Hello all! Work is still busy, and I am still pursuing the project. I should probably give an update on that some time soon, and will. For now, here’s a review of a book I listened to recently. It’s not directly related to the project but it gave rise to relevant thoughts.
I thought I had first heard of Any Day You Can Die in an article in LARB, but I just searched for it there, using the unusually-spelled name of its author, Thommy Waite, and did not find it. I didn’t find any reference to it on lithub, either. I don’t follow lithub, so if I had caught it there, that meant it found its way to me through the channel I suspect: an ad, likely on facebook or goodreads, not enough for me to click on but enough for me to google. That’s the usual way of it, for me, some notion that I win somehow by not clicking directly on the ads. We all have our peccadillos. Upon further googling, it appears this one was self-published! Well, he did a pretty good marketing job (this would make sense given some of the content of this book), or maybe I’m just an easy mark.
In any event, I got the idea that Waite’s Medellin-set novel was both zeitgeisty and “transgressive,” and those are two concepts I do like to keep track of out of historical interest. Unlike the majority of the books I read or listen to out of an interest in getting some core samples of what people are reading, or out of my historical interest in what “transgressive” culture is meant to do, this one was a pretty decent read. Like a lot of the better reads in these categories, it gets there in no small part by borrowing from genre. To the extent “American Psycho” is anything other than a set of cheap tricks, it’s because of Ellis’ borrowings from paperback horror, Kathy Acker made a name by open, wholesale theft from people like William Gibson (I’ve read more of her recently and actually prefer it when she doesn’t do stuff like that- more on that in later reviews), on and on. Thommy Waite gives us some fun crime fiction stuff, particularly in the back half. But he has something else that makes even his millennial navel gazing more worth appreciating than most contemporary literary writing: a certain honesty, and a sense of perspective, of proportion even.
This might seem strange for a novel about “digital nomad” decadence among the gringos who come to Medellin for the cheap living and pleasant climate. It would seem stranger still if you just listened to the opening, where the narrator, who like Waite is a young-ish Australian man with literary aspirations who lived in Medellin for about eighteen months (those immediately preceding the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic), swears up and down that the story he tells is absolutely true. Given that the story Tony, our narrator, tells is about starting a dark web drug-distribution dropshipping (I guess that’s using private drones to deliver stuff? I feel like if I google it all my ads will be even dumber than they are now) with his expat buddies, making a great deal of money, engaging in Homeric bouts of drinking, taking drugs, and fucking, inevitably crossing the wrong people, at least one wiener getting chopped off, and living to tell the tale… attributing either honesty or a sense of proportion, that old classical artistic virtue, to this book might seem strange. Hear me out.
“Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home,” as Charles Portis put it. Thommy/Tony, like Ray Midge in Mexico, is “on the alert for omens” in Medellin, and me, being a dork who doesn’t travel much but who reads a lot, probably tends to ascribe more to local character than makes sense. That’s a long way of saying I think that Waite being an Australian helps make his work less self-indulgent, or self-indulgent in a way that doesn’t test one’s patience quite as bad, as that of other writers of both contemporary first-person fiction (does this count as “autofiction”? Who knows or cares at this point) or of “transgressive fiction.” Tony assures us he really isn’t the bloke-iest of bloke-y Australian dudes, and I for one believe him. The narrator is far too self-conscious and emotionally detached to be a real Bogan type, all beers, shrimps on barbies, and lack of inner life. But, he does have the sense that excess demonstration of selfhood, especially when unbacked by anything of particular interest, is, in some sense, shameful, that internal voice that says that maybe your you-ness isn’t the most interesting thing in the world.
This stance is… well, let’s just say I don’t think any of us have really nailed down a universal best way of how to share our particularity with the world. Constantly crushing it down so as not to seem “up yourself,” which seems to be the default in some parts of the world, doesn’t seem especially healthy. But then… what is? The point here is that narrator Tony – and, presumably, to some extent, author Thommy – writes under the weight of an assumption that talking about yourself is for dicks (or another anatomical term that’s pretty lightweight in the British Commonwealth but can get you slapped here). And this means there’s some kind of self-consciousness, a sense of a need to justify the tens of thousands of words of expression of his subjectivity that constitute this book, that you really don’t get from the people raised in a more self-expressive culture, i.e. the American upper classes (and people who learned their ways, say, in liberal arts programs).
This means, when Tony navel gazes – and he does, plenty – he at least has the good grace to acknowledge that it’s navel gazing, that he doesn’t have anything especially original to say about his feelings… though, from where I sit, he is refreshingly open about all that. When American writers do cop to their own lack of originality or their emotional unavailability, a frequent trick of some, they sound like they’re doing their first monologue in an acting class. You don’t buy it- you might buy that they don’t have anything original to say, but you don’t buy that THEY buy it. They actually DO believe that they’re special and different and interesting, at least because they’ve convinced themselves they don’t think that (or just experience momentary doubt). Forget that first monologue in acting class analogy- think about a wannabe tough guy mean mugging in the mirror, and swap out the tough guy for an aspiring litteratuer and mean mug for whatever look qualifies you for the David Foster Wallace Memorial “Expecting Sympathy for Expecting Sympathy for Expecting Sympathy” Pro-Am Challenge.
I buy that Waite actually does feel ambivalent about self-expression, or is just a good enough writer to convey that feeling, and I don’t care which it is. That’s not to say there’s no ego in this project- there’s a lot, just the kind that feels the need to justify itself by some device other than just pointing at itself and going “Well?” I think this is probably one reason why Waite tells a crime story, rather than just a story of gringos dicking around in Medellin. Tony is a frustrated artist working in marketing when he takes his savings and ups sticks to the Colombian highlands. Medellin is one of the global cool cities that people with some disposable income and an idea that travel will do them some good flock to, I understand, though I also understand these cities fall in and out of fashion. Last I checked, Cape Town and Lisbon were considered pretty cool, but that might have been pre-covid. I don’t check often. Anyway, people, especially people from the English-speaking rich countries, go there to party, live cheaply, and network. These aren’t your old types of dharma bums, traveling free and easy, though some of them would tell you they are (and many of those old dharma bums had career ambitions, too, like the Brother of Eternal Love who first opened a drug route from pre-Taliban Kandahar to Laguna Beach while he was traveling the old hippie trail). These are the backwash of hustle culture, the people who have bought into the idea that if you’re not monetizing your passions, you’re not reaching self-fulfillment, and if you’re not reaching self-fulfillment, why are you even breathing?
Much of this book is about Tony’s failed efforts at self-discovery in this milieu. He’s too ambitious to treat his time in Medellin as a vacation, but too neurotic and ambivalent to really pursue any of the creative projects he wants to do. He wants to work on a novel about Bob Dylan trying to write, produce, and star in a Broadway musical at the height of his powers in the 1960s, which honestly sounds like a real fun read, but of course, he doesn’t get far. He drinks, he dates. He spends time with other Millennial Types in their shared bachelor pad- a Canadian porn addict/Jordan Peterson freak, an English (cockney? London, white, and not rich anyway) aggro cokehead, an earnest American dumbass caught in some kind of positive-vibes MLM scheme. Four of the “Five Eyes!” I guess a Kiwi couldn’t make it. Despite the fact they are all supposed to be escaping from the dreary Anglo world, they’re just as much on some kind of grind as everyone else, and so are all the other expats and many of the Colombians around them- attempts to be social media influencers, startup entrepreneurs (often involving crypto), lifestyle gurus, or just stretching their remote work paychecks by living somewhere cheap. Everyone’s playing an angle, everyone’s trying to live off hype (and easy credit), no one is hiding it- what they hide is the fact that they all fucking hate it, but can’t conceive any other way of living. Tony can’t either.
I come in from a “parallax view” to this kind of life - “as old mate Slavoj Z would say,” as Tony might put it, using his habitual form of referring to quotable figures. At the end of the day, millennial hustle culture is a product of global economic forces that structure my life as much as it does every hair-gelled schmuck trying to get people to pay them to tell them how to start their own life advice MLM scheme… but, for the most part, I have rejected it, and it has rejected me. I’ve got my own way of doing things that runs orthogonal – though not directly opposed to, in all cases – to the way things go in the culture Waite depicts. I don’t pretend my choices have nothing to do with the broader culture (and its mechanisms of persuasion), or come from some deep place of sincerity and/or uniqueness others lack, nothing like that. I’m just odd, particular, stubborn, and don’t happen to like what’s on offer here. Truth be told, it’s less the work involved that I reject – I like good strenuous work – but the various performances and the nonsense you’re expected to swallow, the values that go with it.
Let’s put it this way: despite the fact that I know for a fact self-help culture has been prominent in American culture for longer than I’ve been alive, some part of me insists that at one point, in my not too recent past, it was considered embarrassing for people to talk about self-help gurus, especially in a way that implies you take them even slightly seriously. Was that ever the case or am I generalizing based on scrambled memories of “slacker” culture? Not only does Tony and every Anglophone around him (at first, the coked-up cockney is an exception, but then he takes DMT and we all know what happens next) take self-help hustle-culture vibes-based shit seriously, it makes up most of the parts of their mental framework that aren’t made from personal experience. A lot of the rest comes from stand up comedians/podcasters. And they’re not all dumb, either, these characters or the people like them! Nor do they read/listen to these figures uncritically- Tony, for instance, takes on board stuff from Jordan Peterson and probably agrees with some of it but doesn’t follow the path people like me often assume, that you either take the pill and become lost to rational conversation or don’t.
It’s not so much that that sort of mental framework is awful, though I don’t want to be in it, and from the accounts of “Tony” and others it seems it doesn’t seem to lead to good results (which one does, though?). It’s more just baffling. How did anyone get here? Are the schools that bad? Are youtube and social media algorithms that strong? Is there such a dearth of meaningful alternative ways of looking at the world? If I understand it right, a lot of these gurus market themselves AS the alternative- a Jordan Peterson gives you the supposed straight hard truth that more posi-vibes life coach types don’t, etc. That’s what skeeves me- they’re not stupid, but they have made themselves a world, and the inhabitants don’t seem to feel compelled to look beyond it, even if not doing so makes them and the rest of us miserable. As “old boy Max H” might put it, the problem isn’t that youtube replaces metaphysics- youtube, as Waite shows us, is metaphysics. But why? I can’t help asking- if you can make a world out of anything, why not something equally facile but at least less banal? At least the comedians are funny, sometimes, but they use them for an edgier version of what they get from the gurus! It’s perverse, to me.
I’ve complained before about the ways in which a lot of contemporary fiction builds hermetically sealed worlds of boredom and sentimentality, and then has the gall to pretend to be “realist.” Well, whether he’s trying to do it or not, Waite also constructs a hermetically sealed world, of bullshit, hype, and hustle that more or less doesn’t meaningfully acknowledge an outside, even as it physically squats on “exotic locales” that don’t belong to them… well, A. this world feels realer, more vital, and is better described than, say, Sheila Heti’s world, however much it also sucks, and B. Waite, kindly for the reader (this one, anyway), throws the little world of millennial hustlers at a wall. Tony pursues the dumb dreams that he understands as the only dreams worth having – drawn more from lad magazines and internet porn than anything else – into blowing up his relationship with the beyond-his-league ladyfriend, and, depressed, comes up with a scheme for coordinating drop-shipping for drug customers, and pursues it more or less out of a lack of anything else to do. It is a pretty clever scheme- he offers dark web marketing and dropshipping capacity for a stateside drug dealer. He doesn’t touch drugs, he doesn’t export or import them. People turn out to like buying reliable drugs from a reliable source, unlike most dark web deals, so it works. He recruits his friends. He buys a big fancy house.
I guess here is as good a place as any to discuss the “transgressive” tag the book has attached to it in reviews and blurbs. Well… I start thus- Anton LeVay of the Church of Satan wasn’t as smart as various people, himself included, told us he was, but he did hit upon the double-consciousness of the carnival barker as an object of bathos. What I mean is, there’s always two things going on with the people who sell us material that is meant to shock, titillate, transgress, etc. Their job is to get people in the circus tent to show them the goods. But they’re jaded by the baseness and hypocrisy of man, mark and geek both, and would rather be talking about that, the thing that’s the REAL transgression against etc etc. But they always need the goods, the blood and tits, to get the marks in! And some of them both really like that stuff, even if they don’t want to admit it, and maybe faintly realize that if they sell their jadedness, they’re just selling to higher class marks… and maybe they’re one.
Point being- Waite has his fun with drug use, selfish sex, and offending the sensibilities of assorted people within his online ambit, from the “woke” to the “traditional” - he’s an Aussie, he’s “taking the piss” with people (is that a general Commonwealth idiom, or just Brits? If the latter, sorry, Australia). Maybe I’m overreading, but I do think he gathers that the decadence itself won’t shock much of anyone. What might have a meaningful effect on the reader is the blank, joyless, compulsive way they go about it, not too dissimilar to “the grind” they engage in in their intertwined careers/personal lives, and being inside the head of someone who both sees this joylessness and pointlessness, but does it anyway, seemingly for lack of anything better to do. Tony talks about his “inner Patrick Bateman” when he’s trying to talk himself from emotionally detached to intentionally cold, but to me, Waite has American Psycho beat in terms of actual insight into how anyone acts or thinks.
We all know Tony’s story is going to end disastrously, even if Tony/Thommy didn’t tell us so in the opening of the book. Medellin is most famous to non-Colombians (maybe to Colombians too) for being the hometown of international drug baron and common hip hop lyric reference point Pablo Escobar. All the gringos there, no matter what they may say or how avoidant of drug culture they are, are in Medellin at least in some small part due to the edgy mystique. They could go to Cali, where the considerably more capable and longer-lasting Colombian drug barony came from, but they don’t. It’s Escobar and Medellin, the fuck-you narco-glamor both those names still have in the anglosphere. The Colombians Tony and co meet hate this. It reflects a painful period of their history and hurts their pride. There’s a pretty decent twist in terms of how this plays itself out in Tony’s inevitable downfall. I won’t spoil it- it’s a reflection of Colombia as a serious place with its own logic that those using it as a stage for their own self-discovery don’t understand, and which can hurt them. Hurt them it does!
So, I think Waite managed to write a good novel in a space where I don’t expect it, out of both talent and, for lack of a better term, ethos. He seems to feel if he was going to expose his subjectivity there better be a good story, good jokes, and decent writing attached. So simple, yet so many prominent authors fail to even try! Just plop down any nonsense, call it “art,” and let the PR/criticism machine do the rest. Banal hustle culture for the rich and pretentious! Well, Waite didn’t do it that way. Any Day You Can Die is not perfect. It’s probably a bit longer than it ought to be and could use to cut a few depictions of drinking/drugging/fucking, and also one or two of Tony’s loathing-of-self-and-others monologues. It seems Waite also self-produced the audiobook, and honestly does a really good job, but is not the most natural reader of texts aloud. What’s more, I tend to think maybe he takes hustle culture a little more seriously than he ought (though of course, I can’t prove that’s not just him depicting Tony etc). Sometimes, being sealed into the mindspace of someone who really takes all this shit seriously does get suffocating. In all, though, a pretty decent read. He added a little soupcon at the end about getting in touch with him about the book, showing him reviews they post to goodreads, etc. This makes more sense now that I know it’s self-published. Well, I figured I’d oblige!
Mithra is beautiful, as always.