Hey all! I’ve been having fun all day so I almost forgot to do this. Almost!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement
Yu, Interior Chinatown
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Beautiful!
REVIEWS
Christoper Caldwell, “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” (2020) - It’s getting on towards the end of the year, and so I find myself thinking about the best and worst books I’ve read lately. Since I’ve instantiated “readings on the right” as a slot in my book rotation system, I can rely on it (and the random crap I read for birthday lectures) to fill up my “worst of” list. I don’t feel great about that, as it makes me look like I have an ideological litmus test for quality, which I don’t. It is what it is, as people now say, and I can console myself with the several literary libs who have also made this year’s shitlist so far.
But the bottom three — the ones that have earned my “half-star” rating, for those playing the home game — are all shining examples of contemporary right-wing brain rot, the sort of thing that really makes you (or, well, me) wish we could restrict their (ab)use of the English language for the aesthetic good of society. And they’re three quite different examples, which pleases me as much as I’m going to get pleasure from dogshit like this. Michael Mahoney, you may remember, is a boy nazi who has tried his hand at avant-garde literature and produced nothing but bloviation and commentary on lifestyle choices. I guess in this triptych he’d represent the contemporary right trying to be cool and cutting edge. Andy Ngo produced his pants-wetting “journalistic” account of the dangers of antifa, a laughably cack-handed and incompetent work. There’s the right as brave, honest truth-tellers, above ideology.
And then we come to Chris Caldwell, a journalist of sorts and a Claremont center hack (Claremont is a California school/tax-dodge whose lit review came to some prominence on the strength of having a sufficiently undiscriminating digestive tract to swallow Trumpism without the show of gagging other right wing rags made). Here we have the contemporary right trying to be intellectually relevant. One thing you can say for Caldwell is that he’s not trying to get intellectual relevance by aping anyone on the post-Buckley tree of conservative intellectuals. He’s too coy to come out and say “Trump is great” (his coyness is one of his nauseating qualities) - but he has to be able to express enthusiasm for Trump, his program, and what he represents. And he has to do so in a way that doesn’t come out of the box compromised by what a certain portion of Trump’s base — and something tells me this guy has browsed 4chan and congratulated himself for his edgy currentness in so doing — would call “countersignaling.”
And so, “Age of Entitlement.” I suppose I could, if I wanted to, applaud the ambition of this book, an attempt to read the whole period from the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to the beginning of the Trump campaign in 2015 from a Trumpian (but coy and faux-reluctant) lens. But what distinguishes sweeping, ambitious historical readings from your uncle bitching on Facebook about kids these days? Well, a carefully constructed argument based in sources and a publisher’s imprimatur, generally. Caldwell has the latter, alas.
The thesis here is pretty simple: the Civil Rights movement, and it’s legal denouement in the Civil Rights Act and associated laws, upended the United States Constitution and ushered in a radical new understanding of governance in the US (file under “things conservatives believe that would rule if they were true”). Instead of a nation of laws and limited government, we became a nation of judicial fiat and big government. Rather than limiting behavior, civil rights laws made affirmative guarantees and empowered the federal government to make those guarantees real. It started with guarantees to black people but extended to women, other people of color, gay people, etc. This in turn can be understood as an instantiation of a class revolution- the dread Professional Managerial Class doing in their betters, lording it over the poor working stiffs and making them take sensitivity trainings in the bargain. By the end of the book he’s calling white men “second-class citizens.”
Christopher Caldwell’s Wikipedia entry refers to him as a “journalist.” Journalists can and have produced fine works of history. Journalists, the good ones anyway, have a respect for sources. But Caldwell does not. Most of his sources appear to be anecdotes from journalistic profile pieces. He repeats the kind of ludicrous claims that have become stock-in-trade for idiots, cutouts where knowledge would be, like that one that claims that every dollar any American governing body has spent on anything other than the military between (whichever year, usually sometime around when “those people” started “acting up” in a way the cracker in question started noticing) and (now) equals spending on “welfare” or “social justice,” therefore constituting “the most expensive failed social experiment in history” or whatever. Like the “100 million dead from communism” number, it’s a ridiculous claim, and unlike the communism one, doesn’t paper over anything real, just a category error. But who cares? It’s a meme. It’s all memes- one way in which Caldwell really has been “red-pilled” since his Weekly Standard days. That’s the quality of argument here.
I was curious what would happen when this ding dong got to Reagan and neoliberalism. How was he going to frame a story of expanding government power through decades of rule by politicians of both parties slashing the welfare state and denouncing “government as we know it?” Well, that was my turn for a category error. Because I have a class analysis, I understand what Reagan and Clinton did as part of a class war, a highly successful one- retrenching the scraps of power previous generations of workers wrested from the bourgeoisie. But this guy is actually dumb enough to be paid to write about politics and still think “government” exists in an existentially discrete category, subject to binary switches you can toggle- “small-good; big-bad.” And, of course, he’s both a right-winger and a member in good standing of the upper classes (even as he plays populist at times), so he doesn’t give a shit or notice what happens to poor or working people under these conditions. The government in some sense stayed the same size or got bigger (mostly due to police and military power but ok), gays got more accepted, immigration continued, the news was bad, Reagan or no Reagan. I shouldn’t have expected different.
Of course, if you think of “government” as a thing in and of itself, a building downtown sending out orders and goons according to its own logic, the “second class citizen” business as applied to privileged people the law attempts to blunt the privilege of — white men, usually — makes more sense. This is as good a reason as any to not make that category error, and one of the reasons why the Republican Party and the conservative movement could so easily get swallowed by someone who would say the quiet parts loud. The list of things you need to think in order to wedge such an understanding into the other accoutrements surrounding it — from the expansive power all of these people, libertarians included, want to give the cops, to the long long history of government action specifically propping up white supremacy up to and including literally conquering a continent and handing government land to white squatters and railroads, to a completely fictitious “freedom of association” Caldwell somehow finds in the Constitution — is… long. Arguably, that list is coextensive with white American culture (as opposed to other cultures to which white Americans can and sometimes do belong). Many of its greatest proponents think it’s not long for this earth. Let’s hope they’re right, for once. ‘
Charles Yu, “Interior Chinatown” (2020) (read by Joel De La Fuente) - Another way in which white Americans have been absurdly lucky: many of the “white ethnic” groups came to social acceptance at a time when literature was taken halfway seriously. The most dramatic case in point is the rise of Jewish talent in American literature after World War II (by this time most white American Catholic ethnic communities, after flirting with social realism when that was cool in the thirties ala James Farrell, deracinated all their writers when they produced them at all). Guys like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow came to prominence in an era when you could become famous by writing serious, ambitious literature, and I say this as a guy who doesn’t like Bellow and runs hot and cold on Roth. They could say what they had to say about being an American Jew — it was a lot — and say a lot of other stuff in many different ways, to say nothing of saying it all in a context of broad-based economic prosperity.
None of that holds anymore, and it sucks pretty hard, I’d imagine, for people from ethnic communities that produce a lot of people in a class position to break into literary fame, and for readers more generally. There’s a Tantalus element to the situation. Everyone, notionally, who reads anything other than what Fox News shills at them to fill out cheap ad time, wants to hear about difference from diverse voices. Our universities duly stamp out many many ambitious young scribblers from more and more communities, mostly communities of color (you could argue recent immigrants from Eastern Europe count too, and there are weird quasi-ethnic elements of how literature receives poor whites from some parts of the country). Like Roth’s New York area Jews before them, these writers and their communities have had to make difficult adjustments to American life and constantly second-guess what their (valid, impressive) success means in the face of both racism and life’s general absurdity. All the tools are there in abundance like never before, from word processors and the Internet to every kind of inspiration, every source of color, available at the touch of a button.
All this has been a decent spur to the creation of books- but not, necessarily, to the creation of quality literature, of an exploration of contemporary life and its contexts or of artfulness or experiment in literature, and certainly not the two combined. Newly intellectually prominent ethnic communities are faced with a situation that does not reward literary quality or risk-taking. Publishers are cautious in a way they weren’t during an era of cheap paperbacks and a public that saw the consumption of difficult and/or daring artistic production as a marker of class status. Neither of those were necessarily noble (well, cheap paperbacks are, in my opinion), and the stuff that came out of it wasn’t always great. But it was different. It’s ironic that writers today can now be lumped into the category of “content providers” when, in fact, the actual content of their works is of decreasing relevance. What matters is what boxes they can tick off for the company producing them and the readers consuming them. This does not for quality literature make- you get a lot of secular sermons, a lot of try-hard bullshit, and a lot of not-try-hard-enough bullshit, too. A lot of the better fiction writing that pertains to ethnicity comes from writers immersed in genre, like Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen Graham Jones.
Maybe it’s the Marxist in me, but I have to think the class positions involved have something to do with it, too. Roth, Bellow, Vonnegut (not a Jew, but with German roots when that meant something), none of them were exactly poor or working class. But class divisions, especially within expanding postwar universities, were less salient (especially among white people- more of their/our infernal luck) than they are today. Look up the biographies of contemporary literary lions who write about their ethnic experiences and they’re pretty impressive- fancy schools, often fancy jobs they did before writing, prizes of all kinds. That these are in no way representative of their communities as a whole — couldn’t possibly be, Harvard doesn’t have enough dorm space for it — is part of the problem. That being a winner from a marginalized (but, key, internally stratified) group now means something different than it did in the mid-twentieth century seems to be part of the problem.
All of which is a very long way of getting to a profoundly mediocre — I’d go ahead and say bad — book that has gotten a lot of good press, Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown.” How much of this is marketing, how much any of it will last beyond a season, it’s hard to say, but this has been hailed as a definitive statement in the literature of one of the largest (and most diverse- more on that anon) groups I’m talking about, Asian-Americans. Yu is very much in the category of ultra-impressive resumes you get on writers these days, and worked in a white-shoe law firm before deciding to write full time (he’s not a bad looking guy, either, another recent development in authors- they tend to have it going on, physically, these days). Big, or anyway highly credentialed and talked up, talent, community that wants to be heard, surely he has something to say?
Well… yes and no. Let’s get a description out of the way first, which among other things gets into Yu’s forms, which to the extent there’s a selling point here beyond “big Asian-American literary statement,” is it. This is the story of a guy who goes through most of the book being called Generic Asian Man. He’s called this because the novel takes the form of a screenplay! All the world’s a stage, or anyway, a production set for a hacky police procedural. The main character is forced to play Generic Asian Man over and over again in role after role. Yu is not shy about making this the central problem of Asian-Americans, especially Asian-American men (women are “The Girl With the Almond Eyes” until they become “Old Asian Woman”). He does that thing you get in metafictions where the whole thing is an obvious metaphor, but the author escapes from the obloquy assigned to allegory (never got why allegory gets such a bad wrap, and from Tolkien too!) by keeping it vague as to whether the action in the novel is meant to be taken at all literally. But in any event, we see some of his life as he gets the chance to play an important side-character in a hacky cop show called “Black and White” (can you guess the races of the protagonists?), marries and screws up his marriage, but also has various surreal encounters culminating in being arrested for some sort of Generic crime and having to defend his Asian-Americanness in court, or something.
If there is a central problem in contemporary anglophone literature (and peeking over the Anglo fence to figures like Michel Houellebecq and Karl Ove Knausgaard, I’m not sure it’s much better in other languages), it’s an utter inability to commit to anything worth committing to- and this includes committing to the bit. It’s funny- comedians can do it, in some cases to the point of monstrosity. But with all the political and social change we’ve seen since the return of history circa 2001-2008, and with seemingly good intentions on the part of so many expensively educated people, literature can’t seem to nail commitment.
So, “Interior Chinatown” does not commit to the “all the world’s a stage” bit. It is, in fact, highly self-serious (for all of its jokes, few of which land) and ends in a long long sermon (there’s a kung fu fight after the sermon, which is both Yu’s best joke and a transparent toss to whoever has to make a movie out of this lame book). Some of the better sections of the book, in fact, describe Generic Asian Man’s parents' lives, back in that generally-more-literary midcentury period. Yu unrepentantly milks the experience of midcentury Asians for pathos in what is, let’s recall, the story of a contemporary Generic man (who… may or may not work fairly successfully in show business? I guess Yu was trying to say he does, this might not have been the best choice for audiobook), despite the profound differences in situation between him and them.
What would a story of Generic Asian Man trying to become his beau ideal — Kung Fu Guy! the best Hollywood offers Asians! — look like if it committed to the bit? What would it be without the descent into family story, the stuff about divorce, and the speechifying about why Asians aren’t considered real Americans in the end? Well, it would be… a light novel! Perhaps not unlike that other Asian publishing phenomenon, “Crazy Rich Asians,” in that regard- self-aware, more formally experimental (though not in a way a sitcom couldn’t reproduce, and has), but mostly farcical. Yu isn’t quite funny enough to pull that sort of thing off, but light novels are quite honorable- arguably, that’s what P.G. Wodehouse, one of the all time greats of English language literature, produced.
The problem here isn’t Yu’s descents into pathos on their own, or even the ineptitude with which he shifts into these descents (though the latter is a problem). There’s some serious, serious lumping involved, on axes of class — Yu the white shoe lawyer/bestselling author speaking for a community whose working class majority faces much bigger problems than getting cast in cool roles — and origin — something tells me him claiming to speak for literally every American with roots in Asia, including casually throwing in South Asians and Middle Easterners into the malaise he fights, flies more with white readers than anyone else — but you could still make a decent novel with ideological holes. Hell, a lot of great novels are, like, eighty percent ideological holes!
I guess what makes this novel lousy is a gestalt of all of these problems and a general lack of funniness in the supposedly funny bits or interest in the bits that aren’t supposed to be funny. Maybe it’s also disappointment. There was a point, a sort of first draft of multiculturalism, where it seemed like diversity might actually improve American literature on some axis other than bare representation (which is an improvement! If dull writing is going to be a thing, people of color deserve the same chance to be rewarded for being dull as us whites!). Ishmael Reed, for instance, went out of his way to promote writing from outside establishment circles on every ethnic and class basis he could. He did this because he thought it would transform American literature in terms of form and content beyond the representational benefits- he could be cruelly cutting towards writers of color who he thought carried establishment writers, and he made a lot of enemies that way. Enemies or no, he was pretty successful, helping launch the careers of writers who did pretty well… for a while. But you can’t waltz into Harvard Books and grab a copy of a Shawn Wong novel (I’m sure the employees would order you one that’d be there in a week or two, but you know what I mean). Reed won in that he survives at all- he lost, in that the culture went in an altogether different direction. “The armies of this age are weak,” to quote another guy who literature also didn’t follow, but could have, to our benefit.
We’ve lost so much in the last few decades that we’ve lost the dream that we can get something other than sitcom material or rich kid masturbation in serious literature. That one of the central dreams we lost is also the name of a godawful sitcom that people pat on the head for formal experimentation that would have seemed crusty in Reed’s heyday — “Community” — is just an ironic insult to add to our injury. It’s pointless to pick on Yu in particular for these problems. “Chinatown Interior” is a symptom, not the disease itself, and there’s way worse out there. But I read it and it sucked and here I am. I’m not in charge of what any community, certainly not the Asian-American community, should like or want, but, from the cheap seats, it deserves better than this. **
LAGNIAPPE
Look at how beautiful Mithra is. All my friends admire her