative deficiencies and her paucity of invention by “being there” for people in the Jerzy Kosinski sense of the idiom. Because critical thinking continues to be unpracticed in our apocalyptic age, Attenberg can get away with her act. She’s very much like that stiff from accounting who you politely invited for after-work cocktails just to be friendly and who proceeded to monopolize the banter to steal all your work friends and assert dominance.

Well, Saint Jami — who wrote a poorly researched and scantly remembered dud called Saint Mazie — now “fits in.” There is literally nobody left within the Establishment who will call her out for her insipid solipsism and her piss-poor writing. She’s living proof that, if you stick around long enough and canoodle with the right people for years, then your “work” — such as it is — will be unquestionably appraised as divine mantras from the mount. All of these acolytes — which include many authors — follow Saint Jami on any journey she embarks on without question. She has nearly every haughty careerist from John Scalzi to Roxane Gay doing cart wheels on her little finger. Perhaps because these puffed up self-promoters recognize just how effective Saint Jami has been in spinning her dubious stature as “literary novelist.” And perhaps because self-marketing is truly the only cachet that a writer has left in 2022.

“I would make my own advertising. I would be my advertising. I would stop only when they made me. I would keep driving all over America until someone bought my goddamn book.”

I never thought it was possible, but somehow Saint Jami has written a “memoir” that is more ego-driven and insufferable than Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. You see, these days, it’s privileged women who get to be febrile egomaniacs, not the aging dudebros. Much as it pains me to agree with her, Katie Roiphe did have a point back in 2009 when she pointed to how most contemporary male writers specialized in “an obsessive fascination with trepidation” when it came to spilling the beans about sex. I would suggest further that this trepidation extended to basic truths across the non-carnal spectrum. While this gender role reversal does allow for women to reveal themselves to be just as monstrous as their narcissistic male counterparts, I fundamentally object to the way in which Saint Jami not only sounds like Werner Erhard demanding primal screams for commonplace anxieties from his audience, but how she and her associates package her folderol with an unsophisticated windmill tilt to feminism.

In America, I was just another feminist, and a white, straight, middle-aged one at that. I did not feel radical in America. I felt basic, and when I say “basic,” I mean it in the colloquial sense, as in boring, unoriginal, mainstream. But a thing I have learned, through trial and error, is that my basic feminism can mean different things all over the world. Sometimes it is a helpful conversation to have, and sometimes I’m just being another oppressor, in a way. But in Italy, at that moment, people seemed interested in my feminism. It was a thing to be discussed.

Sure enough, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (an unintentionally hilarious title that suggests some Midwestern innocence) is a dripping pile of dewy hubris. A “memoir” that amounts to nothing more than 300 pages of quotidian and unremarkable “struggle” that dares to call itself distinct and that is driven by that most overused word in the English language: I.

“I temped. I filed. I answered phones. I typed up letters, and then I faxed them across town. I pointed people in the right direction. Down the hall. One flight up. You just missed him. I worked in fifty different offices. All these lives. I took food from the conference room without asking. I replaced women on maternity leave. (Never men.) I lent a hand when they were short-staffed. There was a big mailing. Me, alone, in an empty room, stuffing envelopes. Fingers stung with paper cuts at the end of each day. I worked temp-to-perm and was supposed to feel grateful. If you play your cards right, kid. I never made it to perm.”

A brilliant novel published last year — Jakob Guzman’s Abundance — was an emotionally moving and immensely accomplished work of fiction that didn’t make the National Book Award shortlist. Largely because the literary establishment does not like to hear from people who are both poor and not white. They do, however, like to hear from white neoliberal dullards like Jami Attenberg. Nearly every sentence she writes is so hopelessly drenched in the trite bromides of her unremarkable self. And not even in an interesting way like Kate Zambreno or movingly like Leslie Jamison. This is because Attenberg is a solipsistic blowhard masquerading as a sham empath.

There is nothing remarkable in the above passage whatsoever. Millions of Americans live like this. Millions more live much harder lives. Where is the publishing industry when it comes to their stories? In absentia, of course.

“I had jobs where I was taken less seriously or my opinions dismissed entirely for being a woman. I have been told I am difficult. I am difficult in the sense that I am not easy, but fuck easy.”

Or maybe you’re just a self-serving asshole who nobody wants to work with? And being a woman has zero to do with it?

This ridiculous “memoir” — stitched in the formulaic cobweb of the chronic first person and written by a card-carrying sociopath — has been receiving raves from the bourgie lit brigade. (Or at least fellow mediocre “memoirists” like Claire Derderer in the New York Times, who risibly suggests in her review that it is a rare thing indeed when writers blab about their careers. When, in fact, all of us know that writers can almost never shut up about themselves, even when their lives, like Attenberg’s, are duller than an underpaid barista enslaved to humiliating rituals during a pandemic.) Largely because these tasteless boosters do not recognize anyone in this nation that makes less than $50,000/year and they seldom acknowledge the presence of anyone who isn’t Caucasian. Largely because their lives are lies. This vast swath of Biden-voting, risk-averse, toe-the-line privileged scum, who see Saint Jami as their great lord for “suffering” so commonly, have never known real poverty or been homeless or known real struggle. They are, in their own way, as vile in their absence of empathy as Republicans. These unremarkable lemmings would be chewed up in the first ten minutes of the zombie apocalypse. They’re the ones who call an Uber or order regularly from Seamless and never think to tip a Doordash driver more than 10%. Oh, but they relate to this “struggle.” Jami’s “struggle.” And the whole damn book is like this. Hideous narcissism dolled up as feminist empowerment. The solipsistic cry of the privileged white woman. Me me me. Shut the fuck up. It’s disgusting.

As Joyce Carol Oates suggested on Twitter last month, we can accept a narcissistic writer who writes well and who has a distinct command of language. But Saint Jami’s “command” is laden with clunkers:

“I get asked all the time how I can write about such fucked-up families when my mother is so obviously a nice person.” (False humility.)

“I worked for a cable network on websites for critically acclaimed television shows, all of which were created by men.” (Feeble stabs at the patriarchy.)

“but I liked the idea of talking to students as much as I could, and also, I liked the idea of Davenport.” (Endless narcissistic passages that would be roundly condemned on Twitter if the writer in question had a penis.)

“I try to live in hope when I think of America. Things are terrible everywhere, all the time, I know, but let me have my hope anyway.” (Bullshit bromides.)

“I could have a job in an office, a home in the suburbs. (Not that I wanted to live in the suburbs, but still, they existed and seemed safe.) A stable existence instead of fearing for my life, alone on the road.” (Inflated sense of importance, unexamined contradiction of life goals.)

“I looked around for someone to tell, but it was all strangers. On the bus I ended up being wedged between the window and an ophthalmologist who had flown in for a convention in New York. He did not care that I had sold my first book.” (More inflated self-importance.)

“It was the best thing I had ever written, of that I was certain. Still, my publisher dropped me. It didn’t matter that it was good. They were done with me now.” (Yet another inflated sense of self-worth.)

“Peripatetic was a word I learned in my early twenties. I remember looking it up after reading it somewhere and I thought: That sounds familiar.” (Inflated intelligence.)

“I have been to Northern California maybe a dozen times, mostly to San Francisco, back when you could still be a young dirtbag and live there cheaply, when it still seemed a viable, reasonable place to get away for a few days. It was also where I had written my first book, in Napa.” (As someone who lived happily in San Francisco for thirteen years during the last time it was affordable to live there, go fuck yourself. We weren’t dirtbags. We were making things and finding ourselves.)

“At night I ate store-bought fresh pasta, the kind that comes refrigerated and soft and takes three minutes to prepare, and garlic and butter and olive oil and whatever vegetables I could scrounge from the garden near the big house and I would drink two or three (or four) glasses of wine and sometimes I would sob quietly by myself.” (Foodie aspirations drenched in manipulative self-pity.)

“Where were you the first time you learned the word Gorgonzola?” (Oh please.)

“At the edge of the cove, I saw a couple, the man pointing at something, a woman hugging herself to keep warm. I wondered if she wanted to be here. I wondered if she’d had a rough week at work.” (Wild and off-base assumptions about total strangers.)

“People still used digital cameras regularly then to capture moments, instead of phones like we do now. There would be no instant gratification, no immediate upload to the internet. This was just for them, for now.” (Laughable attempts at profundity.)

“There were gunshots all the time out on the streets.” (I honestly don’t know where to start when it comes to Saint Jami’s stabs at streetcred. She tries so hard throughout this book to prove that she’s “punk rock.” But this passage will do.)

“Every museum in Europe has Warhols in its collection—did you know that?” (If Saint Jami were a man, this would be a prime example of mansplaining.)

“Eventually I tired of DC. There was nothing for me there, I decided, a refrain that would become common enough in my life. I walked away so quickly from everything.” (A completely superficial sense of other cities.)

“A great lesson: When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they’re not on your side.” (Or maybe they’re being kind?)

“The six-packs of yogurt, all different flavors, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, an entire drawer just for cheese. I did not want this life, the husband, the kids. But I did want that refrigerator full of food.” (Pathetic ramshackle gluttony.)

“Rosie brings me lasagna and Julie brings me a tuna casserole, and I have more food than I could ever eat for weeks, and I think: That was my problem in Los Angeles, I didn’t know enough Jews there.” (Gluttony and narcissism walk into a bar. You know the end of the joke.)

“We got drunk very quickly, perhaps she more than me, but I didn’t know her well enough to be able to tell, and then a few of her friends showed up, two men, and we drank a little more, and we decided to drive around town with them. Everyone was kind of a mess except for the driver, who I was trying to flirt with because I was free and in a new city I hadn’t ruined for myself yet.” (More drug addict greed.)

“I am still flattered when people want to be my friend. The chubby child wonders why anyone would want to have her over after school, is grateful to be invited. If someone asks me to meet them for a drink and it feels like something good might come out of it, some sort of future relationship, I enter into it with an open heart.” (Man, I’ve heard this bullshit line from so many narcissists before.)

“I picture her on her barstool now, this writer in Brooklyn. She is slightly older than me, but much better kept. Someone who has been found sexy her entire life. A more accessible type. Taller, more lithe, softer curls on her head, more specific lips, lips with a wry, saucy point of view, pursed, it seems, always.” (Narcissistic jealousy of other peers.)

“Can you imagine viewing everything in your life through two sets of eyes? Yet surely, I have viewed myself through thousands of sets of eyes in my life. Without even knowing it.” (More egregious narcissism.)

“The main dramatic crisis of the film is her relationship with an angry, aggressive driving instructor who has an unrequited crush on her, and who ultimately is abusive toward her in a confrontation one night. She escapes uninjured, too precious is this character for permanent damage.” (A complete misread of Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky.)

“On my first book tour, sixteen years ago, a male bookstore owner hugged me too long after an event at his shop. ‘I could tell you were special by your picture,’ he said. I wondered if he’d even read my book.” (Narcissistic victimhood by way of wild assumptions.)

“Once I did an event where a man standing in my signing line said to me, ‘You remind me of my daughter; she’s also a narcissist.'” (No examination of this truth. Perhaps it’s too uncomfortable for Saint Jami. But the man in question here was spot-on.)

“I post another picture of myself in a hotel room on Instagram before I leave for the night. This is me, this is where I am, this is what I am wearing. I post it so people can tell me I look OK. I post it so people know I’m alive. I post it as a proof of life. I grow accustomed to seeing myself in a box on my cell phone. Did I live in the box?” (Jesus Christ, do you not listen to yourself, Saint Jami? What remarkable narcissism.)

“What’s it like to wake up every day and not worry what anyone else thinks?” (Saint Jami says this of a man who is not on social media. How can he not know of the “struggle” it is to be judged on social media? Well, maybe if you’re a narcissist, it consumes every hour of your day. But if you’re a well-adjusted human being, who honestly gives a fuck?)

“My boss was tall, a burly Australian man, actually physically intimidating, with a booming voice, and not a day went by that he didn’t comment on my facial expressions as he passed my desk. Particularly if I wasn’t smiling. That loud voice could be heard all across the office. Why aren’t you smiling? What’s wrong? Sometimes tapping his finger on my desk. Why don’t you smile more?” (More cartoonish description to bolster the book’s weak and shaky commitment to “feminism.”)

“At my event I am introduced as living in Brooklyn. From the crowd I hear it. A boo. For being from Brooklyn. I had traveled all that way just to get booed.” (Again, who cares? Maybe if you weren’t so concerned with what other people think and actually listened to them, you might be able to win the crowd over.)

“In 2020, a therapist tells me I’m hardwired for anxiety. I was screwed from the get-go, I think. I’m an excellent compartmentalizer of my feelings. I can organize my thoughts and emotions to protect myself and to build a shield, but that will only take me so far. I say, ‘I have been doing it for years.’ I can tell, she says, with what sounds like sympathy.” (Or maybe the therapist was probably thinking to herself, “Do I tell this solipsitic client that she’s a narcissist? Or do I continue to take her money?”)

“He sold himself to my mother, too.” (Because, as we all know, love is transactional.)

“In his stories, things happened. His characters were physical and often violent. They engaged in sharp dialogue, and they said things they’d regret. They drank a lot.” (Because, of course, every male writer who dips on the dark side of life is clearly a monster. I’m sorry to hear that Attenberg was assaulted. But there’s no need to stack the deck like this.)

“I could always see right through them because I am them: an absolute living nightmare in exactly the same way they are, except slightly more tolerable, because I’m a woman.” (Finally. One slight moment of honesty — near the end of the book. Although let me assure you that Jami Attenberg is more of a “living nightmare” than even she knows.)

“Then I read a status update on Facebook by someone who had been in our writing program, and he mourned him and said, ‘He was the best writer in our class,’ and I wanted to fucking scream, because I was the best writer in our class.” (I don’t think you were. Particularly if this is the way you write as a grown-ass adult.)

What’s particularly calculating about Attenberg describing her assault is that it brilliantly inoculates her from criticism. “Oh, you don’t like my book? Well, clearly, you stand on the side of toxic masculinity!” Hardly. But I have to wonder — in light of Alice Sebold identifying the wrong man who assaulted her — how much of this story was invented or embellished or even fact-checked by the people at Ecco. It’s easy enough to suss out who “Brendan” is. (It took me three minutes to find him on Google.) And since the dude is now dead, we have no way to corroborate the story. We also get a casual detail about a suicide attempt, but no effort by Attenberg to examine what led her to this state. Victimhood has become the currency of “memoirs” of this type. Victimhood is also the very quality that a narcissist flails about to anyone who will listen.

Perhaps the literary sphere is drawn to Attenberg’s work because they too believe themselves to be victims in some way. And when a victim presents herself as largely infallible and as the hero of her own story, you can then wallow in your own collective victimhood and sell multiple copies of your terrible book.