Yesteryear, Novel, Art, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Don't Read This Book, Current Culture, Tradwife, human striving
IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND READING THIS
BOOK. You are welcome to read the review
and decide for yourself, and this is a book that it makes sense to be aware of –
it will soon be a motion picture from Amazon starring Ann Hathaway and it is
being pushed in all sorts of venues, but the book reading pleasure is limited
and you will likely get as much (or more) from the film as from the book.
One of the advantages of belonging to book clubs like the
one I belong to, a neighborhood club where the hosts rotate and choose the book
when it is their turn to host, is that you get to read a variety of books that
you might otherwise not run across. This
book, as referenced above, is likely to be hard to avoid running into, but
would not have fallen into my hands of my own accord. The club was certainly surprised (and many said
very pleasantly surprised) to read
about prosthetic (glass) eyes when it was last my turn. It was a book my friend wrote – and a very
good book, indeed.
I am glad to have been exposed to the ideas in this book –
it helps me get a better sense of current popular visions of our aberrant
America that seems to be becoming mainstream, but is – I think and hope –
largely performative. Of course, when it
is being performed in the Oval Office, that is a very big stage, but I don’t
think our country, as we approach our 250th anniversary, is
currently functioning as itself and I anticipate that this perturbation will resolve
into a novel culture – that will be informed by, but not primarily determined
by, the current performative, virtual and unreal/surreal culture that this book
purports to reflect.
This is not a novel – in the usual sense. It is a script for a movie. We are not in the hands of a craftsperson who
is writing this – nor in the hands of an editorial team that is concerned about
the craft of writing. This is advertised
on the first page. After a two dimensional
introduction of the character who will be our narrator and hero, says "...the radiator was puffing hot air”.
This is not a person who has lived with radiant heat. She does not understand HVAC – or perhaps
more accurately, she is used to living with modern HVAC and has never been cognizant
of what it is like to have a radiator heat a room. And she is about to tell us what it is like
to live in house that is heated by a fireplace?
The craft of writing springs from a visceral understanding
of the human experience. I became an
analyst because of a hunger to understand that visceral experience. In this, I think I emulated Freud who, as a bench
scientist, wanted to scientifically understand people. Of course, people are not the kinds of
relatively simple systems that scientists study. They are complex and gushy, not neat and
clean.
Neal DeGrasse Tyson, in his latest book about extraterrestrial
life, suggests that if we want to demonstrate our own perhaps puny
understanding of the universe to E.T.s, we should communicate in the universal
language of the universe – math and physics.
Even if another species can’t decode the symbols for the elements, they
will understand the shape of the periodic table as something that is familiar
to them. The elements are universal and any other civilization will have had to figure them out and arrange them - in just the way we have done.
DeGrasse Tyson goes on to explain that while physics and math
are the basic building blocks, human life is just one form that life might
take. There is no evidence that our DNA
produces the ultimate living creature; indeed, other biological worlds might
create creatures that don’t even have DNA!
And DNA creates a wide range of creatures who then create cultures who
then create an infinite array of individual subjectivities, and it is the
writer’s responsibility to capture something about the particulars of a few of
those subjectivities and illustrate how they interact.
I am not a writer because my understanding of the human
condition is clunky and, as Freud said about every one of his discoveries about
the human condition, the artists had beaten him to that discovery. Frued (and I) are just able, when we are lucky, to articulate some aspect of the human condition in clunky
terms.
Well, this author is clunky, and I don’t think I would have
minded reading this book if she was, as it were, a good engineer – but she
doesn’t understand HVAC, much less the human condition. That said, there is a nugget buried in the
middle of this mess that I think is worth thinking about, so a quick rendition
of the plot, as it were, and then on to the meat:
A woman goes off from Idaho and being poorly understood by
her family to Harvard where she is poorly understood by the people that are assumed to be her peers, but, in fact, have no kinship with her. For a masterful first person telling of this kind
of experience by someone who lived it, please read Educated,
by Tara Westover. In the current, Yesteryear, rendition, the
shy, smart Christian girl, upset by the vacuous ways of the cultural elite girls
she is thrown in with, becomes smitten with a stupid, rich, vacuous son of a
Senator.
Realizing that she has made a huge mistake, she gets his
father to invest in a ranch for them in Idaho where she can hide this
embarrassing idiot away from the world, and then decides to advertise her presence
in this remote wasteland by streaming her experience as a tradwife to the world
– pretending that her family and ranch life is ideal when, in fact, she and it
are a fiction – one that she is creating almost in spite of herself.
Not surprisingly this flimsy construction crashes. What seems promising about the novel is that
the heroine is telling her tradwife story in the past tense – as recollections –
then in alternate chapters is moving forward in time in an alternate universe
where she is actually living in a frontier home – not one that she has created –
and she (and we) see how grim that existence actually was.
OK, that is an interesting vehicle – and I won’t reveal the
twist that we as readers are trying to figure out through the book. If you’ve read it, you know, and if I haven’t
convinced you not to read it yet, I don’t want to spoil it for you, except to
say that I didn’t see it coming because it didn’t actually make any more sense
than a radiator puffing heat. I’m just
saying.
So, the meat? Or
perhaps, rather, the morsel? The central
thing that author promises is that we are all experiencing ourselves as living in a maze with no way out. We feel trapped in a world that is controlled
by billionaires who have no understanding that it is our labor that allows them
to have the wealthy perks that make their lives seem so enviable. Having a tradwife be constructed as having
the perfect life on social media helps us whether we have “traditional values”
which conflict with our actual, miserable existence; or, we have more elite,
snobbish values that allow us to look down on the traditional world so that we
can believe that our vacuous existences are worth living – even though the
pleasures they provide are thin and we are headed towards the grave without
having found any meaning in our lives.
I think this is a trope, but a powerful one, used by the
media and politicians alike to inform us that we are not what I believe us to
be: humans living human lives. Until 200
years ago, most of us lived not so differently from the domesticated animals that
were likely sharing our living quarters.
And we were, if not happy, deeply invested in our lives and the
continuation of the species. Unlike the
spoiled protagonist in this book, who whined and whimpered about her previous
superior life when confronted with a lack of creature comforts, we strove to
improve our lot – we were deeply engaged in our lives; nasty and brutish and
short though they may have been.
Similarly, I think that, as much as we complain about not
having enough time, money, or pleasure, we are currently living lives that
kings and queens would have envied. We
can travel in ways that were unimaginable until recently, and we have more
information in our pockets than were contained in the greatest libraries of all
time. Are we happy? Not necessarily. Happiness is a feeling state that comes and
goes. But are we invested in our
lives? I think we are every bit as invested as our
ancestors were – and we are every bit as ambivalently as they were.
Sometimes this means that we are invested in our online lives - as if those were our real lives, rather than pale imitations, and distortions, of the lives we are actually leading. Am I concerned that the opinions I present in these posts are two dimensional or don't reflect all that I feel about any subject? Am I too pollyannaish, including in this current evaluation of our condition? I think all of those criticisms are accurate. The truth of the human condition is complicated, and our minds do much better with manipulating simple things, like how pure chemicals interact in pristine environments. Hydrogen and oxygen makes water. Simple and clean.
Human life, on the other hand, continues to be messy – and I anticipate that it
will be as long as it continues. Living
viscerally in that life, as complicated and challenging as that is – is our
fate. Art’s role is to help us in that
struggle. This book articulates a vision
– the maze and then later the labyrinth – that is certainly a way of reducing a
very complex relationship of our lives to our culture, and creating a simple equation to describe out engagement with a
new and very complicated future – but it neither provides a way out, nor does it
accurately describe our current halting complicated trek through it. Instead, it celebrates, reifies, and
simplifies the complexity of living, reducing it to a kind of periodic table of
the human elements that is the very thing it appears to be railing
against. We deserve better from our
artists and the empires that billionaires are exploiting to expand their
influence, which might, with a certain amount of irony, actually be the point
of this book…
I am curious if a movie version will actually enhance it. Will Ann Hathaway bring something to the character - as an actual human being enacting an imaginary one and thereby infusing the imaginary character with life - unlike the conceptualist - which I think this author is - creating a cartoon and putting it through its paces, an actress will have to confront, as she engages in the role, the complexities that it exposes in herself.
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