If I wasn’t going to make another week, it’d be this week- stuff has been busy. I didn’t want to leave my readers bereft, though, so… time for a reading roundup!
I had judged Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation by its cover — literally, the one where twenty-something Wurtzel’s moon eyes and midriff are the first things you see — for a long, long time… and I don’t think I was alone in that.
As one of the most visible artifacts produced by several decades of society trying to figure out “what’s the deal with depression?”, mostly through mass media, it’d be impossible for someone my age to go into this one “cold.” I spent a long time associating this book with a glamorization of depression, and most of that time was spent pretending I cared about that in principle, when in reality I resented that I was hip deep in depression my whole life and it wasn’t glamorous, at all. I spent a shorter time, but still a few years, wondering, “hmm, wonder what this book and the lady who made it is actually like.” Well, in pursuit of the Gen X project, I found out much about the former and a little about the latter. This isn’t a great book, and whether I’d call it a good book might (ironically?) depend on my mood. But it wasn’t terrible. Yeah, there’s some way overly-cute language, and yeah, a lot of mooning about divorce- remember nineties divorce discourse? Remember how it was seen as tragic in and of itself? But more than that, I do think Wurtzel was a somewhat messed up, reasonably smart woman in her twenties who related her experience honestly… as it felt to her, anyway, and what else are we looking for in a memoirs? She tells stories in a reasonably engaging fashion. We see interesting glimpses of New York in the seventies and Harvard in the eighties (she was one of those depressives who can get a lot done, in between bed-bound episodes). Most notably, she was profoundly aware of the many absurdities of her situation: how her life did not seem to be “objectively bad” enough to feel as bad as she did (been there, sister!); how she had a degree of privilege that billions of others would envy (which people, her mother and later reviewers of this book especially, saw fit to remind her of often); how silly a truthful relation of her emotional state and what she did with herself would sound to more or less anyone. There was a lot of self-awareness, and an odd sort of courage, in her cringeworthy writing moments. Like- yep, that’s how that particular kind of depression would express itself, then and there, and she’s not dissembling that to look good. So, I was pleasantly surprised. Truth be told, the discourse around this book and the rest of the “discovery” of depression in the nineties is more what I’m interested in than the book itself. But the book wasn’t bad. Moreover, being honest and reasonably straightforward — a woman tells her story — it provides stark contrast to the whole discourse around it, from the day a publisher first looked at the manuscript to the present, years after Wurtzel’s premature death by cancer. That’s not straightforward or honest, at all, never has been, and its particular twists and turns I think will prove worth tracing for my project.
I listened to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, his follow up to his big hit The Sympathizer, recently, but god help me I don’t remember that much about it. Last we saw the unnamed narrator, he was being tortured in a Vietnamese reeducation camp by one of his two blood brothers, a commissar in the newly triumphant communist government. His other blood brother, an avowed anticommunist killer, was also there, after talking the narrator into accompanying him and some other hopeless CIA stooges into a plan to return from California to Vietnam to start an uprising against the victors of the war. Well, I guess there wouldn’t be The Sympathizer, written as it is in past tense, if the narrator had been killed there, unless he was relating it in the afterlife, but there also wouldn’t be this sequel. Narrator and friend get on a boat and wind up in Paris. There, they wind up working for a drug dealer. In that capacity, the narrator experiences both low life and high society, as he sells to people including an obvious manque of Bernard-Henri Levy, and what’s likely supposed to be a Lacan-Althusser-Foucault mashup type. He’s still involved with spy vs spy stuff having to do with communism and anticommunism. I wrote a lot about The Sympathizer when I read it, how Nguyen was basically trying to “do” the late twentieth century from a distinctly 2010s lens. And, well, I think he’s still doing that. This time, trying to parse what he’s trying to get across about history, humanity, etc., is the primary interest, because the plot isn’t really doing it - there was a better balance (ie a better plot, more interesting characterization and language) in The Sympathizer. And, 2010s academic liberalism meets Vietnam War is more interesting than same academic liberalism meeting bumming around Paris in the eighties. Did you know, “gentle reader,” (as the narrator would say), that French universalism isn’t always good? That it can be… racist? You did?? That jibe is less of a reduction that I’d like it to be. Am I just a blunt-souled historian missing out on the butterfly-wonderful subtleties of the literature on offer here? Or is there just not that much there? Who’s to say?
Some quick hits… Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance, was a weird slice of mid-sixties British bohemian gothic, overripe with pathos, bathos, adjectives, melodrama, etc., as a weirdo and his simp friend cause all kinds of problems, mostly for women. The press that publishes this made it seem like a feminist classic, and maybe it is, but everything is from the point of view of awful men. It was “a bit much” in places in how it piled gloom onto disaster onto little extra kick in the ribs, but I enjoyed it a lot.
Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy had a sort of revival a few years back, maybe catching some of the wave from Elena Ferrante’s success. Written in the sixties and seventies, the trilogy is Ditlevsen describing her life growing up in Denmark in the early twentieth century. It’s not bad, but I think it found its way to me because a while ago, someone did the numbers on the cost of republishing the English translation of these vs the reward for pushing it as “pioneering autofiction,” thought it’d work, and criticism, as it does, praised it to the skies. Then it made its way to my list of “books people are reading and maybe I should look at to keep track of the literary zeitgeist,” and only got in front of me well after the boom was over. Like Wurtzerl’s relationship to depression, Ditlevsen’s (posthumous- she died in 1976) situation vis a vis this odd artifact we call “autofiction” is something I haven’t got the time to get into now, but the pin is in for further discussion as the project goes on.
I read a history book for little babies: The Age of Interconnection, by Jonathan Sperber. Sperber’s a funny one- his thing seems to be trying to deflate left-leaning radicalism, not by the usual screaming about how they’re coming for your lives and toothbrush, but by just sort of pooh-poohing, assorted deflections, odd framings. He wrote a biography of Marx a while back that tried to own the old mole by… pointing out he lived in the mid-19th century, and was involved in mid-19th century intellectual disputes? The idea here was, I think, to reassure bougie liberal readers that they could go ahead with their bougie liberal lives and not really have to think about Marx or what he meant (and still regard themselves as intellectually-inclined). Screaming about something makes it seem compelling. Similarly, in Age of Interconnection Sperber frames the period between 1945 and 2000 as defined by nothing so gauche as power relations but by… well, notionally interconnection, but what exactly that means is never made clear. Sperber’s not so spicy as to suggest power doesn’t matter, oh no. Power decides many of the set-pieces he sets out. It’s just that power doesn’t seem to come from anywhere, or have any meaningful dynamics to it, or establish any patterns beyond “well, you can’t have everything.” It’s a long book, and it starts to feel like just anecdote after anecdote about this happened or that didn’t, with a lot of facts but devoid of a real thesis. I guess he figured you can bore people into not noticing fundamental dynamics, like the way the Cold War structured politics throughout the world or the massive revanchist campaign of upward redistribution of class power that has dominated the last fifty years. I am genuinely curious to read his first monograph, about radicalism in the 19th century Rhineland. Was he always this way?
Please enjoy these rare Mithra toe beans-