Journal: A Nation Without Accountability

One of the truly unsettling paradigm shifts here in America is anticipating a diabolical world in which redress will be responded to with retaliation. Can you call the police if you know that your name will be added to a list if you aren’t white, male, and fascist? Can you settle a dispute with your neighbor if there is even the slightest possibility that the neighbor in question will rat you out to the New Gestapo? Can you legitimately defend yourself in court if all notions of jurisprudence have been permanently corrupted from the top down? If you are being exploited at your job, can you really do anything other than say yes to all overtime, throw all notions of an ideal work-life balance out the window, and not complain when you don’t get your annual raise? And if the fascists fritter away our social security or possibly seize our dutiful payments over the years to serve their own selfish ends, do you have a nest egg or a prodigious 401k to offset the robbery? (78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2023 study. National credit card debt hit $1.14 trillion back in August. The obvious answer to this question is a heartbreaking no.)

The new way will involve looking the other way — even when horrors we cannot possibly imagine right now will happen just outside our doors. Screams in the street without a community coming together to help the victim. Based on what I have observed so far, I think the majority of Americans are going to suffer through this in silence and allow the vile tendrils of unfettered authoritarianism to wrap scaly ringlets around every facet of American life. I do hope that I’m wrong. Before all this, I often joked with friends about what it would take for Americans to drag the plutocrats out into the streets. The answer, of course, is nothing. Americans are ultimately quite conformist. They do not remember the Wobblies, Shays’ Rebellion, or even the Boston Tea Party. It started with the book bans, but the fascists truly want the American public to be stupid, illiterate, and not possess a basic understanding of history. We are essentially malleable livestock to them. And they are eager for women to pump out babies, whether they like it or not. The hell of it is that it’s all going to be a primitive mimicry of all that has happened before. Recall the Mother’s Cross that Hitler established on December 16, 1938 to encourage “pure” German women to reproduce. Remember that Hitler established Muttertag as a national holiday not long after he became Chancellor in 1933. We will see a similar motherhood cult here. And there will be no accountability.

The spirit of rebellion practiced by our ancestors has been whacked out of us over generations and replaced with a dutiful commitment to corrupt leaders in power. And, as we saw from the 53% of Gen Xers and the 57% of white women college graduates who voted for Trump, there are many obdurate authoritarians around us. Not only do we now live in a nation without checks and balances, but it is clear that the people would rather bob their heads up and down and accept the most callous policies of this new status quo, even as everything — particularly accountability — is taken away from them.

Our spirit of resistance has been crushed and I see no immediate signs that it will be revived. It is as if the great labor movements of the last few years — the longshoremen, UPS, the train workers, SAG-AFTRA, et al. — never happened. There really should be rebellion in every city over what is going on, but nothing has really been organized, save for the good people behind the Women’s March planning several events. (I note that they haven’t planned anything after January 20th. Possibly because nobody knows if Trump will weaponize the National Guard and other military branches to retaliate with mass arrests and bullets against those who peacefully protest — a legitimately horrifying possibility.)

Trump and his fascists won’t just go after the more vulnerable members of our society. They are actively working right now to make all of us more vulnerable. Some truly monstrous people are being considered for his new Cabinet, including Susan Wiles as his Chief of Staff, John Paulson and Larry Kudlow as Treasury Secretary, and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The common quality of all of these proposed candidates is that they are sycophants who will always say yes. They have all been quite nimble about retaliating against perceived enemies without saying anything publicly. They don’t need to say anything publicly. Because they have their MAGA Cult doing everything they can to flood our feeds with deranged counterfactuals and insane conspiracy theories. Just three days after the election results, there have been crude and unsettling efforts on TikTok by the fascists to paint me as an unhinged maniac.

Even those teetering within some precarious middle-class tax bracket are going to see their purchasing power erode and their options for any shred of upward mobility dry up. I have to laugh over vital battles for a living wage and affordable housing becoming nullified overnight. It strikes me as absurd that vital efforts to improve everyone’s lot in life will no longer be in play. It’s as if these discussions never happened. And as we regroup and try to fight another day for some shred of accountability, the question now is what topics will be allowed into the national dialogue within the next year. We are going to see a vast and burgeoning underclass and all this could very well outdo the suffering we experienced during the Great Depression. As climate change spawns more disasters, we could very well be living under a federal government that offers nothing to help its people. One of Trump’s ideological innovations was to falsely align FEMA aid with xenophobia. And the cowardly jackals who voted for him absolutely believe this.

And I see that Netanyahu has gleefully leaned into more genocidal efforts, knowing very well that he will continue to collect his paycheck from the States for more arms to massacre Palestinians and knowing that he can manipulate Trump with ease. No difference between the two candidates, my ass.

We really should have paid greater attention to the September polls showing us that the majority of Americans support mass deportation — including 25% of professed Democrats. Goddamn, that was a huge mistake. But, hey, there was a whole lot going on. (And what’s the Venn diagram like between this xenophobic bunch and the 16 million registered Democrats who stayed home on Tuesday? Christ, I know Republicans who voted for Kamala because they understood the dire threat better than these pusillanimous weasels.). Instead of actively organizing to fight the ruling class, most Americans are looking for a scapegoat and they are quite happy to buy into illusions. They would prefer to be victims rather than fighters and thinkers and decent people. They voted to obliterate this nation and take away security and possibility from everyone.

Senator Bernie Sanders was right to observe that the Democratic Party abandoned working class Americans, that “the American people are angry and want change.” And while it’s unsettling that a vote from an uneducated nihilistic chowderhead without empathy or commiseration was on the same level as anyone considering the long game, it cannot be gainsaid that the working-class was so angry and so impatient that they were willing to destroy accountability. The ruling class won this week. They pitted us all against each other and now there is no way back.

We have ten weeks to figure this out. Ten weeks before the Orange Menace becomes the 47th President. Ten weeks to figure out a strategy. Ten weeks to figure out who we can trust and how we can outwit the vast majority of Americans who smile at us in the hall just before they inform on us to the new authoritarians. I am starting to see neoliberals blame progressives for what went down on Tuesday, but honestly it’s these sanctimonious Karens I worry about the most. They will prove just as zealous in casually ruining lives as the MAGA Cult. Sure, “Susie from Accounting” smiles at you, asks how your day was, and comes into the office with a homemade fruitcake to share with everyone. But Susie from Accounting is also going to be the one reporting anyone who is “disloyal” or who sticks out. And Susie from Accounting will love this new power she has to rat anyone who she perceives as distasteful. Accountability, predicated on a fair and neutral weighing of the grievances, has been replaced by a new evil accounting culture that will outdo McCarthyism and the Christian zealots who accused women of being witches in 17th century Salem.

The fascists are already well ahead of us. We are going to have to act and think fast. Hopefully my William Shrirer-inspired “journal” here can be of some solace to those who are on the good side. Any ideas are welcome. Thank you for reading.

Journal: Early Signs of Fascism in America

It has been only two days since the horrific election results were announced and, even in a “safe” blue spot like New York City, I have noticed an increased conformity. Everyone is now on their best behavior. Which, of course, is exactly what the Republicans want. This is why Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg showed great pusillanimity in praising Donald Trump after his victory. They fear being punished by Trump’s new tariffs, which are estimated to remove $78 billion of spending power each year from Americans. I have already heard sussurations among international friends about boycotts being organized against America. There is talk of other countries punishing us much in the manner in which we froze assets in Russia. We are about to be dropped into the worst economic quagmire since the Great Depression. And frankly we deserve it. I’m deeply ashamed to be an American right now.

Out of morbid curiosity, I listened to Bill Burr’s podcast and he made no mention of Trump. He, like Bezos and Zuckerburg, knows where his bread is buttered. And he has become a gutless and timid shell of his former self. His jokes were remarkably inauthentic and he desperately tried to pad out his show with laughter. Presumably he — like many other prominent entertainers — has been informed by his manager to not talk politics. Only two days in and the more robust truth tellers are already turning into Trump sycophants. I’m sure we will see many more disappointments. My money is on Jon Stewart to be one of the first to sell out. He did, after all, defend that vile racist Tony Hinchcliffe.

Now I was already a polite fellow, but even I have found myself doubling and even tripling down on courtesy, adding a few more thank yous even when I have already effusively expressed gratitude. After all, we have no idea who will start ratting us out once Trump’s version of a Gestapo becomes a reality. People don’t really trust each other anymore and there is an increased nervous edge to people’s laughter. I have attempted to crack jokes, but my comedic instincts seem to have desiccated. Because the thought of what is about to come is just too chilling. The thought of having to tone down my exuberant loudmouth qualities for four years in order to increase my probability of not being shot under a fascist regime is a complete affront to who I am as a human being. I am also getting my passport renewed while it is still possible.

The streets have become lonelier and emptier. People are hiding in their apartments. The liquor store in my neighborhood seems the only place where you can listen to the ribald honesty and goodhearted camaraderie that flowed like limitless wine at the start of this week, but that is now as rare as plutonium deposits. The frightening thing is that we are all falling into these new routines with a distressing ease. It seems we’re fated to accept our new fascist world faster than the Germans did after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. In 2016, there were protests against Trump the next day. But not this time. Everyone walks with a forlorn face and an unshakable fear. Nobody is having a good time and you can feel a palpable anxiety exuding from nearly everyone. It’s much stronger than the dread I recall in November 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected.

I have to hand it to Donald Trump. He has destroyed the spirit of life in America overnight. He has turned us all into people trying to save their own skin. And his incorrigible cult has continued to lie and gaslight and fabricate reality in the comments on my TikTok posts — this even when I was reporting nothing but objective facts. I did make a good faith effort to try and get through to one such MAGA cultist today, only to be received by a corpulent and pustulant face of unrepentant rage, screaming at me for “fearmongering,” despite the fact that I had quoted from Project 2025 and directly from the Orange Menace himself.

I spent much of the last two days working the phones, calling two dozen friends to remind them that I love them and that I have their backs. A few were reluctant to talk altogether, but they did text me back. The bravest among my coterie broached the question of personal retaliation. Nobody’s ever going to say this on social media, but it seems to be on everyone’s minds. My friends all agreed with me that, if it comes to it, they would rather be shot in the head than capitulate to Trump and his fascism. That’s how I knew I could trust them. But then I’ve known all these amazing people a very long time.

I have found it impossible to read or write new pages of my audio drama. Yesterday, I slipped and succumbed to binge drinking for the first time in two and a half years. But I am now sober and thankfully my worst solecism was calling a friend and not remembering the conversation we had. She was extremely kind and understanding. Yeah, I need to stay off the sauce. But I am human and deeply worried and frightened about the future.

Living seemed so easy only a few days ago. I had a happy life and a creative routine in which I pumped out five good clean pages each day. But I have been plagued by the worst depression I have felt in ten years: in large part because I cannot determine how I can possibly be myself or be social with others in this hideous new order. I have no idea what “living” is going to be like once that monster takes office again. If I can’t be lively and outspoken, then how can I be me? Will I have to flee this country? Will I have to hide people in my apartment? How quickly will they detain me? Is there a single woman in Canada who can pluck me from this nightmare, whisk me away to Toronto, and marry me? I mean, the girl I was seeing just broke up with me: amicable, no hard feelings between us. So I’m now available again. Are these pragmatic considerations or paranoia?

It is a deeply soul-destroying time to be a thinker. I’ve never really considered myself an intellectual, but I feel that the very bedrock of ideas has been permanently sullied by a populace that would rather hear the sweet white supremacist lies that Donny whispers into their ears. I fear for the intelligentsia, the academics, the librarians, and all the other guardians of thought and knowledge. I can imagine books being burned. I can imagine professors being beaten to death by MAGA thugs in classrooms. This has all happened before. Just read any book about the Holocaust. What’s particularly sickening is that Trump has silenced nearly everyone and created a system where sycophancy is the only way to make it to tomorrow. The fascists have the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and, unless there is a miracle, the House of Representatives. For the first time in a long time, I truly have no idea what our future will be. I am a solitary stranger in a nation that I once loved with all my heart. Contrary to President Biden’s speech today, I cannot see the great American experiment continuing. We are a nation lost, with a spirit that feels as if has been permanently asphyxiated.

America is Dead, But We Are Not

America, as we once knew it and as we once lived it, is now dead. The idiocratic will of a vastly illiterate and uneducated populace expressed itself yesterday at the ballot box. They opted to throw the great American experiment into the dustbin of history.

We had a good run.

Like many of you, I never thought I would see the day in which fascism would rear its ugly head in our once great democratic republic. And I am not going to sugar coat this. What we are about to experience will be more awful than even the most devoted cynic or the most prescient scholar can possibly imagine. There will be cruel and repugnant wars on people who are not white, male, hetero, cis, and wealthy. Women will become second-class citizens. We will see arrests and iniquities beyond our wildest imagination. We will see injustice and barbarism meted out on an unprecedented scale. And it will be ugly and callous and shocking.

We will see many people we love die and disappear. Some of us, including me, may not be here in five years. Because they are going to go after the most outspoken voices. Be prepared for many of the prominent figures you now trust to sell out to the new order. Because they will do everything they can to stub out the most vital lights. And they will succeed to a large degree.

All this is going to happen, whether we like it or not.

The vile chowderheads and uninformed fuckwits who decided to destroy the considerable promise that our nation once possessed will also feel the evil implications of their flippant choice. Even after it is too late, they will fail to understand how we got here. But make no mistake. They were the ones who got us here. They are the ones who are the true enemies within. They are the ones who cannot be trusted. It is now abundantly clear that there are two Americas. Those who are on the good side – and there are still many here — are now the minority.

Most people will keep their heads down. They will not be up to the new challenge. And they will come to accept the new state of affairs. Many of these self-serving cowards will casually report anyone who sticks out to the new authoritarian regime and it will be as natural as the manner in which they voted for this unhinged madman, who will likely die before his term is completed and who will be replaced by a younger and more dangerous bastard legitimized by the likes of Ron Howard and the mercantile opportunists at HarperCollins.

But we must not remain silent. Yes, the new American existence will be fraught with peril and danger and disaster. Prices will go up. MAGA brownshirts will roam the streets looking for enemies, even in blue territories. People will be detained. But we cannot remain silent. We must continue to fight and speak out, even if it means losing our lives.

Yeah, that’s the new American existence. I’m not happy about it either. But if the alternative is pledging fealty to a despotic felon and rapist who possesses no guardrails, then I can think of no other way to live. I would rather die than capitulate to the Evil Orange Menace. They can torture me and cut out my tongue. But they won’t take away my spirit. This is because I am a patriot. A patriot of the old America, which died on November 5, 2024. Don’t let them take away all that is good about you.

We must live to fight. I cannot possibly predict what the nature of this new fighting spirit will be. It could involve crossing into territory that was once unfathomable and distasteful. It could involve forging the unlikeliest alliances. But it is our duty to keep the memory of what we once had alive so that we can rebuild something beautiful after the chaos that is about to come. And that means being fiercer and more provocative in the name of good. It means sticking up for the weirdos and the outliers and the marginalized. It means supporting all the people who are telling us things that we do not want to hear. It may involve secretly hiding people in our homes.

But we must do all this.

History reminds us that fascism never lasts. Fascism is a repugnant ideology that is incompatible with all that is good about humankind. But while it exists – and it will thrive here in deeply unsettling ways for at least five years – we must do everything we can to support each other and to uphold the remaining virtues of the commonweal.

We must also be extremely careful and cautious about who we invite into our inner circles. There will be traitors eager to rat us out. There will be ravenous lowlifes quite happy to destroy our lives to save their own skin. And the people who betray us will include our families and our closest friends. Not all of us will make it. But most of us can stay alive, with our spirits intact, if we keep fighting.

Silence is not an option. This is precisely what the new order wants. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel fear. But you must not give it to them.

This will be the most difficult time that you and I have ever lived through. I am not being hyperbolic here. It’s all outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto. What I can say is that all the in-fighting on our side needs to stop. Because the only recourse we have is strength in numbers.

Do not let them destroy who you are. Do not let them stop you from living or being kind or cracking jokes. We are in for some deeply unpleasant times, but it will not last. It cannot last. It is very possible that the United States of America will fracture into territories. We will be tested in ways that we never imagined, but I can tell you this much. We are up to the challenge. We are stronger than we know. All who believe in basic decency and kindness and humanity must come together and be fearless in fighting these jackals. The bastards won the election and ended this nation, but I promise you that they will not win the long game if we fight indefatigably for the greater good.

Garth Greenwell’s Small Brain

In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems to be in there somewhere. At our fiftieth high school reunion, Pegeen Linn remembered how self-conscious she was when she acted in a high school play and had to kiss a boy on the stage in front of the whole school. She smiled at me. “And that boy was you. You had this monologue and then I had to walk on and kiss you, with everybody watching.” I discovered that this monologue was still there in my memory, untouched. Do you ever have that happen? You find a moment from your past, undisturbed ever since, still vivid, surprising you. In high school I fell under the spell of Thomas Wolfe: “A stone, a leaf, a door. And all of the forgotten faces.” Now I feel all the faces returning to memory.

– Roger Ebert, Life Itself

Roger Ebert was 67 years old when he wrote these words. He was three years away from succumbing to the awful cancer that contorted his body and robbed him of his smart sonorous voice. But what’s so deeply touching about Ebert’s memoir is how you marvel over how the man was still committed to the life of the mind. Garth Greenwell is 46. He is incapable of such reflection or humility. And if his insufferably indulgent third novel, Small Rain, is any indication of his present intelligence and late life wisdom potential, I highly doubt that Greenwell will get anywhere close to Ebert’s poignant well-lived insight in twenty years. If anything, Greenwell seems to be on the Philip Hensher career track to becoming an insufferable Tory, a pretentious cynic whom nobody really likes. Like Hensher, Greenwell is tolerated simply because the son of a bitch has prattled banality for too many years and, instead of recognizing that he has nothing original or interesting or genuinely moving to say, he just doesn’t have the decency to shut the fuck up.

Reading Small Rain is like being trapped in an escape room in which all of the fun puzzles and quirky themes have been removed and you’re left staring at soulless cinderblock walls. You slam your fists against the concrete to the point of bleeding, only to hear Garth Greenwell’s faux patrician voice over the PA system. A copy of Small Rain spits out from a secret slit onto the floor. “We’ll let you out when you finish reading.” “I don’t want to read this shit. Let me out now!” “No, you fucking mook. I am Garth Greenwell, certified literary genius. You cannot leave until you get to the last page. You will genuflect to me and provide me with four pints of your blood and your social security number.” “What’s the alternative?” “You will die in this room.”

And because you value your own life, you slog your way through an interminable and truly awful novel set In Iowa City during the summer of 2020 in which an unnamed poet tears an aorta and ends up in the hospital. And stays in that hospital. With occasional visits from his partner L. And he stays in the hospital. And he stays in the hospital. And does nothing but stay in that hospital without really revealing all that much about himself other than that he is a precious prick who talks about his days teaching in Bulgaria (hey, just like Greenwell himself!) when he’s not mixing up foreign accents (the poet speaks fluent Spanish but he can’t recognize a Colombian accent?) or throwing fits before the nurses.

In fact, Greenwell is so superficial that we learn far more about the house that the poet and L. live in than we do about their relationship. There is a meet-cute flashback in an Iowa City joint, but the only thing we learn about this pair is that the two talked about poetry for two hours and that L. in the initial courtship days didn’t speak English very well (despite being a professor?). And they are big on “alternative nights,” which extends to cooking and speaking in different languages. In other words, we have nothing but vapid shorthand and very little reason to care about this couple because Greenwell serves up nothing but boilerplate. In fact, L. is so underwritten that he is almost as stereotypical as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers, at least, had the benison of being hilarious on multiple viewings. It is believed that Garth Greenwell is so humorless that he has not laughed once since the Clinton Administration.

And the more you learn about the poet — and let’s be clear that there really isn’t all that much to know because Greenwell excels in graphene-flat characterizations, including the Lifetime movie formulaic desperation that kicks in halfway through the novel when we learn that his father abandoned him after learning that he was gay – you really want the fucker to shut up already and die. Greenwell is such a manipulative narcissist that he even throws in some body dysmorphia and sibling bullying near the end of his novel to try guilting us into sympathizing with his bland and unremarkable protagonist. Here is one such banal flashback:

I remembered my mother saying as we drove each weekend to my grandparents’ farm, at each sharp turn she would say it, this is a real death trap. It was part of her constant narration as she drove, as constant as the cassette tapes she pulled out to flip from one side to the other, Juice Newton and Kenny Rogers; still those songs can place me in the car, int eh backseat beside my brother, strapped in:I can conjure up the smell of my mother’s cigarettes, the cheap upholstery, the foam of the headrest my sister, in the front, leaned back against…

Blah blah blah. What on earth is the fucking point of this, Greenwell? Jesus Motherfucking Christ, you’re trolling us, ain’t you, ain’t you, you talentless repetitive mind-numbingly boring fuck?

(menacing crackle from the escape room’s PA system)

MISTER CHAMPION, I TOLD YOU THAT IF YOU DON’T FINISH THE BOOK, YOU WILL DIE IN THIS ROOM!

“Alright! Alright! I’m reading it, you sadistic asshole!”

And he stays in the hospital. And he whines. And he stays in the hospital. You read variations on the same tedious descriptions over and over again. You howl at the sick bastard behind the PA system, who responds with frequent laughter. Two gin-scented tears trick down the sides of your nose. But it’s alright, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. You will win the victory over yourself. You love Big Greenwell.

* * *

This is a roundabout way of reporting that Garth Greenwell has used his dubious talents to deliver one of the worst reading experiences I’ve had in the last three years. Garth Greenwell is not about life. He does not care about human beings and is thus, as far as I’m concerned, an enemy to true literature. He writes with the groan-inducing cadences of a long-winded septuagenarian about to show you his vacation slideshow in the basement. You will not find three-dimensional characters in his work. You will find plenty of gay sex (though not so much here) that isn’t nearly as bold or as vivacious or as honest as the carnality flowing throughout Alan Hollinghursts’s rich work. You will also find extremely generalized descriptive shorthand that reveals nothing, along the lines of:

the man, who was young and thin, in his twenties, a short beard visible around his surgical mask, took my arm to examine my IVs.

The man’s physical details, of course, tell us nothing about him and don’t really contribute to the atmosphere. If so, why even bring this up? And Greenwell does it again here:

He was in his midfifties, maybe around L’s age, a white guy, wiry, with a buzz cut under the red ballcap he always wore (a flag on that, too), his sunglasses perched atop the bill.

Not only is Greenwell so without imagination that he gives us a MAGA stereotype, but he even uses the same occluded hair trick for two separate walk-on characters. Or to put it another way, Garth Greenwell can be likened to a bumbling hit man showing up to a far-range job with a .22 Short instead of a sniper rifle.

And when he’s not giving us this woefully inept physicality, he resorts to the same repetitive vomiting:

He was my age, twenty-something, an actor performing in the Festival, not in any glamorous way; he was a local, an extra or maybe something more than an extra.

Garth Greenwell is around my age, actually a little younger but about my age, a writer performing in the Hot Fall Books Olympics with Small Rain, not in any glamorous way, although he does believe he is glamorous, or maybe he is both glamorous and not glamorous like Schrodinger’s cat; I sound so literary when I am pointlessly speculative; he was a yokel from Kentucky, a local from Kentucky, a huckster from Kentucky and now he hates Kentucky, a literary grifter or maybe something more than a literary grifter.

By way of contrast, here is a beautifully compact single-sentence description from Paul G. Tremblay’s excellent The Cabin at the End of the World:

Freckles dust across the bridge of a long nose that dives deeply beneath her large, egg-shaped brown eyes.

Boom! We’re in. We know so much about this woman in only a sentence and we want to know more! Greenwell is completely incapable of such economical descriptive depth.

Oh, and before i am accused of hating literature (I obviously don’t!), let me serve up a counterpoint to further demonstrate Garth Greenwell’s dereliction of descriptive duty. Here’s an excerpt from John Langan’s criminally underrated The Fisherman (Word Horde, you’re doing the Lord’s work!) describing a man who has lost his family in a car accident:

Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.

Unlike Greenwell, one isn’t vexed by the “at least polite, frequently pleasant” aside because there is a natural descriptive escalation in the language. And every physical detail spells out exactly who this guy is. Greenwell can only repeat himself like a lonely parrot braying for a cracker.

* * *

In Small Rain, you will find plentiful prolix descriptions of stuff. Lots of stuff. Not such stuff as dreams are made on, but stuff you can find on any given Target receipt. A little life rounded with a sleep indeed.

But in the public areas there was art on the walls, bright geometric abstractions or gauzy photos of Iowa scenes: an old barn, the sun setting behind it, fields of corn. One showed a stretch of prairie in bloom, though there wasn’t a prairie anymore, not really.

John Cage once suggested that if something was boring for two minutes, then you should sit with it for four. If it was still boring after minutes, try it after eight. Keep multiplying until you get to thirty-two and you eventually discover that something is not boring at all. This hideously generic passage would suggest that Cage’s credo may be one secret ingredient in the Garth Greenwell Writing School. But I’m here to tell you that Greenwell has nothing to say. Zilch! Nada! Nichego! He pads out his endless paragraphs with this nonsense. And then he throws in a half-assed reference to Walter Benjamin after all this. (No, I’m not kidding.)

a shallow wide glass on a long stem that I lifted often in my boredom

Well, you certainly bored the fuck out of me because you couldn’t just write “coupe glass.” But good on you for padding out that word count!

She returned a few minutes later, her hands full of the plastic packaging all of the medical supplies came in, endless boxes and envelopes and bags; so much plastic, I thought, as she sorted them on the counter and began tearing them open, so much waste.

“So much waste.” A rare case of Greenwell having a moment of self-awareness? Somebody hide the lexical firehose from this puffed up practitioner!

The floor in my bedroom had been badly damaged, the beautiful old wooden floors we had salvaged everywhere in the house; here they were strained beyond saving, sanded too often to sand again.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the duds of his sentences. Why does this unintentionally hilarious stab at “poetry” through mindless repetition remind me of the “life unworthy of life” mantra used to justify the evil Aktion T-4 program? And why does every picture of Garth Greenwell instantly remind me of Reinhard Heydrich? It’s certainly true that I’ve read twenty-five books on the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany ever since Joe Biden choked in the presidential debate. Still, I can’t shake the obvious metaphor. Reading a Garth Greenwell novel is not unlike a German being forced to vote for Hitler while being observed by an SS officer.

And there’s also the redundant manner in which Greenwell describes the condition of all this stuff. Is he writing fiction or product entries for an L.L. Bean catalog? One reads a prolonged Greenwell sentence beginning with the phrase “But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing…” and one wonders if whipping up zippy slogans for Madison Avenue is more his speed. He is so condescending to his readership that he seems to believe, at times, that we cannot infer for ourselves whether a pen is uncapped or whether a remote control can turn on a television:

A television hung just to the left of the cabinets, more or less where my bed pointed; I could operate it with a control that hung from a cord attached to the bed.

There was a marker clipped at the top, which she pried loose and uncapped.

It would honestly be more interesting if the doctor aggressively loosened the cap from the clip while pulling it out. But Greenwell appears to have an allergy to active verbs.

* * *

Some of Greenwell’s descriptive redundancies are outright insulting, almost as if Greenwell believes his reader demographic is somewhere between five to eight years old. We are informed — as if we couldn’t figure out the facile arithmetic on our own — that a building that is a “1970s monstrosity” was erected “after the chaos of the sixties.” A building constructed from chaos! Poetry!

There are classist overtones, such as the poet being condescending when he is told that COVID would be “catastrophic” to his medical condition and when he admits that he is attracted to L because his Spanish is “not the language of the streets but a private language.” But it’s an unearned classism. Because Greenwell simply has no concept of how people live and spend money. We are asked to believe, with astonishing incredulity, that L. — a Portuguese professor who is probably making $135k/year tops (that’s what a Glassdoor search gives me) — and the poet narrator — who subsists in the far from lucrative field of freelance writing — can not only pay rent and a mortgage, but can also spend money on credit cards and significant home repairs. (Greenwell does try and cover his ass later by pointing out that the poet is slated to be teaching classes in the fall of 2020, but it’s still unconvincing.) Does the cost of the poet’s healthcare come into play in this novel? Of course not. Clearly, L. is the one pulling the financial weight in this relationship, but it never occurs to Greenwell to investigate how money (particularly when one partner earns much more than the other) can impact a relationship. Instead, L. and the poet simply scream at each other. He may as well be writing an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Because this loathsome bastard really does have this annoying tendency to fixate on a word and riff on it in a way that reads like some illiterate yokel trying to mimic Samuel Beckett after skimming the Molloy Trilogy CliffsNotes:

there was a tremendous smile, full voltage, an American smile, a smile of triumph, I thought, a smile of that Midwestern confidence and cheer I found so odious, a pernicious smile, privileged and coddled, a smile that had never known hardship or fear, a smile of utter complacent harmony with its world, a smile I had always hated.

I haven’t quoted the full passage because simply typing it reduces me to a small animal whimpering with hunger for a substantive meal. Greenwell actually believes that if he bombards you with banal repetitive bullshit like this, you will somehow come around and declare him a sui generis prodigy. And judging from the unquestioning reception that his hopelessly desiccated work has received, his marketing strategy seems to have worked.

* * *

I last took a principled swing at this grandiose gasbag back in 2020 — ironically, only weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic — the subject of Small Rain. I received a surprising uptick in emails from some hot literary names who thanked me for writing the piece, but who couldn’t go on the public record because, as one correspondent conveyed to me, “I’ll get into trouble if I cross Garth.” Well, I have no such qualms about getting into “trouble” — in large part because the higher calling of demanding literature that isn’t predicated upon overwrought and superficial bullshit is too vital. I also despise the backscratchers and hobnobbers of the so-called literary world with every fiber of my being. They invented a smorgasbord of untrue rumors about me many years ago after what I had to say about the joys of literature was listened to with more regularity than any of the ponderous logs they dropped into the minuscule ponds of literary rags that nobody reads. One of these opportunistic shit-talkers was, in fact, Garth Greenwell.

To this very day, I simply cannot believe that anybody takes Greenwell’s pompous and atrocious sentences so seriously. Even the grumpy Dwight Garner, who gave Small Rain a pan, professes to be a Greenwell stan. But Garth Greenwell’s “success” — and it is the type of succès fou that only fools in a small circle salivate over — has more to do with Greenwell being a nimble networker rather than a writer of any real talent. He has sycophantic and untrustworthy lapdogs like Matt Bell, Taffy Brodesser-Alzer, and Sam Adler-Bell in his corner to butter his day-old bread, revealing in their undiscerning monomania that propping up mainstream dullards in high places matters more than stumping for the truly original weirdos or having bona-fide principles. But now Garth, dear Garth, Garth is his name, Oh Fucking Humorless Gasbag Garth Please Stop Writing Your Dreadful Fiction, let me forge interminable Garth-like sentences with all the dubious grace of a wino downing five shots in one sitting at a bar because it’s oh so literary, has written a Novel for Our Times! A pandemic novel! The same form that “inspired” Gary Shteyngart to capitulate to egregious navel gazing of the affluent and write his worst novel, Our Country Friends. It is a template that recalls the embarrassing rash of extremely mediocre novels that followed 9/11 more than two decades ago — with only Ken Kalfus and Jess Walter emerging out of this topical Faustian bargain with anything truly original and groundbreaking. I think it says something about our declining literary standards that, outside of Katherine Anne Porter’s moving “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” you won’t find a lot of fiction about the 1918 Spanish flu that people remember. Previous literary practitioners understood that you could never escape the platitudes and generalizations that froth to the surface when you write about a cataclysmic catastrophe. Risk-averse critics have turned this pigshit into a silk purse because job security matters more than upholding literary standards. Presumably, they also do not want to “cross Garth.”

I have insisted that Garth Greenwell has a small brain and I would like to qualify this.

I am convinced that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.
– R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art

In Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals (of which I shall later deliver more fulsome thoughts as part of my ongoing Modern Library project), he rightly argues out that art’s purpose is to offer alternative ways of existing and negotiating the universe. Art is a corrective to the moral self-righteousness of religious fundamentalism, which regulates our bodies (and permanently aligns sex with procreation, as decreed by a dubious almighty authority) when it isn’t declaring that all subjects submit with abject fealty to a fictitious deity’s sovereignty. But as religious authority has rightly eroded in the last century, artists have become forced to survive by dint of crass mercantile methods, in which the quest for differing ways of existence is interrupted by the need to paint the wife of a millionaire. It is, of course, the duty of any genuine artist to carry on this vital mission. But Greenwell’s feeble output makes it perfectly clear that he would rather surrender to market forces rather than imbue his characters with anything close to a meaningful consideration of existence. He has successfully manipulated many well-meaning individuals into believing that his mission is that of the holy artist, in large part because he writes about LGBTQIA characters. But if his gay characters are not altogether different from the heinous stereotypes populating a potboiler, then what makes him any different from some garden-variety Brooklyn writer writing another pedestrian debut novel about some twentysomething cipher trying to land a media job or find love?

Greenwell’s small-minded “effort” then is not to burden or challenge us with vital meat-and-potatoes questions, but to force us to submit to badly written and falsely tender longueurs that represent a conformist betrayal of the artistic purpose — in short, a capitulation to capitalism. If Greenwell wanted to write a “topical” novel, why then does he lack the guts to confront the moral fundamentalism of Trumpism? (Since I’ve taken Greenwell to the woodshed, I think it’s only fair to praise him on one minor point. The only page of Small Rain that I appreciated was a moment in which the poet sees how his sister has been brainwashed by right-wing news and is taking the poet’s mother out to a populated restaurant. Had Greenwell written an entire novel with such relatable human stakes like this, I would have written an entirely different essay.) Why does he traffic in such obvious observations such as the way in which physical touch became a rare commodity during lockdown? Well, it’s because he’s little more than a literary hack sitting by the sidelines, a member of the uninvolved who will never take a real risk, an obnoxious milquetoast incapable of putting himself on the front lines.

In fact, the only true sentence in Small Rain — and this one is just as grotesquely belabored as all the others — comes about a third of the way through the book:

It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery — which is always true, I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well be magic; and now my life depended on it.

Or, to read this more accurately, Garth Greenwell knows fuck all about what it is to be alive. Or if he does know, he’s certainly quite hopeless in conveying this through language! He probably knows deep down — despite his tendency to quote the “germs” line from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure at nearly every opportunity (he does it again in Small Rain) — that he is a literary charlatan. But he must carry on bombarding us with his hideous prose as if his life depended on it.

In response to being reviewed (naturally, Greenwell the bitchy capitalist pig put his “essay” behind a Substack paywall), Greenwell recently had the wildly arrogant temerity to suggest that “there’s something a little degrading in evaluation.” Mr. Greenwell, the only person who has degraded himself is you. You are the chump who wrote the shitty book: a novel gravid with empty calories that is far from “nourishing” and this is not of any “help in living” whatsoever. Are you truly that delusional? Are you sure you don’t have a cult of acolytes wearing red baseball caps? (Make American Greenwell Again?) And take your lumps like a man. You’re an immensely privileged middle-aged white guy, not a teenager. The degrading thing here would be to accept you as a god who is above reproach. I have already established in two essays (and numerous examples) that you cannot write a smooth sentence even if a terrorist held a gun to your head. You literally have nothing to say about human existence that I haven’t seen more eloquently and originally expressed in the perhaps fifteen thousand books I’ve read over the course of my lifetime.

Of course, if Greenwell does learn how to write a sentence without shoving his Brobdingnagian head up his own asshole, then I will be the first to commend him. But it’s clear that such a day will never arrive. No argument that I promulgate will deter Farrar, Straus & Giroux from continuing to publish further drivel from this wildly arrogant impostor. And all of literature suffers when mediocrity is propped atop the dais.

Thou Art Mortal

They drop. One by one. Not like flies. No, these vital spirits soared so high above the earth that it is tragically inconceivable when you learn that they are gone. Permanently. And as they disappear, their flesh rotting ignobly inside the cinnabar chambers of the dead and the veracity of their former vivacity powering mighty metropolises you didn’t know they constructed inside your mind, you are reminded of how increasingly invisible and vulnerable you are. You are not dead like them. Not yet at least. But you will be dead sooner than you think. You are not quite forgotten although the texts and the calls and the emails and the social invites attenuate as you become a more exclusive and less desirable prospect with age. It is harder to plant new hitches with the other mischief-makers. You know the ebullient minds are out there, but they have become lost in the insufferable noise of who’s the best. It’s not who is the best. It’s who feels and thinks the most. It’s who has the stones to be completely truthful, though gently and lovingly so. It’s who does the most solids without consideration of reciprocity. And as your truth burgeons into one of complexity and nuance as you rack up more life experience than even the most exactingly tabulating mind can track, the quest for who remains among your ilk grows harder.

You feel more disposable somehow, but more giving. More loving. More present. And you wish that this feeling had been actualized much earlier in your life, even though it was always there and it only required the secret sad ingredient of loss to bake the ironclad bonds that endure.

You wished that you could have tamed whatever solipsistic beasts had roared before they buckled out of the gate. You’ve seen how others succumbed to late age narcissism you didn’t quite possess. And now you know, as the minutes become evermore precious, that they did so because they had no other way of coping or behaving. We all delude ourselves in one way or another. Most of the time, it’s that constant navelgazing, that incessant self-interrogation and self-immolation that backfires upon you years later like some aging car incapable of passing the yearly smog check.

But the self is overrated. Nobody cares about the preening anxieties and the careening fears that keep you stirring in a cold sweat beyond midnight. Even when you express these to others in the clearest and most vulnerable and most mindful terms, they simply won’t perceive it or practice it the way you do. But that also goes for loving and giving and being present. Nobody sees the world the way you do. Maybe centuries from now, some genius will crack the social code so that there isn’t so much of a divide. That is, if the robots, who are now honing martial arts skills, don’t destroy us first.

But sometimes you get lucky and you meet a soul of limitless depth who is on a similar journey. If you’re really lucky, they stick with you for life.

But what if they don’t make it while your engine still has a good deal of mileage? What if you’re minding your own business, dipping your morning spoon into a granola bed shrouded with yogurt, and you get the text that they passed? Then what? Well, unspeakable grief for a start. And the sense that your world is becoming much smaller soon after.

Before fifty, these alerts happened every once in a while and it made you sad. But what if two people you know drop dead on the same day? That had never happened to me until yesterday. And I was ill-equipped to contend with all the sorrow and the feelings of unbearable loss that mopped up every last ounce of my usually robust and exuberant energy and that caused me to sleep for an obscene number of hours. I put up a good front, as I always do, when I entered into the world. But, oh, I was crying behind closed doors. Remembering a wonderful evening with my now dead ex, one of the first women to call me sexy and truly mean it, as the two of us fooled around to She Wants Revenge’s first album playing on repeat and watched the sun rise and talked about how awesome Emma Goldman was. And I recalled how smart and witty and beautiful she was. I remembered her full punkish splendor. Perhaps that memory will die with me. That’s the other great tragedy. So much human experience lost to time.

What’s happened with me is that I have grown angrier and less tolerant of those who eschew compassion and empathy. Of those who are conveniently selective towards those outside their myopic sphere, almost always out of spite and bitterness and almost always functioning with that supercilious streak that often walks hand in hand with stupidity.

Technology has given us the power to connect with each other, to find our fellow weirdos, and yet I feel that most people understand each other with less acumen than they did before the invention of Netscape Navigator.

It’s strange to me that the most expensive human rituals are weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. What of everything in between? Life should be defined by more than coming of age, death, and who we decided to marry. This is stuff for the census takers, not for the celebration of life.

Human beings are more than mere insects. And the loss of someone you know is hardly on the level of a fly being swatted.

We only start to understand mortality when we’re in our last decades. Herman Melville once called mortal greatness a disease. And when even the great 19th century Bard of New York is uneasy about this state of affairs, you have to wonder on some level if you’re as crazy as Ahab to care and feel so much about the friends, family, and lovers you lose. Well, I’d rather be sick with sorrow than to feel nothing at all.