Hey all! It’s another “reviews plus Mithra pic” week, but hey, it’s four reviews! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Alderman, The Power
Liu, Virtue Hoarders
Bacharach, The Bend of the World
Binet, HHhH
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Xerox Perch
REVIEWS
Naomi Alderman, “The Power” (2016) - A kind friend and patron of the art of literary criticism sent me this book in the mail, saying he had mixed feelings about it and wanting to know my takes!
Let me start by talking about some other books altogether. For a while there, it looked like journalistic accounts of fictional genre disasters might become a big thing, or maybe it only seemed that way to me after Max Brooks’ “World War Z” was all over the place in 2006 or so (it is a profoundly 2006 kind of book). “World War Z” is deeply silly, so I didn’t appreciate how well Brooks did with it until I read a book in the same vein about an AI/robot uprising which was extraordinarily bad. Apparently Brooks also did a bad job writing about a war between people and Sasquatches? Writing! It’s not easy, folks!
No less a figure than Barack Obama (who was big-upped but not by name in “World War Z” - like I said, big time 2006 vibes) named Naomi Alderman’s “The Power” one of his favorite books of the year when it came out. It’s a somewhat more high-concept deal than “World War Z” or the robot book- women develop the power to basically shoot lightning from their hands. It starts with teenage girls, but they can pass it on to other women, and soon enough, pretty much all women can zap people right up.
So… I get this would be a big deal, should it happen “in real life.” But like… people can already kill people, women very much included. Yes, it would be convenient to be able to kill people from a distance with something that is just in your body (though there’s all sorts of limits in terms of how much juice a given woman has, how well they can control it, etc). I mean, it would be weird if half of all people just had a gun on them at all times that they wouldn’t even have to conceal, or draw to use! It would be weirder still if this situation were in-born, and gendered.
But I’m not convinced such a situation would collapse society, which it does in “The Power.” But I’m more convinced that it would collapse society – among other things, societies are maybe more delicate than we thought when I was a kid – than I am that it would result in millennia of matriarchy, and that said matriarchy would be, more or less, opposite-day patriarchy, like a world Quinn and the gang might wind up in on “Sliders.” The framing story is an interaction between a lady editor (named Naomi Alderman) and a dude writer (named an anagram of Naomi Alderman) about the dude trying to write a historical novel of the rise of global matriarchy! So, they reconstituted our society not just down to having publishing houses like ours, but also, as the book progresses, women wipe out refugee camps for fun, wipe out depictions of men ala the Taliban, etc etc.
Look, two things: one, I don’t think future histories need to be credible or even believable to be good or fun. Two, I absolutely think women are capable of abusing power. But the way Alderman handles both the unspooling of this story and the story of women proving as beastly as men just seems kind of pro-forma, a going through of the motions. Like… wouldn’t they come up with more interesting ways of being fucked up and wrong? Different ones, anyway? Given that they’ve got superpowers and all, and the different socialization of women, that first few generations who get powers at least? Why just have them replicate what men do already?
The characters and the writing aren’t awful but aren’t enough to restore the interest lost by whiffing on the execution of the premise. To probably contextualize too much, this was written around the time Black Mirror made its comeback, going from charming and subversive-seeming indie favorite to big-market, overly-lugubrious butt of “what if your mum was an app??” jokes. That’s what “The Power” feels like, to me. **’
Catherine Liu, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class” (2021) - I considered not doing a review of this, because it really is a glorified pamphlet. In this, it’s a lot like its competitor in my “let’s read unusual right-wingers” election, Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, and the resemblances don’t stop there, as I’ll discuss below. Most of the books I chose to put into that arc in my readings on the right slot have some kind of resonance with one or another vaguely zeitgeisty ideological trend: Wang Huning and the geopolitical rise of China (alas, the English translation I found was so bad as to be unreadable), Kaczynski is considered required reading by many on the accelerationist right, George Schuyler and racial pessimism, Peter Thiel and his bought and paid for Senate candidates, David Mamet and Thad Russell represent different flavors on supposed tough guy independent thinkers who are also culture war pantswetters.
Liu, for her part, is probably the writer of the lot who can least be called a right-winger, as she identifies as a socialist and anti-capitalist (George Schuyler did, too, while writing “Black No More,” but eventually became a conservative and minor National Review hanger-on). But I think given what “professional managerial class” discourse has become, and how Liu herself has used it… I first became familiar with Liu via left-wing facebook, where she used to be quite an active commenter- enough that I remembered her, despite the fact we never friended or followed each other, and I can’t recall any interactions with her (she is not on facebook, my network of choice, anymore, it seems). You can probably tell what that means: Liu was memorable because she was… and here we run into a vocabulary problem. As someone who believes more or less any reigning in of bigoted language is an attempt by nefarious bourgeois actors to police the working class, Liu herself should be the last person to point to how problematic most words a white man could use to describe an Asian woman acting outre in public could be. But, A. Liu and other… upside-down-and-backwards culture warriors on the sort-of-left aren’t known for their consistency or high-mindedness, and B. I hold myself to certain standards because of how I want to live my life. So… I’ll just say Liu made an impression on me with the vociferousness, frequency, and unsolicitedness of her commentary, all over leftbook, on any issue pertaining to the problems of what used to be called “political correctness” and is now called “wokeness” or just “woke.”
So, I was intrigued, in a car-crash rubberneck kind of way, when I saw she was putting out a book on “the professional managerial class.” The “PMC” as it’s inevitably abbreviated online is the sort of bogey-figure for the anti-woke left, and at the same time the closest they get to a coherent concept beyond “PC sucks” (which is funny… the antics of enforcers of moral codes, including those around social justice, often do suck… why do you need a big theory for this?). The idea here is that a class of people defined by their role using educational credentials to manage systems of production and reproduction use various cultures mores – lead among them “PC,” “woke,” whatever – to maintain their class position, sabotage the actual solidarity-based politics that could upend the class system, and just generally suck pretty bad.
In the good old internet way, this is a massively expanded and bowdlerized version of a relatively nuanced and modest claim made by smart people a while ago. The idea of the professional managerial class began, back in the seventies, to explain the changing makeup and role of who exactly was running the capitalist machine. It’s pretty undeniable that credentialed professionals have been increasingly important to the management of capitalism (and have been since at least the late nineteenth century), and, as Ehrenreich was pondering when she modified some of the ideas of the Yugoslav socialist thinker Milovan Djilas, a fair number of members of the sixties New Left, like Ehrenreich, were now in that professional strata. What might it all mean? I’m pretty sure “diversity trainings are stopping the revolution from happening” isn’t what they had in mind, but here we are.
Most stereotypes have some basis in fact, and there are, indeed, some pretty annoying promoters of a sort of civic virtue based on rather stilted, corporate-friendly diversity-thought out there. Some of them wind up in notionally leftist organizations and cause cultural problems, though typically not the kind that the anti-woke people would think. Moreover, it’s definitely true that a lot of organized leftists in the US and Europe have been through a lot of education and carry with them the organizational styles and sometimes the priorities of their environments – suburb, school, office job – even when they’re away from those things, meant to be antagonistic towards them.
If Liu were a clever propagandist, she probably could have restricted her pamphlet to these problems. But as I remembered from her facebook comment tirades, she really does not know where to stop. She baldly and seemingly without irony or shame makes wildly inflated claims about the power and, especially, the unity of the PMC. Apart from the kind of analytical uselessness of any category that includes the head of HR at Facebook and a shift manager at Starbucks with 90K in student loans because both went to liberal arts college and think trans people are people, there’s also just sloppiness. Here, Liu’s work is similar to that of her friend Angela Nagle, the left’s favorite interpreter of the alt-right for about six months before people started noticing the slipshod quality of her work, capped by appearances on Tucker Carlson (Liu, of course, holds her up as a free speech martyr- I really don’t think Liu can help herself with some of this shit).
Both the slipshod quality of the work, and the flaws in the analysis, can be seen most clearly in Liu’s rigid determination to break down everything into a set of dyads: there’s the PMC, which endorses the politics of identity because they seek to divide others, and there’s the working class, which has a politics of solidarity to unite themselves (Liu makes fleeting allusion to their being an actual capitalist elite in actual control of the economy but they are quickly ushered back behind the curtain). These qualities hold true, everywhere and always, throughout space and time. Bring up class or money: good! Bring up race, gender, sexual orientation: bad! I’m aware that most people who complain about cancel culture or woke culture or whatever on the left usually at least grant that racism and other “identity-based oppressions” are an actual thing it’s ok to organize against, but Liu basically does not, not in this text. It’s honestly pretty wild.
It gets slipshod, too, not just in many many “citation needed” (and “I’ve read that book, the author isn’t saying what you’re saying they’re saying when you cite –their whole book– in a footnote instead of a page number”) moments, but in things that would probably have helped her argument. Perhaps the most baffling historical lacuna to me was her treatment of the Progressives. The Progressives of the early twentieth century were mostly lawyers, professors, social workers, and other… professional… managers… whose reforms had a lot to do with making American society more rational and easier to manage. Critics, supporters, and people neutral towards the Progressives all agree on this. If there was ever a professional managerial class hand on the American tiller, it was in the days of the Progressives… and they did enough weird, bad shit (along with the good they did- they were complicated) that they’re easy enough to make into bad guys, and to lump modern “progressives” in with them- conservatives do it all the time.
Nope! Liu passed that one up. She talks about the Progressives a few times in this short book, and always in the positive, because they mostly monkeyed around with the regulatory state. They didn’t make anyone attend sensitivity trainings! They didn’t really do much with, say, labor organizing, or even income or wealth redistribution, or any kind of politics that didn’t benefit their class specifically, but it really is “talks about money + not woke = good” as far as Liu’s concerned. It probably doesn’t help that one of the Progressive weak spots was race (including against Asians, and uhhh, we needn’t get too deep into the psychology here buttttt), so, you know, being against their racism means you’re doing identity politics, and hence not doing a solidarity. To quote a line flung at Liu’s supposed maitresse Ehrenreich, that would be doing a no-growth.
Liu made the interesting choice to divide up several of the chapters in this book into baffling pairs of good, non-PMC examples of something – childrearing, sexual mores – and bad, PMC versions. Doctor Spock (not the Star Trek guy, though some depictions of the PMC have a vaguely Vulcan cast), PMC individualist childcare, very bad; Donald Winnicot, says parents can be “good enough” unlike neurotic PMC parentic, good! Winnicot, of course, was by any standard just as much a member of the PMC as Spock or any other famous psychologist. Of course, so is Liu, professor of Media Studies at UC Irvine, as she admits. But PMC isn’t, after all, despite Liu’s professed hatred of cultural explanations (weird flex for Media Studies but about what one would expect from the worst field, don’t at me about Economics, Media Studies is much worse), an actual socioeconomic category as far as she’s concerned. It’s barely a political tendency. Honestly, it’s not even a set of cultural traits, not for all Liu’s trying, not in any coherent way. It’s a way to walk backwards into calling anyone who calls you on your shit a class enemy to be crushed.
There is a legend – a poorly-verified and likely apocryphal one – that during the bloody and protracted civil war in Algeria that roiled through the nineties, one Islamist militia became undone by what it had seen and done and decided to become Islamist Satanists, massacring villagers to the dark being they became convinced ruled the universe, spiting the god they once devoted themselves to and who led them to this pass. There’s a way that whatever you want to call it – the post-left, the anti-woke left, the dirtbag left (the last a little bit less so, as they at least seem to derive some joy from life, unlike the others) – reminds me of that story. Swap out the bloodbath of nineties Algeria for the mild and entirely voluntary unpleasantness of tens twitter, which is a pretty big swap I admit… what I mean is, getting so deep into a mucky conflict that you decide that your particular circumstances (which you did most of the work to put yourself into) are so important that they deserve to define the moral universe and can generate monocausal explanations, that become a kind of warped-mirror-image of the ideology that led you into the soup to begin with.
Look: I’ve known the sort of people this book, and the anti-woke left in general, lampoons (in the case of this book, ineffectively, missing a very very broad target some very stupid people have hit easily). I’ve known a number of expensively-credentialed, passive-aggressive people who do, indeed, use identity politics, less to divide on principle, and more as a cudgel to get their way in petty disputes. It sucks. But if you actually value solidarity, as Liu ritually intones she does, page after page, you wouldn’t let petty grievances with the Martin Princes of the academic left drive you into inane analysis and cooperation with the right. I think it’s pretty clear that for a little cluster of academics and social media gadflys, leftism was always a posture, associated with a kitschy caricature of working class life, than it was anything else. When that caricature became harder to retain – work at a Starbucks or a cleaning company or a call center or a nursing home and tell me they can’t handle knowing about trans people or the existence of racism – they flounced off. Numerous commentators who shared political or social media space with these people, mostly from the marginalized communities whose organizing the anti-woke left writes off, called that this would happen long ago. Extra half star for staying fully dedicated to the bit. *’
Jacob Bacharach, “The Bend of the World” (2014) (read aloud by the author) - This was a pretty entertaining, agreeable, somewhat forgettable humor novel. Jacob Bacharach is a weird twitter habitue and entertaining guest on lefty podcasts, or was back when I listened to those more. He’s one of those small/mid-size city dudes who is all in on his small/mid-size city, in his case, Pittsburg. The main character – I’m behind on reviews and forget his name, it doesn’t really matter – is a young corporate drone from a rich family who’s wasting his life on noncommittal relationships, jobs, and priorities in general.
He then has a weird year! He meets a disturbingly fascinating couple, a bold young man and a tragic alcoholic sexy artist lady, at a party, the same night he sees some UFOs! The main character has been on the fringe of conspiracy stuff for most of life due to his best friend, Johnny (yes, I did sometimes imagine him as Johnny from “The Room,” but the author reads this in his own, non-Wiseauesque voice so it didn’t happen too often). Johnny is a gay, drug-addicted conspiracy theorist, which, if I remember Bacharach’s podcast appearances, is not too dissimilar to Bacharach himself as a teenager/young man. Johnny believes Pittsburg is the center of a massive conspiracy involving Nazis, time-tunnels, summoning alternate dimensons, and bigfoots.
The main character doesn’t really believe in all this stuff and alternately humors Johnny and tries to save Johnny from himself, his drug problems and tendency to annoy powerful Pittsburgers. Meanwhile, the dude from the compelling couple gets a job at the main character’s pointless company and offers to make the main character a soulless corporate shark like himself. Is this company, and the weird guy in particular, part of a big conspiracy? Maybe THE big conspiracy? It’s hard to say. The main character interacts with the art world, his family, his hippy artsy girlfriend and more serious tragic drunk artist second love interest.
Bacharach evokes an agreeable atmosphere of confusion as to what, exactly, the big Nazi/time-traveller/Pittsburg/bigfoot conspiracy is, intermingling it with a lot of shit both weird and mundane, but this does have the effect (especially when combined with my review backlog) of making me forget whether the conspiracy WAS real or not, and what exactly it was. At some point, the main character and the drunk sexy artist have to strike out into Appalachian Pennsylvania to save Johnny from the main theorist of the big conspiracy, who turns out to have weird designs of his own. There’s showdowns at a big weird drug/orgone party in the woods, complete with possibly-drug-induced visions of beneficient Bigfoots. In the end, some people die, and the main character decides to ditch corporate whatever and become… a landlord?! Well… this might have been before Bacharach made his turn all the way left, he was right-libertarian leaning as a young drug-addled semi-ironic conspiracy theorist… but that’s a minor point. I was worried it was going to take the path of “guy meets a weird alpha man’s man who leads him to uncomfortable discoveries,” ala “Fight Club,” “The Red Pill,” and I feel a fair number of zeitgeisty works from the last thirty years or so. That doesn’t happen! Stuff does happen, but usually without much sense of stakes. That’s not the worst thing in the world. This was pretty fun, somewhat forgettable- some of the things that might have made it less forgettable might have made it less fun, if you get what I mean. ****
Laurent Binet, “HHhH” (2010) (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) (read aloud by John Lee) - One thing about the Nazis, is most of them died like punks. Shooting themselves rather than facing justice, sniveling on their way to the gallows in Nuremberg or Jerusalem… Reinhard Heydrich, arguably the coldest, evilest, Nazi-est Nazi of the bunch, died ranting and raving in his hospital bed from a wound that shouldn’t have been fatal – the shitty sten gun they shot at him with didn’t work, he got horsehair upholstery lodged in himself from a mis-thrown grenade, it got infected because his doctors sucked. Fuck him.
Getting ahead of myself, here! This is a sort of meta-historical novel. French writer Laurent Binet talks about how he got fascinated with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, number two man in the SS, man who oversaw the planning of the Holocaust, overlord of what’s now Czechia when the Nazis seized it, one of the few Nazi leaders to even remotely resemble the “Blond Beast” Nietzschean ubermensch type. He got got by two soldiers, a Czech and a Slovak, dropped into the country by the British Special Operations Executive. After weeks on the lam, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were betrayed by a Czech resistance man, and hundreds of SS men tracked them down to a church basement. After a long siege where they shot several Nazis and refused to surrender, the two SOE men killed themselves. Among other acts of retaliation, the Nazis leveled the Czech town of Lidice and murdered all five hundred inhabitants.
It’s a great story! I think Slayer might have written a song about it… both heroic and grim. Binet does not tell it as a straightforward, historical-fiction style narrative, and talks a lot about how he learned about the lives of the people involved, how we would like to present them, how facts compel him to present them, books he read while writing this book, how he felt insecure about Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones,” a novel of Nazism that won the Prix Goncourt while he was writing it (a novel in French written by an American, to boot!), etc etc.
Meta stuff can go either way. I could see how one might not like it in this story. But I actually think it worked pretty well. “Showing his work” enhanced my appreciation for the story and its details. World War Two is such well-trodden territory, with so many layers of mythology drawn over it, that it can be hard to know what to think of it. Among other things, I see a trend where the smarter, more independent writers and critics kind of steer away from it. I get the impulse, but I think it’s good to not disengage… or maybe the little kid who loved WWII stuff in me simply hasn’t shut up yet. In any event! I thought this was pretty fun. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Xerox Perch
For some reason, we have a printer/copier/fax. We use it sometimes, documents etc. But mostly, Mithra uses it. It’s a convenient perch, and it matches!
Peter, do you have any recommendations for Ms. Gaitskill? I feel like you have reviewed a few of these but they were always kind of "meh"
https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/political-fiction-73b