On Literary “Influence,” Success, and Resentment

I decided to read Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi — released this week — on the basis of a controversy that erupted last summer. Conroe had allegedly appropriated the work of Sam Pink. I’ve exposed plagiarists before. I’m always happy to do so again. Plagiarists are great enemies to anyone committed to creativity and originality.

But I’ve compared dozens of passages from Fuccboi against Sam Pink’s work just to be sure. Fuccboi isn’t a plagiarized work. It definitely owes some influence to Sam Pink. But it’s hardly the grand theft that Pink advertised it to be.

Fuccboi is an okay book. Nothing special. Not really all that “fearless” — to use a buzz word that’s been tossed around by the hype machine. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It just didn’t grab me. I honestly don’t care enough about the book one way or the other to write an expansive opinion.

The Conroe-Pink controversy is actually something far more cliched than an act of plagiarism. It’s a case where someone who deserves more success complains about someone who actually has success. A tale as old as time, except with an eager social media poised to pounce on the key players.

This was something we saw with the controversies that have plagued Kristen Roupenian. Roupenian had great success with her short story, “Cat Person,” which appeared in The New Yorker and went viral. She then netted a $1.2 million advance and an HBO development deal with her collection, You Know You Want This. And the weirdest thing about the reviews is that male reviewers were largely okay with the book while women went ballistic. Why? Because they were resentful. They were the ones who deserved all the gravy! In The Washington Post, Emily Gould devoted most of her “review” complaining about Roupenian’s success, even writing, “I felt absolutely enraged by its weaknesses.” Enraged? You’re just angry because you didn’t land the big book deal. Then, last summer, Slate stepped into the manufactured media smackdown and published an essay from Alexis Nowicki pointing to certain details that Roupenian had inadvertently plucked from her life. Turns out that Roupenian met up with a man who had a much younger girlfriend (Nowicki). She heard some of the details and used her imagination to jump off from them with “Cat Person.”

Now this was hardly Wallace Stegner plucking verbatim from Mary Hallock Foote’s letters in Angle of Repose. But apparently it was enough to enrage Nowicki. Nowicki emailed Roupenian and Roupenian replied with a considerate note of apology.

But come on now. As Lauren Groff tweeted in response to the Roupenian social media uproar, “I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets.”

Which brings us back to Conroe and Pink.

On August 15, 2021, Sam Pink published a blog post, claiming that Conroe completely stole his style and publishing correspondence between him and Conroe. “You’ll see the influence,” wrote Conroe to Pink. “My only hope is you won’t feel it to be flagrant. That you’ll view it as flattery. As gratitude. People go around with this idea of originality, where they tryna front like they got no influences. My shit is, fkn draw from everything you fuck with most. But then shout out who you fuck with. Pay homage to the Ogs.”

But Pink certainly didn’t see Conroe’s email that way. In his post, Pink wrote, “In addition to him admitting it, there is similar slang in the book, it’s divided in seasons like garbage times, the opening is very similar to garbage times, he even uses the trick from person where a word scrolls through his head.”

Conroe’s novel certainly has a loose nod to the structure of Sam Pink’s The Garbage Times. Both novels open in January. Like Pink, Conroe is fond of using truncated and often verbless one-sentence paragraphs to generate reading momentum. And he did indeed “use the trick” from Person.

But is this outright plagiarism? On the level of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams ripping off Marvin Gaye? No. Anyone who reads knows damned well that authors test out their own spins on other author’s stylistic tricks. Pink himself is no exception.

In The Garbage Times, Pink shows, to my mind, a clear debt to Martin Amis by including a ruffian named Keith — a wastrel with “slicked-back hair and a boiled-looking face” and “tiny busted teeth.” Amis, of course, has slicked-back hair, has had dentition issues, and, of course, included a memorable scoundrel named Keith Talent in his very underappreciated novel, London Fields. Amis’s Keith wears a silver leather jacket. Pink’s Keith wears a leather trenchcoat. Amis’s characters in London Fields smoke half-cigarettes and Pink’s Keith also smokes a half-cigarette. Should Amis raise a stink against Sam Pink? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Especially for a man of his age and renown.

This is really about resentment.

And, look, I get it. I’m not a jealous or a competitive person. But during moments in my life when I have felt devalued and hopeless, I have become pissed off when mediocre “talents” who have hurt me in monstrous ways go on to have success. A pair of two-bit lowlifes in the audio drama world who led a vicious campaign to defame me get their audio drama adapted into an awful Netflix TV show? What the fuck? It’s only human to feel upset when your hard and careful work is devalued and underappreciated and someone else comes along and reaps all the success and riches that were seemingly denied you.

But moments like this are incredibly rare for me — usually arriving at the worst and most depressing moments of my life. I’m too busy focusing on getting better at my craft. That’s what I can control. I have no sway whatsoever over who gets selected to shoot into the stratosphere. And I try not to pay too much attention to it. It’s a waste of time and energy.

Sam Pink is a talented novelist who should be more widely read. Personally I feel that he has far greater talent than Conroe. And it’s criminal that he didn’t land the coveted $200,000 publishing deal.

But it’s a waste of time to let someone who is successful — especially someone who isn’t all that talented — live rent-free in your head.

The Other Side of Being Kind

This happened just before the pandemic.

I met her as I was heading to a bar after hitting quite a few other ones. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the other bar. She was in her early thirties. Her dark hair flowed down her shoulders in a tangled and confused mess. She wore several layers of mismatched clothing and she moved in the somewhat jerky and protective manner of someone who was accustomed to being hurt and demeaned on a daily basis. Occasional winces. A thin arm that often popped up to protect herself even as she made a valiant good faith attempt to connect. I could tell that she was someone who had been very open with people before she had fallen on hard times. Her limpid eyes singled me out and she seemed to see a tenderhearted light in me. She said hello. I said hello back. And we talked.

She sang me a song, one she had written, and she had a beautiful voice. She told me that she had been homeless for months and that she didn’t have any place to sleep. She told me a few things about herself and she seemed to me a pretty decent and severely hurt soul. She told me that she was very hungry. So I took her to a bodega to buy her a hero. She had been in New York for a few months and she had stayed on the streets the entire time, but nobody had bought her a hero before. She was clearly unfamiliar with how sandwiches worked in Brooklyn bodegas. She thought that I was buying her a gyro and she asked for sprouts. The guy at the bodega, seeing her and me, gave me a wink and a thumbs up. And that creepy assumptive gesture really pissed me off. Because I had no designs. The only thing I wanted to do was to help her. Probably because I was lost myself.

I could smell her pungent odor. So I said, “Would you like a shower?” I told her that I had some leftover shampoo because I had just shaved off my latest beard and she could use the shampoo to clean her hair. She said that she trusted me and we went to my apartment. I made sure she had a fresh bar of soap. I made sure she had a fresh towel and luckily I had a brand new toothbrush for her to use. Then she finished cleaning herself up and got dressed and opened the door and emerged from the bathroom and I offered her a beer and she jumped on me and tried kissing me with an almost animalistic instinct, the kind of thing you do when you really need to survive. I gently pushed her away. She offered me sex in exchange for crashing at my pad and, when I was making my bed up for her, she tried to go down on me and she tried to move my hand on her body. And I stopped her and I said, “No, that won’t be necessary. Please. I’m not that kind of man. You can stay here tonight unconditionally.”

I did, however, record her singing. Because when she first walked into my apartment, she saw one of my microphones mounted high in the main room and she wanted to sing. But she didn’t have a phone. And she didn’t have an email address. And so I have this recording of her singing that I’m not going to share with anyone and, I suppose, if she ever contacts me again, I can give it to her. Then I made sure she was comfortable in my bed while I crashed on the couch.

I only got bits and pieces of her story, but I learned enough about her to know that pretty much every other man she’d met had used her and that the quid pro quo she had offered me was pretty much par for the course. And I hated myself for not being able to do more for her. But at the very least, I could treat her with dignity and make sure she was fed and showered and had a MetroCard with a few rides on it. She declined my offer of breakfast.

She said that I was a very cool person. And I told her that I wasn’t that cool. I asked if she had gone to a shelter and she said that she had, but that it hadn’t worked out. I did my best to urge her to call her family, offering my phone. But she declined. I asked her what she’d be doing that day. She said that she’d be spending the day wandering around Times Square. And it broke my heart. But at least I could help her for one night and treat her with a kind of respect she didn’t usually receive. I asked her if she wanted one of my books. Something to read while she tried to survive another day. And she slipped my copy of Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? under her coat — largely because she thought the idea of a “frog hospital” was very funny. When I escorted her to the subway station, she told me that she felt it was going to be a very good day. And I really hope it was for her. When we parted ways, I spent some time thinking about her for a while, hoping that she would get back on her feet, wondering if I did enough. But I did the best that I could with what I had.

I was shaken by what happened, in part because there was a time in my life not long ago (and maybe even not far in the future) in which I could have been some version of this woman. And it has me wondering if my sincere efforts at kindness arise in some way from a baleful solipsism. I feel uneasy about chronicling all this because, even in mentioning the facts here, I fear that I have painted myself as a hero. But I’m far from a hero. I’m just a wildly flawed human being.

That morning, I got a call from my incredibly sweet and deeply spiritual friend. She has an uncanny instinct for checking in on me at the right moments. And I apparently possess the same timing with her. I told her what happened. We got to talking about how so many people who mete out benevolent gestures towards the marginalized are besmirched. My wise friend reminded me that there have been many saints in human history who have been inexplicably belittled and badmouthed. One can look no further than Hippolytus’s castigation of Pope Callixtus I. Pope Callixtus I, an incredible bishop who is justly celebrated by the Catholic Church, was condemned because he extended absolution and forgiveness to those who had committed sexual transgressions. He was upbraided simply for having the stones and the instinct to be merciful. I certainly do not consider myself to be a saint and I am often not sure if I am a good person, although I certainly try to be. In chronicling the details, at least as I perceived the situation, I am wondering if I am not acknowledging my faults or even fully reckoning with my privilege. Could I have stopped the woman from kissing me faster? Yes, but I was extremely surprised and very tired and thus slightly delayed in my response. Could I have done more for her? Maybe, but I had just paid off a huge bill. The one thing I knew that night was that I had the ability to help someone and that I couldn’t bear the thought of this woman sleeping on the streets. How many times has any New Yorker passed by one of the countless thousands of people who need our help, not once considering their perspective? Is my good act diminished by other actions in which I have kept my head down on the subway when someone has asked me for help? Am I truly doing enough to help other people when there are other times in which I don’t have the energy for it?

The problem with being kind is that we are inevitably forced into a situation in which our actions are perceived as pious absolutism and further promoted on social media. I think of all the self-aggrandizing TikToks in which people depict their professed acts of kindness for likes and follows. It is the same perceptual problem that we see in those who we deem evil: namely, that evil people are incorrigible monsters who are incapable of change. Both hard archetypes fail to account for the vaster middle ground that all human character is rooted in. Yet we must be good. And that goodness must emerge by unprompted natural instinct.

In Phenomenology of Perception, existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed that “living” was defined by what he deemed “circumscribed absences,” which is to say, in plain English, that heartfelt life and everyday behavior both contain certain qualities that can only be understood through the body and by the physical gestures from which we assign and interpret motivation:

The meaning of a gesture thus ‘understood’ is not behind it, it is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture…[i]t is arrayed all over the gesture itself — as, in perceptual experience, the significance of the fireplace does not lie beyond the perceptible spectacle, namely the fireplace itself as my eyes and movements discover it in the world.

If Merleau-Ponty is correct, it’s quite possible that what we comprehend as “being kind” can only be interpreted through the structure of the world. But if the structure of the world leaves little room for expressive variation — and during the pandemic, we find our faces covered by masks, our bodies increasingly removed from public space, and we leave far too many in the cold — we seem forever fated to be enmeshed within a structural construct hostile to natural kindness in which we have no control. If the structure of our world is further vitiated by the vicious construct of social media — itself an imperfect representation of tangible experience and palpable reality that rewards self-serving networkers and the savage wolf pack mentality — then the benison of a kind gesture becomes lost in the miasma of blind spots and a failure to grasp human totality — this at a time when we really need to know and feel it most if we hope to solve our numerous social ills. Perhaps the natural instincts of the human heart are too volatile and too foggy for anyone to entirely trust. Perhaps the structure of the world can never be altered, particularly since empathy has been increasingly politicized. The cruelty is the point when the point should be all about the kindness.

In Defense of Kathy Griffin

I’ve never understood the bellicosity against Kathy Griffin. And neither do regular people. (Even after her 2017 controversy, Griffin still managed to fill theatres around the world.) I’ve always liked her. Her first comedy album, For Your Consideration, was so successful that she was the first woman to hit #1 on the Billboard Top Comedy Albums chart. She’s won two Emmys and a Grammy Award. She’s funny, often provocative, and has been a tireless advocate for LGBTQ rights well before most mainstream celebrities. She’s done USO tours. Gloss over the raunch and you’ll clearly see that her life and performances have been guided, first and foremost, by empathy. When her only sister was diagnosed with cancer, she shaved her head in solidarity. When Sia was attacked over her movie Music, it was Griffin who stepped in and saved her from suicide. Kathy Griffin stumped for same-sex marriage when it wasn’t fashionable to do so and she organized rallies in Washington to protest the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rule, a now embarrassingly regressive and homophobic idea that, one must remember, was conjured up by none other than Bill Clinton.

Presumably much of the ire that has been directed Griffin’s way comes from the atavistic notion — one that has often been promulgated by other women (and those who don’t like Griffin include Soldead O’Brien and Chelsea Clinton) — that a woman who wavers between the blunt and the scatological as adeptly as a male comic just shouldn’t count. (Case in point: Dave Chappelle still has a career, despite appallingly transphobic comments in his latest special.) But Kathy Griffin has been punished by the mainstream media in a way that has always struck me as cruel and deeply unfair. She was the perfect hosting partner for Anderson Cooper during CNN’s annual New Year’s Eve coverage at Times Square, but her salacious on-air banter sparked rebuke, even though it was relatively mild compared to men.

Then the Trump bloody head photo incident happened on May 30, 2017. Griffin posted a short video where she held up a crude model of Trump’s noggin and suffered significant professional and personal repercussions for it. But much like her advocacy of LGBTQ rights, Griffin was well ahead of the curve about the dangers of Donald Trump and the need to offer bold pushback. Trump not only mismanaged a pandemic that has gone on to kill nearly 900,000 Americans, but, among his countless transgressions, he inspired the unthinkable: the violent January 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol. The most vocal opponents to Griffin weren’t the Trump family and his lapdogs, but “liberal” actors like Jeffrey Wright and Debra Messing. (Nearly five years later, it can be argued that Messing using her energies to publicly expose Trump supporters was a more repugnant act than Griffin’s photo. At least Griffin confined her protest to an artistic statement.)

She was dropped by CNN. Dropped from her promotional deals. Thousands of death threats. Didn’t get a television role again until recently — in the latest season of Search Party, which just dropped on HBO Max. Despite being ignobly pushed out of Hollywood, she hit the tour circuit not long after and her shows sold out in minutes. Again, regular people love her. It was the people in power and other entertainers who resented her. And for what? Because she’s a provocative loudmouth? Who cares? The world needs provocative loudmouths. The world needs Kathy Griffin.

Now The New York Times has just profiled her after she recovered from lung cancer treatment. That it would take Griffin losing a lung to merit this type of coverage says everything you need to know about how the media industrial complex throws modest troublemakers under the bus. In the profile, Griffin says, “I wasn’t canceled. I was erased.” She said that she didn’t have any desire to make enemies. She only wanted to make people laugh. And she did. She offended Jeff Zucker by demanding what she was worth for her New Year’s Eve appearances.

It’s clear that Griffin has been punished for being a woman. After all, Jeffrey Toobin can be welcomed back into the CNN fold after masturbating during a Zoom meeting. She has needlessly suffered because she’s a woman. But as reported by the Times, she has remained the consummate professional — most recently on the set of Search Party

It’s also clear that Griffin has been punished for being politically outspoken, often on subjects that the mainstream media isn’t ready to take on. But also because she gets through to a large audience. And if there is one constant across every cultural sector, it’s this: the people in power, particularly more risk-averse artists and shameless networking types who prop up mediocrity in order to get ahead, resent anyone who can be both appealing to a mass audience and revealing. (See, for example, the recent divisive critical reaction to Don’t Look Up.)

At a time in which we need to shake up a population that has grown exhausted by the listlessness of do-nothing Democrats, Kathy Griffin should be welcomed back and tapped as an invaluable resource — not only on how to not only speak to the vox populi, but how to win back the nation. Her instinct for knowing when to fight a risky political battle is one of her many unsung and underappreciated talents. It aligns quite neatly with her comedic timing. Kathy Griffin is the populist provocateur who wins people over with her charm and her honesty. Anyone who attacked her in the last five years did so because they are resentful that they only hold onto their dull and unadventurous perches because they have nothing new to say and all they have left are past laurels to rest on. These bitter has-beens owe Kathy Griffin not only an apology, but a fulsome invitation to return to the party.

A House for Mr. Biswas (Modern Library #72)

(This is the twenty-ninth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Day of the Locust.)

I have to be honest. V.S. Naipaul’s literary work is so abominably heartless that I would be greatly tempted to fire bottlerockets all night from my Brooklyn rooftop while wearing nothing more than a male monokini if his scabrous worldview and his pointless head games were permanently erased from the canon. He is surely the most overrated writer of the 20th century.

I’ve delivered variations of these sentiments over the phone to amused literary friends, who, when they weren’t laughing their asses off over my five minute anti-Naipaul soliloquies, were good enough to urge me to forgo the semi-scholarly format of this ridiculous years-long project and simply speak from the heart. I shall do my best to be as thoughtful as I can about my Naipaul bellicosity, which is, alas, the only way to move forward with this project. I can tell you this much. Not even Finnegans Wake, which took me five years to read and eventually write about, made me feel as frustrated as I was with A House for Mr. Biswas. Even the books on the list that I haven’t cared for all that much (The Old Wives’ Tale, the wildly overrated Ragtime, the failings of Kim) still contained something essential or interesting. You could see why a bunch of old white dudes decided to canonize the books even if they seemed to be speaking a hoary language — even accounting for the folkways and mores of 1998. But A House for Mr. Biswas was a joyless chore during the two times I read it. It is a reactionary monument to imperialistic ugliness that isn’t so much a thoughtful examination of colonialism as it is an author catching mice in a glue trap and watching them squirm their way into a slow and painful death instead of putting them out of their misery with a hammer.

In his life and his work, Naipaul was a sadistic bully, a narcissistic tyrant, and a mean-spirited man who used his powers to punch down. The only quality that distinguishes Naipaul from Donald Trump is his descriptive acumen and his honed prose. There is a moment in A House for Mr. Biswas in which Naipaul has a mother snap off branches from a hibiscus bush to discipline her child and it represents that brilliant exactitude. But that’s pretty much it. There isn’t a single Nobel laureate who basks in repugnancy like this simply because he can. Knut Hamsun was a terrible person (who later turned Nazi), but his masterpiece Hunger actually made you feel something about the down-and-out impoverished wretch at the center of the novel. The late great Toni Morrison, inexplicably omitted from the Modern Library canon, used ugly imagery to reveal the deep humanity within victims of racism and oppression. But what does Naipaul offer other than pointless cruelty? James Wood offered the hamfisted theory that Naipaul adopted the dual role of the colonizer and the colonized to adopt “a cool, summary omniscience that he uses to provoke our rebellious compassion.” But I personally could not feel any compassion for Biswas, in large part because I was constantly aware of the manipulative way that Naipaul had rigged the game. Naipaul, in other words, is an old school bully lulling and gaslighting the reader into a phony empathy. Having no empathy to offer, Naipaul leaves such overanalytical and generous critics as Wood to mine the gelid prose and do the work that Naipaul himself couldn’t be bothered to do. That Naipaul was able to play this game of three-card monte on so many says a great deal about how the literary establishment has a knack for propping up bona-fide sociopaths. Even progressive-minded naifs like Teju Cole stumped for this novel, claiming House to be “a masterwork of realism,” but largely on the basis of its itemized lists and of the way that the book encumbers the reader with its turgid pace. Both Wood and Cole acknowledge that it falls upon the reader to provide the munificence that Naipaul himself cannot. But they refuse to acknowledge that the faults of House‘s thin characterizations very much fall on Naipaul’s shoulders. If a writer isn’t committed to depicting the human, then why even bother praising the writer?

For the Spainards, Mr. Biswas knew, had surrendered the island one hundred years before, and their descendants had disappeared; yet they left a memory of reckless valour, and this memory had passed to people who came from another continent and didn’t know what a Spainard was, people who, in their huts of mud and grass where time and distance were obliterated, still frightened their children with the name of Alexander, of whose greatness they knew nothing.

I don’t gainsay Naipaul’s command at the sentence level, such as the measured passage above. At times, Naipaul comes across as the holistic sage reminding us that all of our lives are mired in historical cycles in which we often forget the final festoons of the previous arc. But grifters often talk in cant that suggest a larger tapestry. If you speak in ways that suggest larger cosmic contours, many people are going to assume that there’s something more to your tale than a mean monodimensional character who treats his family badly and who spends most of the goddamned novel writhing in anger and resentment simply because he never has the guts to make a real decision. I suspect Naipaul has bamboozled so many otherwise cogent minds because this kind of pedestrian toxic masculinity, especially in an older book, can be easily excused as a “sign of the times.” But even with Wuthering Heights‘s Heathcliff, named by Bustle‘s Charlotte Ahlin as the “most toxic male character in all of literature,” we can still understand why he forces his son Linton to marry. Heathcliff grows nastier as the novel continues. But he’s still tormented by Catherine’s ghost and the dregs of being bullied and locked in an attic. Mr. Biswas, by contrast, loses his father Raghu early on in the book after Mr. Biswas, entrusted to take care of a neighbor’s calf, falls into a stream and drowns. Mr. Biswas hides beneath his bed in shame. Raghu dives in for the missing calf and his own son. Raghu dies. Emily Bronte had the smarts to connect Heathcliff’s psychology to the past, which makes him more than merely a “toxic male character.” We want to understand why he behaves as he does. But, with Naipaul, the drowning incident is rarely referenced again in the novel. So Mr. Biswas is a man flung into misfortunes in the present without really acknowledging his past. Does this make him as much of a dope as any other ostensible cipher living out a failed life on a former Spanish colony? Apparently.

But there’s something much seedier at work here. As I pointed out with A Bend in the River, Naipual’s bad faith portrayal of low-caste types has always felt supererogatory. He isn’t taking potshots in an interesting or bona-fide punk rock way that challenges the audience. He revels in filth and ugliness and he chooses targets who are just too easy to flambee. You may recall my love for Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, which featured some wild and outlandish depictions of degeneracy, but Caldwell used his broad caricatures to implicate his audience for their generalizations about the poor. It’s clear to me that Naipaul doesn’t have any such grand game afoot here, other than reveling in his hideous hubris. He’s happy to see his inventions rot. The man lived to hurl unpleasant observations about unpleasant people, both in his life and in his fiction. And I say this as a huge fan of unlikable characters. Naipaul’s ensemble isn’t terribly interesting or dimensional. For all my complaints about Evelyn Waugh, at least that reactionary clown was committed to some kind of beauty. A throwback beauty that came from a repressed Catholicism, but a beauty nonetheless. What do we get with Naipaul? Hari “humming from some hymn book in his cheerless way.”

While I commend Naiapul’s prose powers (his description of a box imprinted with the circles of condensed milk cans and his evocation of gods for the Tulsi house are two of many examples of what make him a commendable stylist), I really don’t see why Mr. Biswas deserves such an expansive volume. He is mean, arrogant, cowardly, and an altogether predictable specimen of 20th century masculinity. He possesses no empathy for the people who surround him, looking at his future wife Shama not with compassion as she is berated by a customer, but “as a child.” He expresses flights of wild behavior that might be characterized as bipolar. He throws fits, feels as if he is entitled to a job. Even in describing Mr. Biswas in the way I am here, I fear that I am making him more interesting he deserves to be portrayed. Naipaul doesn’t give us a real reason for Mr. Biswaa’s ego or his cruelty — despite the fact that we are constantly surrounded by his family, which include in-laws who are too numerous to track without notes. He would prefer to wallow in ugliness — both in the ramshackle aesthetic of rural Trinidad and the boorish behavior of his many side characters. There are unlikable characters and villains in literature who deserve our attention because we want to know how they came to be who they are. But with Mr. Biswas, I never felt any strong pull to know him any further. Mr. Biswas is an unremarkable reader, a mediocre sign-painter, and a ham-fisted writer who never has anything especially interesting to say, but always has an especially monstrous act to mete out to anyone in his surrounding orbit.

So I’m quite happy to be rid of Naipaul. I will never read him again. There are people who still swear by Naipaul. Robert McCrum once declared Naipaul to be “the greatest living writer of English prose.” But what’s the point of picking up the pen when you don’t have a pulse?

Next Up: Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica!

The Day of the Locust (Modern Library #73)

(This is the twenty-eighth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A Farewell to Arms.)

December 22, 1940 may be literature’s answer to July 4, 1826, the day in which John Adams rasped his last words on his deathbed. “Thomas Jefferson still survives,” he gasped, not knowing that Jefferson himself had passed away only five hours before. One hundred and fourteen years later, two towering literary titans, far more obscure in their time than Adams and Jefferson had been in theirs, met their end at a needlessly early age. On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed inside a ground-floor apartment not far from the Sunset Strip at the age of 44. The alcohol had finally caught up with him. He believed himself a failure. He would never know that his tragically brief life and his coruscating work would be rediscovered only a handful of years later — not long after 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed to World War II servicemen. The next day, about two hundred miles southwest of Fitzgerald’s home, Nathanael West and his wife Eileen McKenney (whose sprightly spirit would be immortalized by her sister Ruth in a series of light but amusing New Yorker pieces later turned into a wildly successful stage show called My Sister Eileen) would be killed instantly in a car collision on their way back from Mexico. West was, by all reports, a notoriously awful driver and he was even younger than Fitzgerald. Just thirty-seven.

Both men had turned to screenwriting to stay afloat during the Great Depression. Both men had much to say about the traps and illusions of American life. But it would take longer for West to be reassessed and appreciated — in large part because he was arguably fiercer than Fitz with his fiction. He had his finger firmly on the troubling pulse of feral American life and he wasn’t afraid to use it with the other nine at his typewriter. In a short essay called “Some Notes on Violence,” West pointed to the idiomatic violence that had permeated every corner of printed media: “We did not start with the ideas of printing tales of violence. We now believe that we would be doing violence by suppressing them.” His razor-sharp satire featured philandering dwarves, skewered the hideous contradictions of gaudy Hollywood spectacle, and, in just one of many enthralling flashes of his grimly hilarious invention, depicted a dead horse serving as au courant decor at the bottom of a swimming pool. (In an age in which urine-drinking is prescribed as a COVID remedy and reality star Stephanie Matto makes $200,000 selling her farts in a jar, one wonders why the present fictional landscape doesn’t reflect our scabrous realities and why 85% of today’s gatekeepers are so hostile to such a necessary dialogue between fiction and life. But then this is the same universe in which Hanya Yanagihara’s excellent, quite readable, and wildly ambitious new novel, To Paradise, is framed by The New York Times in belittingly racist and sexist terms, assuaging an increasingly unadventurous bourgeois readership: “Can an Asian American woman write a great American novel?” (Well, of course, she can. Why even summon the rhetoric?))

West’s high point as a novelist was arguably The Day of the Locust — just as compact as Gatsby in its length and sentences, but more wryly surreal than ethereal. And he had a genius for fusing this talent with a theatrically visceral and often bleakly comic strain revealing the FOMO and desperate collective belonging at any vicious cost that one sees prominently among numerous Instagram influencers today. Consider this scene at a funeral:

He knew their kind. While not torch-bearers themselves, they would run behind the fire and do a great deal of the shouting. They had come to see Harry buried, hoping for a dramatic incident of some sort, hoping at least for one of the mourners to be led weeping hysterically from the chapel. It seemed to Tod that they stared back at him with an expression of vicious, acrid boredom that trembled on the edge of violence.

This is followed not long after by an old woman who shows up with “a face pulled out of shape by badly-fitting store teeth” whispering to “a man sucking on the handle of a home-made walking stick.” This close attention to background characters making do with either the remaining scraps they could cobble together or the insufficient products on sale at a store obviously sprang from the Great Depression and West’s own experience working at a hotel, where he undoubtedly observed a motley array of eccentrics and strange outliers. (Jay Martin’s excellent biography, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, covers quite a bit of these hotel days and reveals West to be an impeccable bullshit artist in his life, wheeling deals to help other writers land rooms and constantly reinventing the details of his life to negotiate a failing capitalist system.) But West’s panoramic description also feels unsettlingly close to our present time, in which inflation, the supply chain, and an inept framework increasingly leaving Americans out in the cold produces the same plausible character types. And in another eerie parallel to the present, The Day of the Locust also includes a dismal romantic rival named Homer Simpson. The only song Homer knows is the national anthem

The novel follows Tod Hackett, an artist who has moved to Hollywood to find inspiration for what he hopes will be his masterwork painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” (I casually wondered if Rage Against the Machine’s album The Battle of Los Angeles took titular inspiration from West. But sadly no interviewer appears to have asked Zack de la Rocha and company this.) He swoons for Faye Greener after seeing her in the hall at a dismal complex called San Berdoo. But Faye can “only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her.” Tod harbors disturbingly intense and violent fantasies towards Faye. Is Tod mentally unbalanced? Or is this the inevitable byproduct of trying to find inspiration in a landscape of contradictions? West smartly leaves these questions open for the reader to infer.

One reads this masterpiece in 2022 greatly saddened by the possibilities of what West could have become. Would he have floundered like Erskine Caldwell or soured into a bitter reactionary like Evelyn Waugh? I don’t think he would have. West was committed to grim playful truth right out of the gate — as his scatologically driven first work, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, made abundantly clear. It says quite a lot about the bleak tenor of the prewar Depression period that so many wild and dark comic novelists flourished. Much as one reads the fiction published just before World War I and marvels at the flowing frankness that just preceded Hemingway permanently altering the English language with his declarative sentences, so too does one approach Tobacco Road, Scoop, and The Day of the Locust with a sense of what might have been in literature if the Second World War had never happened. One then turns to our present pandemic age and wonders why most of today’s contemporary fiction writers remain so spineless, so dully vanilla and offensively weak-kneed and uninventive, so hostile to serving up appropriate pushback against our present devil’s bargain of late-stage capitalism and all of its concomitant horrors.

West would have been canceled quite swiftly if he were starting out today. Joe Woodward’s biography of Nathanael West, Alive Inside the Wreck, points to a fascinating review from Ben Abramson that appeared in Reading and Collecting in which he suggested that West’s books should be reviewed two or three years after publication so that they could be reviewed on “merits” rather than “merchandise.” Indeed, it is the mercantile thrust of vapid careerist “critics” on social media these days — the type epitomized by so many mediocre Twitter addicts who wouldn’t know, appreciate or stump for bona-fide punk rock even if they traveled back in time and became desecrated by excrement while standing in the front row of a GG Allin show — that motivates their own sham criteria and their head-in-the-sand approach to our societal ills. But eighty-three years after The Day of the Locust‘s publication — well past Abramson’s prescription for proper consideration — The Day of the Locust says more about the eternal and seemingly unfixable ailments of American life than most of today’s writers can summon over the course of a career. Despite being cut down in his prime, Nathanael West still survives.

Next Up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas!

Jeff VanderMeer and Nick Mamatas: Bullies Who Invent Context, Enemies to Those in Recovery

I’ve already been transparent about the fact that I had an alcohol-fueled episode during a 36 hour period on Friday and Saturday, one in which I barely remember much of what I was doing. We’re talking vituperative emails and blackout drunk conversations that I don’t even recall on the phone with friends. Shameful assholic stuff that I would certainly not have done if I were sober. That’s why I attended a meeting today for the first time in my life. And that’s why I deleted my Twitter account. And that’s why I won’t be drinking again for a very long time, if ever. To all the friends who reached out to me and who know the true score and who actually know who I am and who have directed me to resources, thank you.

During the course of that hideous bender, a blog post in draft — seemingly listing the people who I wanted dead (a satirical holding place title that did not reflect the true intent of the list, of which more anon) and written after I had imbibed a large bottle of scotch, a six pack of beer, and a bottle of wine and was hardly in what I or any person would call a rational or clear-thinking place — was accidentally published and swiftly unpublished after I realized what I did. But blue-checkmarked authors like Jeff VanderMeer and Nick Mamatas (the latter, citing blue zone fighting, has also threatened me with a fight to the death and, as you can see from the screenshot, tried to hack my website) — two people who I have literally not thought about in years but that I was thinking about for reasons that shall soon become apparent, two people who I have said nothing about in more than a decade, two authors whose books I do not read and will not read and have no interest in reading or knowing in any way — but who have both gone out of their way to use their influence on Twitter, invoking my name to spread false rumors about me while also dredging up my drunkenly assembled list without context, which came from a very dark place that I hope you never have to experience. They are now so obsessed with me that they are literally scouring cached images of my website to impugn me and badmouth me. Trying to egg the addict back onto Twitter. These are clearly two harmful browbeaters who I will now not be including on the far more important list I was assembling and that I’m not supposed to talk about — one that involves submitting myself with humility and contrition to the people who I have wronged.

Mamatas and VanderMeer thrive on hating and injuring and hurting perceived enemies. (Here are a few examples. On October 7, 2020, VanderMeer claimed, sans evidence, that Dan Bloom “sent me strange and harassing emails, emailed venues I was speaking at insinuating that they could cut me loose.” Meanwhile, Weird Webzine, after not expressing enough fealty to Mamatas for a minimal contribution, was harassed by Mamatas on December 12, 2018.) People talked to me about the weirdly obsessive conduct of both men when I used to practice as a literary journalist. And it’s clear that it would delight them if I cracked. But I won’t. They want me to drink. They want me to be a raging asshole. They want me, in short, to suffer and be the worst human being possible. But they were on this list. Because I was thinking about the people for whom I had bad feelings about and trying to fix myself. I am truly baffled as to why I live rent-free in their heads. Because I have literally said or thought nothing at all about them for a good ten years. Not even in emails. But they seem peculiarly obsessed with me. They want you to know that I am an irredeemable human being. The timing here — and this was initiated by Mamatas — isn’t an accident. I’ve been public in other online places about the fact that I’m unemployed and in the running for jobs right now. And aside from disrupting my efforts at recovery, these two people want to take potential bread out of my mouth by making sure the social media deck is stacked against me. Which is something I wouldn’t even do to my worst enemy.

I know there is no appealing to either Mamatas or VanderMeer. Both have, in my personal dealings with them (the last I contacted them in any way was more than a good ten years ago, for Pete’s sake), possessed neither a stain of empathy nor an ability to commiserate and I’m hardly the only person who they’ve hunted down and invented stories and motivations about. I hope one day that the many victims of VanderMeer and Mamatas eventually come forward. My list should never have been published and was not intended to be published. It was the rough draft for another list. And it had a bold title. Because I have a sick sense of humor. But I just figured I would provide the appropriate context as I remain committed to carrying on with two very important things: (a) not returning to Twitter and (b) not drinking.

I am not afraid of telling the truth about myself. Even the unpleasant parts. And I’m certainly not afraid of either Mamtas or VanderMeer, who are both little more than schoolyard bullies in the form of sad and resentful middle-aged men and who will undoubtedly twist this essay (and the list with the acerbic title) to serve their own wildly narcissistic and abusive ends.

Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait

[To celebrate Martin Luther King weekend, I’m repubishing my 2019 essay on Why We Can’t Wait. King’s commitment to courage and humanism through nonviolent resistance remains one of the most inspiring legacies of the 20th century and deserves our great respect and consideration.]

It was a warm day in April when Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested. It was the thirteenth and the most important arrest of his life. King, wearing denim work pants and a gray fatigue shirt, was manacled along with fifty others that afternoon, joining close to a thousand more who had bravely submitted their bodies over many weeks to make a vital point about racial inequality and the unquestionable inhumanity of segregation.

The brave people of Birmingham had tried so many times before. They had attempted peaceful negotiation with a city that had closed sixty public parks rather than uphold the federal desegregation law. They had talked with businesses that had debased black people by denying them restaurant service and asking them to walk through doors labeled COLORED. Some of these atavistic signs had been removed, only for the placards to be returned to the windows once the businesses believed that their hollow gestures had been fulfilled. And so it became necessary to push harder — peacefully, but harder. The Birmingham police unleashed attack dogs on children and doused peaceful protesters with high-pressure water hoses and seemed hell-bent on debasing and arresting the growing throngs who stood up and said, without raising a fist and always believing in hope and often singing songs, “Enough. No more.”

There were many local leaders who claimed that they stood for the righteous, but who turned against King. White leaders in Birmingham believed — not unlike pro-segregation Governor George Wallace just three months earlier — that King’s nonviolent protests against segregation would incite a torrent of violence. But the violence never came from King’s well-trained camp and had actually emerged from the savage police force upholding an unjust law. King had been very careful with his activists, asking them to sign a ten-point Commitment Card that included these two vital points:

6. OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.

8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.

Two days before King’s arrest, Bull Connor, the racist Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety and a man so vile and heartless that he’d once egged on Klansmen to beat Freedom Riders to a pulp for fifteen minutes as the police stood adjacent and did not intervene, had issued an injunction against the protests. He raised the bail bond from $200 to $1,500 for those who were arrested. (That’s $10,000 in 2019 dollars. When you consider the lower pay and the denied economic opportunities for Birmingham blacks, you can very well imagine what a cruel and needless punishment this was for many protesters who lived paycheck to paycheck.)

And so on Good Friday, it became necessary for King, along with his invaluable fellow leaders Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth, to walk directly to Birmingham Jail and sing “We Shall Overcome.” King took a very big risk in doing so. But he needed to set an example for civil disobedience. He needed to show that he was not immune to the sacrifices of this very important fight. The bondsman who provided the bail for the demonstrators told King that he was out as King pondered the nearly diminished funds for the campaign. In jail, King would not be able to use his contacts and raise the money that would keep his campaign going. Despite all this, and this is probably one of the key takeaways from this remarkable episode in political history, King was dedicated to practicing what he preached. As he put it:

How could my failure now to submit to arrest be explained to the local community? What would be the verdict of the country about a man who had encouraged hundreds of people to make a stunning and then excused himself?

Many who watched this noble march, the details of which are documented in S. Jonathan Bass’s excellent book Blessed Are the Peacemakers, dressed in their Sunday best out of respect for King’s efforts. Police crept along with the marchers before Connor gave the final order. Shuttlesworth had left earlier. King, Abernathy, and their fellow protestors were soon surrounded by paddy wagons and motorcycles and a three-wheel motorcart. They dropped to their knees in peaceful prayer. The head of the patrol squeezed the back of King’s belt and escorted him into a police car. The police gripped the back of Abernathy’s shirt and steered him into a van.

King was placed in an isolation cell. Thankfully, he did not suffer physical brutality, but the atmosphere was dank enough to diminish a weaker man’s hope. As he wrote, “You will never know the meaning of utter darkness until you have lain in such a dungeon, knowing that sunlight is streaming overhead and still seeing only darkness below.” Jail officials refused a private meeting between King and his attorney. Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s chief of staff, sent a telegram to President Kennedy. The police did not permit King to speak to anyone for at least twenty-four hours.

As his confidantes gradually gained permission to speak to King, King became aware of a statement published by eight white clergy members in Birmingham — available here. This octet not only urged the black community to withdraw support for these demonstrations, but risibly suggested that King’s campaign was “unwise and untimely” and could be settled by the courts. They completely missed the point of what King was determined to accomplish.

King began drafting a response, scribbling around the margins of a newspaper. Abernathy asked King if the police had given him anything to write on. “No,” King replied, “I’m using toilet paper.” Within a week, he had paper and a notepad. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” contained in his incredibly inspiring book Why We Can’t Wait, is one of the most powerful statements ever written about civil rights. It nimbly argues for the need to take direct action rather than wait for injustice to be rectified. It remains an essential text for anyone who professes to champion humanity and dignity.

* * *

King’s “Letter” against the eight clergymen could just as easily apply to many “well-meaning” liberals today. He expertly fillets the white clergy for their lack of concern, pointing out that “the superficial kind of social analysis that deal with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.” He points out that direct action is, in and of itself, a form of negotiation. The only way that an issue becomes lodged in the national conversation is when it becomes dramatized. King advocates a “constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth” — something that seems increasingly difficult for people on social media to understand as they block viewpoints that they vaguely disagree with and cower behind filter bubbles. He is also adamantly, and rightly, committed to not allowing anyone’s timetable to get in the way of fighting a national cancer that had then ignobly endured for 340 years. He distinguishes between the just and the unjust law, pointing out that “one has a moral responsibility to obey unjust laws.” But he is very careful and very clear about his definitions:

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

This is a cogent philosophy applicable to many ills beyond racism. This is radicalism in all of its beauty. This is precisely what made Martin Luther King one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. For me, Martin Luther King remains a true hero, a model for justice, humility, peace, moral responsibility, organizational acumen, progress, and doing what’s right. But it also made King dangerous enough for James Earl Ray, a staunch Wallace supporter, to assassinate him on April 4, 1968. (Incidentally, King’s family have supported Ray’s efforts to prove his innocence.)

* * *

Why We Can’t Wait‘s scope isn’t just limited to Birmingham. The book doesn’t hesitate to cover a vast historical trajectory that somehow stumps for action in 1963 and in 2019. It reminds us that much of what King was fighting for must remain at the forefront of today’s progressive politics, but also must involve a government that acts on behalf of the people: “There is a right and a wrong side in this conflict and the government does not belong the middle.” Unfortunately, the government has doggedly sided against human rights and against the majestic democracy of voting. While Jim Crow has thankfully been abolished, the recent battle to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, shows that systemic racism remains very much alive and that the courts for which the eight white Birmingham clergy professed such faith and fealty are stacked against African-Americans. (A 2018 Harvard study discovered that counties freed from federal oversight saw a dramatic drop in minority voter turnout.)

Much as the end of physical slavery inspired racists to conjure up segregation as a new method of diminishing African-Americans, so too do we see such cavalier and dehumanizing “innovations” in present day racism. Police shootings and hate crimes are all driven by the same repugnant violence that King devoted his life to defeating.

The economic parallels between 1963 and 2019 are also distressingly acute. In Why We Can’t Wait, King noted that there were “two and one-half times as many jobless Negros as whites in 1963, and their median income was half that of the white man.” Fifty-six years later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informs us that African Americans are nearly twice as unemployed as whites in a flush economic time with a low unemployment rate, with the U.S. Census Bureau reporting that the median household income for African-Americans in 2017 was $40,258 compared to $68,145 for whites. In other words, a black family now only makes 59% of the median income earned by a white family.

If these statistics are supposed to represent “progress,” then it’s clear that we’re still making the mistake of waiting. These are appalling and unacceptable baby steps towards the very necessary racial equality that King called for. White Americans continue to ignore these statistics and the putatively liberal politicians who profess to stand for fairness continue to demonstrate how tone-deaf they are to feral wrongs that affect real lives. As Ashley Williams learned in February 2016, white Democrats continue to dismiss anyone who challenges them on their disgraceful legacy of incarcerating people of color. The protester is “rude,” “not appropriate,” or is, in a particularly loaded gerund, “trespassing.” “Maybe you can listen to what I have to say” was Hillary Clinton’s response to Williams, to which one rightfully replies in the name of moral justice, “Hillary, maybe you’re the one here who needs to listen.”

Even Kamala Harris, now running for President, has tried to paint herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” when her record reveals clear support for measures that actively harm the lives of black people. In 2015, Harris opposed a bill that demanded greater probing into police officer shootings. That same year, she refused to support body cams, only to volte-face with egregious opportunism just ten days before announcing her candidacy. In the case of George Gage, Harris held back key exculpatory evidence that might have freed a man who did not have criminal record. Gage was forced to represent himself in court and is now serving a 70-year sentence. In upholding these savage inequities, I don’t think it’s a stretch to out Kamala Harris as a disingenuous fraud. Like many Democrats who pay mere lip service to policies that uproot lives, she is not a true friend to African Americans, much less humanity. It was a hardly a surprise when Black Lives Matter’s Johnetta Elzie declared that she was “not excited” about Harris’s candidacy back in January. After rereading King and being reminded of the evils of casual complicity, I can honestly say that, as someone who lives in a neighborhood where the police dole out regular injustices to African-Americans, I’m not incredibly thrilled about Harris either.

But what we do have in this present age is the ability to mobilize and fight, to march in the streets until our nation’s gravest ills become ubiquitously publicized, something that can no longer be ignored. What we have today is the power to vote and to not settle for any candidate who refuses to heed the realities that are presently eating our nation away from the inside. If such efforts fail or the futility of protesting makes one despondent, one can still turn to King for inspiration. King sees the upside in a failure, galvanizing the reader without ever sounding like a Pollyanna. Pointing to the 1962 sit-ins in Albany, Georgia, King observes that, while restaurants remained segregated after months of protest, the activism did result in more African-Americans voting and Georgia at long last electing “the first governor [who] pledged to respect and enforce the law equally.”

It’s sometimes difficult to summon hope when the political clime presently seems so intransigent, but I was surprised to find myself incredibly optimistic and fired up after rereading Why We Can’t Wait for the first time in more than two decades. This remarkable book from a rightfully towering figure seems to have answered every argument that milquetoasts produce against radicalism. No, we can’t wait. We shouldn’t wait. We must act today.

Systemic Breakdown

Our system has failed to adjust itself to the increasingly doomed tenor of our times. Psychic breakdowns, poverty, an absence of empathy, deaths of despair — this is all now baked into the social contract. And if you want to survive, well, you’d better be just as selfish as the plutocrats gleefully dangling the shiny keys to a castle you can’t enter just before raising the drawbridge. Pay your taxes on time, but we will not respond in a timely manner to your soul-crushing debilities. In fact, we won’t even respond at all, as thousands of Virginian motorists stranded for twenty-four hours on an uncleared stretch of I-95 learned at the start of the year. Fight amongst yourselves. Declare large naval battles in small ponds. Stop saying thank you. Stop helping people. Above all, do not express what’s wrong. Do not mention the disease. Not the virus still ravaging the world, but the illness called late-stage capitalism.

The law of averages no longer works if you’re left to rot while you’re on the skids. Climate change has become just as cartoonish as the Republican Party, taking grandiose lunges with its floods and fires. Increasingly stupider and illiterate people are declared the movers and shakers. They deny science in our hallowed halls. Bounce around TikTok live streams and you’ll see people with thousands of followers struggle for a good hour to solve a common algebra problem that they should have finished in a minute. Post your daily Wordle for all to see! It’s a fairly simple puzzle (you can knock out the vowels on the first try with a word like OUIJA or AUDIO), but this will make you feel better and reaffirmed. The only thing right now that can reassure us. Because government certainly isn’t.

On any given day, America resembles any number of dystopian movies from the 1970s and the 1980s. It turns out that these gloomy motion pictures were the true prophecy and that they significantly underestimated how cruel and faithless our republic would turn. There will be more deranged politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who will win in the November midterms. Prepare for more frightening times. Prepare to be left on your own. Prepare for these people to seize power. Because everybody wants everything now. And there is no longer any consideration of the glacial pace that government has always operated at.

There’s no accountability anymore. And even if you can find the courage to rise up and say something, you’ll be subsumed by the army of Russian bots on social media or do-nothing dawdlers looking for a pretext to cancel you. Every mistake that you have ever made in your life can be found and will be used against you. Because the world can only countenance people with sham perfection, people who were likely born into wealth and who have people who can erase their messes, people who somehow remained quite boring and unremarkable throughout their lives or who were assiduous enough to dodge the heightened scrutiny. We used to fear state surveillance. Now we say nothing about how millions have turned into social media snitches and given the digital panopticon far more angles than Jeremy Bentham could have even imagined.

Meanwhile, how much data do the corporations really have on us? Even the most careful person is bound to install an app and unthinkingly allow access to all that private information on your phone. Lists bought and traded against other lists bought and traded. And we become hopelessly addicted to the next app designed to maximize our attention as it scoops all the grit from our phones.

The most talked about television show is Succession, which is all about the rich. One of our most beloved children’s writers is a transphobe. Not even Lin-Manuel Miranda can get a break anymore. Don’t think about the genuine societal threats of systemic racism, guns, and income inequality. It’s just not fun. And if we’re going to be left in the cold to die, why not entertain ourselves to death?

Grown-ass adults now possess the intellectual range and temperament of uneducated tots. Is forty the new thirty? Or is fifty the new forty? Well, someone at Slate will sort this out with yet another insipid hot take. Why bother to grow these days when there’s no future ahead? Why bother to believe in anything when the system is broken?

Jami Attenberg: An Insufferable Narcissist for Insufferable Narcissists

I CAME ALL THIS WAY TO MEET YOU: WRITING MYSELF HOME
by Jami Attenberg
(Ecco, 272 pages)

Jami Attenberg is easily one the most narcissistic and least interesting writers of our time. She literally contributes nothing to literature other than wanton displays of privileged navel-gazing. Should there come a time in which this insufferable solipsist is precluding from publishing any further books, I will write ruthlessly joyful ballads for the many trees that are spared from massacre to spew out her deranged and self-serving lexical offerings. She is truly that awful. There is so much conceited drivel to quote from in her latest book (of which more anon), but I’ll start here:

“I was allowed to stay there for free as long as I walked the dog, an enormous Tibetan mastiff, which I did, diligently, even though the dog didn’t like me all that much and sometimes snapped at me. I felt a little bit like I was the help, there to accomplish a designated task, even though no one actually made me feel that way.”

Maybe because dogs are usually reliable at sniffing out leeches and sponges? The truly atrocious people who boast about their hollow lives and take take take from those who have earned their stature through hardscrabble years of real work? Maybe because even animals have an intuitive sense of sussing out human garbage complaining about being the “help”? (I’ll refrain from the obvious Kathryn Stockett parallel here, but I cannot help but be angered by Attenberg’s casual slide to white privilege as she boasts about traveling to Italy, Sicily, Portugal, England, and Australia without having anything particularly insightful to say. Most of us, of course, simply do our duties and never complain about it. Such are the hard knock realities of living under late-stage capitalism while subtly participating in the “great resignation.”) A few hundred pages later — because self-aggrandizement is the Attenberg formula (and it works! she has the 38,000 followers on Twitter to prove it!) — she trots out her privilege by noting how she and her merry narcissists “leave our towels on the floor for someone to pick up after it is time for us to go.” I’m guessing that this amorphous “someone” is a hell of a lot more interesting than Attenberg. This — combined with Attenberg’s frequent references to being “alone” — is the language of a drug addict and, as Attenberg is so keen to remind us throughout her dreadful dirge, she did drugs, folks! And not only that. She even named one of her chapters after Henry Rollins’s moving memoir. She’s so punk rock! Even when she appropriates from more fascinating and selfless lives for her own gain. Much as she once made a token appearance at Zuccotti Park while the rest of us Occupy Wall Streeters dodged the nets and tear gas from New York’s finest on a daily basis to stand up for the greater good. Because for Attenberg, like many two-bit con artists who confess their shallow “vulnerabilities” on social media in an attempt to win followers and clout, friendships and human relationships are purely transactional:

I knew who my people were, even though I didn’t see them that often anymore. The ones who had stuck by me in my worst moments. The ones I hoped I offered something to in return. Craving collaboration, a shared sense of something bigger than myself, and finding people seeking the same. I had been lucky. I had lost some friends in my life, or sometimes they had lost me. The thing about bad friends is you never realize when you’re being one until it’s too late. Forgiveness and understanding? Regret and apologies? Not in this economy. But I had sustained a life with the ones who counted, the ones I could talk to for hours. The ones I would build something new with every time we met. When I got to meet them.

If you think I have an axe to grind, please know that I do not make these statements lightly. Jami Attenberg is part of a strain of “literary” writers who are destroying our culture with their relentless commitment to unearned amour-propre. I read 162 books last year — many great, some bad, some striated with the usual solipsism that one expects from authors. Such is the price one pays for finding the real truth-tellers, the literary outliers who hold a mirror to our souls and truly humble us with their voices. The writers who remind us why selfless empathy is so important in an age in which caring about other people has become increasingly (and needlessly) politicized. I also had a mother who was a wildly manipulative narcissist, a sister who turned into a cruel and self-serving narcissist who left me for dead and who I will never forgive, and, just last month, ended a relationship with a wildly manipulative narcissist who I had the misfortune to fall for until I cut the cord with great succor from a dear friend (a woman, incidentally; most of my close friends are women). I offer all this not for you to feel sorry for me (that would be an Attenberg move), but to cement that I do know what the hell I’m talking about and I am very much committed to being real. Gratitude, humility, and positivism have been dependable bellwethers in my ongoing quest to be a better person. But these three vital characteristics are clearly beyond a spoiled and wildly overrated braggart like Attenberg, who thrives and subsists because Isaac Fitzgerald (once an inveterate wastrel who was thick as thieves with the abusive Stephen Elliott in his alcohol-smeared Rumpus days, a biographical detail that entailed many years of his life that he, like Attenberg, has nimbly managed to storm past) declared a Dave Eggers-style “No haters” policy when Buzzfeed commissioned this equally shallow opportunist to steer its book coverage, thus securing an agora in which tripe like the below passage is allowed to pass muster without righteous and appropriate pushback:

“Instead, I have become a superior dinner guest. I am wonderful to have at your side while you cook, particularly if you give me a glass of wine, and also to have sit at your table, because I will appreciate your food in a deep, emotional, and highly verbal way, perhaps, in small part, because I did not get to experience that kind of cooking growing up. I’m just always so appreciative of being fed a delicious, home-cooked meal; genuinely, puppy-dog-eyes astonished by the food put before me. Invite me over and feed me. I will be your best companion.”

Puppy dog eyes. Feed this voracious do-nothing dunce, dammit! She’s staring at you!

Sometimes I get so frozen in my feelings, though, or perhaps it is that one feeling is stronger than the others and that’s the one that commands me. I have multiple feelings going on at the same time within me, all day long. This is why I can appreciate a room full of old bones chattering at me silently. This is the makeup of my soul. A room full of bones, a multitude of voices, all at once.

Do you hear that? You’re all nothing more than bones. What a deeply pleasant person!

None of my friends would visit me except if it was my birthday party or the like; there had to be the guarantee of a good time. Williamsburg was too far, it seemed, but from what? The familiar.

Or maybe — and this is easily corroborated by how easy it is to travel out to Williamsburg on the L line — your “friends” just didn’t like you? Speaking as someone who lives off the ass-end of the 2 and 5 lines — a far greater subway crawl than heading to Williamsburg — I’ve never had a problem persuading pals to stop by. Largely because I am fun, giving, firmly committed to secular humanism, genuinely effusive, and I deeply and genuinely care about people. Having visited Attenberg’s loft on Kent Avenue a few times, I can personally attest that every trip felt very much like coercion. A publicist who I will not name once informed me that she “didn’t want to cross Jami.” And this was well before The Middlesteins secured her “literary worth.” Others have reported to me how Attenberg would slice them out of her life if she couldn’t use them. I interviewed this meretricious writer twice back in the days when I had a literary podcast and I only did so because Attenberg — an adept and accomplished narcissist — had a knack for guilting you if you didn’t pay enough attention to her. She preys upon anyone who feels an altruistic instinct to include people. And she had a way of making you feel bad if you declined her invite. Speaking for myself, I deeply regret that I fell for her boorish egotistical act for so long. But being a true-blue empath is often a double-edged sword. And I’ve fallen on my own unscabbered blade far too many times to secure my own obscurity. Perhaps I was just as nonessential as the poor neighbor Attenberg describes in her cluelessly self-absorbed and vile volume. Your apartment floods and here’s that narcissistic writer who only hangs out with you to cadge cigarettes and does fuck all to help you. The next thing you know, you’re dead. “We looked out for each other,” writes Attenberg in a blithe manner that reminded me of Evelyn Waugh at his nastiest, “but sometimes people fall through the cracks.” Written like a true sociopath. A manipulative impostor who also writes pages later, “[I]t helps me to be of service to the universe.” Well, only in the most Brahmin of ways. Then there is risible atonement here:

I don’t regret any of it, except for how much money I spent on drugs. And also, sometimes I was an asshole. And for that: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

You’ve never been sorry at all, Jami Attenberg. You’ve hurt many good people. They’ve told me the details. You’re a terrible person. And no amount of pain that you’ve experienced gives you the excuse to be an asshole.

I am sure the easily triggered peanut gallery, all of them so eager to cavil and find fault with a middle-aged dude taking a necessary stand against an unmitigated narcissist and hubris-fueled mediocrity inexplicably bound in print, will look to my biographical details and my attack dog approach here as evidence of a bias that I may have against narcissistic women. And they may very well be right. But I have also publicly denounced a vast panoply of male narcissists (some of whom have turned out to be abusive) that includes Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, almost every writer named John or Jonathan (though Ames and Wray are both good eggs and I will defend both of them to the death), Philip Hensher, Stephen Elliott, Blake Bailey, Dave Eggers, and scores more over the last twenty years. 88% of male cultural critics are narcissists. In my time, I have feuded at some point with nearly all of them. Because I hate narcissists. They are the cockroaches who crawl in your kitchen that you feel an overwhelming desire to crush with a ball-peen hammer. Never mind the damage to the lino and the kitchen island. There’s a greater pestilence to eradicate. A higher duty, so to speak. And any amount of collateral property damage that bites into your security deposit is worth your noble efforts at genocide. Narcissists have lied about me, blatantly mischaracterized who I truly am and attempted to ruin me with bold prevarications on social media, abused me, and hurt me in a myriad of ways. And, as we saw with the last guy who inhabited the Oval Office, narcissists can damage the nation. So when it comes to narcissists, I am an equal opportunity assassin. Let them all be sent to the gallows. They are the true scum of the earth.

But I digress.

“I am interviewing my father because I am trying to figure out why I am the way I am. The daughter of a salesman, now a salesman herself, in a way.”

Let’s talk about Jami Attenberg — an insufferable narcissist for insufferable narcissists. In other words, what now counts as a “writer’s writer” among all these self-absorbed Bookriot-reading dweebs who boast about their galleys on Twitter. An abject salesman. A repugnant and talentless asshat who really wants you to like her! I am sure she is busting out her Hitachi Magical Wand reading my words (that is, if she made it this far). Because Attenberg is one of those shameless schmucks who gets off on her own press. She’s even willing to promulgate a bullshit “ghost story” (the ghost is in the form of a man, of course) because, deep down, she thinks that little of the intelligence of her reading audience.

“Product knowledge is the big thing,” [Attenberg’s father] continues. “That’s what makes a salesperson successful, is that the salesperson can convey the knowledge to the customer. If you feel confident, they will too.”

Attenberg continues to be adulated by fawning and uncritical book nerds across the nation in large part because she has adeptly and indefatigably marketed her public image (a pug-beagle named Sid, constant shoutouts to other writers who are usually as mediocre as she is, relentless invitations to movers and shakers that are more networking opportunities than genuine social bonhomie, et al.). She is, in short, the Establishment. A completely dull and unremarkable figure who makes up for her creative deficiencies and her paucity of invention by “being there” for people in the Jerzy Kosinski sense of the idiom. Because critical thinking continues to be unpracticed in our apocalyptic age, Attenberg can get away with her act. She’s very much like that stiff from accounting who you politely invited for after-work cocktails just to be friendly and who proceeded to monopolize the banter to steal all your work friends and assert dominance.

Well, Saint Jami — who wrote a poorly researched and scantly remembered dud called Saint Mazie — now “fits in.” There is literally nobody left within the Establishment who will call her out for her insipid solipsism and her piss-poor writing. She’s living proof that, if you stick around long enough and canoodle with the right people for years, then your “work” — such as it is — will be unquestionably appraised as divine mantras from the mount. All of these acolytes — which include many authors — follow Saint Jami on any journey she embarks on without question. She has nearly every haughty careerist from John Scalzi to Roxane Gay doing cart wheels on her little finger. Perhaps because these puffed up self-promoters recognize just how effective Saint Jami has been in spinning her dubious stature as “literary novelist.” And perhaps because self-marketing is truly the only cachet that a writer has left in 2022.

“I would make my own advertising. I would be my advertising. I would stop only when they made me. I would keep driving all over America until someone bought my goddamn book.”

I never thought it was possible, but somehow Saint Jami has written a “memoir” that is more ego-driven and insufferable than Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. You see, these days, it’s privileged women who get to be febrile egomaniacs, not the aging dudebros. Much as it pains me to agree with her, Katie Roiphe did have a point back in 2009 when she pointed to how most contemporary male writers specialized in “an obsessive fascination with trepidation” when it came to spilling the beans about sex. I would suggest further that this trepidation extended to basic truths across the non-carnal spectrum. While this gender role reversal does allow for women to reveal themselves to be just as monstrous as their narcissistic male counterparts, I fundamentally object to the way in which Saint Jami not only sounds like Werner Erhard demanding primal screams for commonplace anxieties from his audience, but how she and her associates package her folderol with an unsophisticated windmill tilt to feminism.

In America, I was just another feminist, and a white, straight, middle-aged one at that. I did not feel radical in America. I felt basic, and when I say “basic,” I mean it in the colloquial sense, as in boring, unoriginal, mainstream. But a thing I have learned, through trial and error, is that my basic feminism can mean different things all over the world. Sometimes it is a helpful conversation to have, and sometimes I’m just being another oppressor, in a way. But in Italy, at that moment, people seemed interested in my feminism. It was a thing to be discussed.

Sure enough, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (an unintentionally hilarious title that suggests some Midwestern innocence) is a dripping pile of dewy hubris. A “memoir” that amounts to nothing more than 300 pages of quotidian and unremarkable “struggle” that dares to call itself distinct and that is driven by that most overused word in the English language: I.

“I temped. I filed. I answered phones. I typed up letters, and then I faxed them across town. I pointed people in the right direction. Down the hall. One flight up. You just missed him. I worked in fifty different offices. All these lives. I took food from the conference room without asking. I replaced women on maternity leave. (Never men.) I lent a hand when they were short-staffed. There was a big mailing. Me, alone, in an empty room, stuffing envelopes. Fingers stung with paper cuts at the end of each day. I worked temp-to-perm and was supposed to feel grateful. If you play your cards right, kid. I never made it to perm.”

A brilliant novel published last year — Jakob Guzman’s Abundance — was an emotionally moving and immensely accomplished work of fiction that didn’t make the National Book Award shortlist. Largely because the literary establishment does not like to hear from people who are both poor and not white. They do, however, like to hear from white neoliberal dullards like Jami Attenberg. Nearly every sentence she writes is so hopelessly drenched in the trite bromides of her unremarkable self. And not even in an interesting way like Kate Zambreno or movingly like Leslie Jamison. This is because Attenberg is a solipsistic blowhard masquerading as a sham empath.

There is nothing remarkable in the above passage whatsoever. Millions of Americans live like this. Millions more live much harder lives. Where is the publishing industry when it comes to their stories? In absentia, of course.

“I had jobs where I was taken less seriously or my opinions dismissed entirely for being a woman. I have been told I am difficult. I am difficult in the sense that I am not easy, but fuck easy.”

Or maybe you’re just a self-serving asshole who nobody wants to work with? And being a woman has zero to do with it?

This ridiculous “memoir” — stitched in the formulaic cobweb of the chronic first person and written by a card-carrying sociopath — has been receiving raves from the bourgie lit brigade. (Or at least fellow mediocre “memoirists” like Claire Derderer in the New York Times, who risibly suggests in her review that it is a rare thing indeed when writers blab about their careers. When, in fact, all of us know that writers can almost never shut up about themselves, even when their lives, like Attenberg’s, are duller than an underpaid barista enslaved to humiliating rituals during a pandemic.) Largely because these tasteless boosters do not recognize anyone in this nation that makes less than $50,000/year and they seldom acknowledge the presence of anyone who isn’t Caucasian. Largely because their lives are lies. This vast swath of Biden-voting, risk-averse, toe-the-line privileged scum, who see Saint Jami as their great lord for “suffering” so commonly, have never known real poverty or been homeless or known real struggle. They are, in their own way, as vile in their absence of empathy as Republicans. These unremarkable lemmings would be chewed up in the first ten minutes of the zombie apocalypse. They’re the ones who call an Uber or order regularly from Seamless and never think to tip a Doordash driver more than 10%. Oh, but they relate to this “struggle.” Jami’s “struggle.” And the whole damn book is like this. Hideous narcissism dolled up as feminist empowerment. The solipsistic cry of the privileged white woman. Me me me. Shut the fuck up. It’s disgusting.

As Joyce Carol Oates suggested on Twitter last month, we can accept a narcissistic writer who writes well and who has a distinct command of language. But Saint Jami’s “command” is laden with clunkers:

“I get asked all the time how I can write about such fucked-up families when my mother is so obviously a nice person.” (False humility.)

“I worked for a cable network on websites for critically acclaimed television shows, all of which were created by men.” (Feeble stabs at the patriarchy.)

“but I liked the idea of talking to students as much as I could, and also, I liked the idea of Davenport.” (Endless narcissistic passages that would be roundly condemned on Twitter if the writer in question had a penis.)

“I try to live in hope when I think of America. Things are terrible everywhere, all the time, I know, but let me have my hope anyway.” (Bullshit bromides.)

“I could have a job in an office, a home in the suburbs. (Not that I wanted to live in the suburbs, but still, they existed and seemed safe.) A stable existence instead of fearing for my life, alone on the road.” (Inflated sense of importance, unexamined contradiction of life goals.)

“I looked around for someone to tell, but it was all strangers. On the bus I ended up being wedged between the window and an ophthalmologist who had flown in for a convention in New York. He did not care that I had sold my first book.” (More inflated self-importance.)

“It was the best thing I had ever written, of that I was certain. Still, my publisher dropped me. It didn’t matter that it was good. They were done with me now.” (Yet another inflated sense of self-worth.)

“Peripatetic was a word I learned in my early twenties. I remember looking it up after reading it somewhere and I thought: That sounds familiar.” (Inflated intelligence.)

“I have been to Northern California maybe a dozen times, mostly to San Francisco, back when you could still be a young dirtbag and live there cheaply, when it still seemed a viable, reasonable place to get away for a few days. It was also where I had written my first book, in Napa.” (As someone who lived happily in San Francisco for thirteen years during the last time it was affordable to live there, go fuck yourself. We weren’t dirtbags. We were making things and finding ourselves.)

“At night I ate store-bought fresh pasta, the kind that comes refrigerated and soft and takes three minutes to prepare, and garlic and butter and olive oil and whatever vegetables I could scrounge from the garden near the big house and I would drink two or three (or four) glasses of wine and sometimes I would sob quietly by myself.” (Foodie aspirations drenched in manipulative self-pity.)

“Where were you the first time you learned the word Gorgonzola?” (Oh please.)

“At the edge of the cove, I saw a couple, the man pointing at something, a woman hugging herself to keep warm. I wondered if she wanted to be here. I wondered if she’d had a rough week at work.” (Wild and off-base assumptions about total strangers.)

“People still used digital cameras regularly then to capture moments, instead of phones like we do now. There would be no instant gratification, no immediate upload to the internet. This was just for them, for now.” (Laughable attempts at profundity.)

“There were gunshots all the time out on the streets.” (I honestly don’t know where to start when it comes to Saint Jami’s stabs at streetcred. She tries so hard throughout this book to prove that she’s “punk rock.” But this passage will do.)

“Every museum in Europe has Warhols in its collection—did you know that?” (If Saint Jami were a man, this would be a prime example of mansplaining.)

“Eventually I tired of DC. There was nothing for me there, I decided, a refrain that would become common enough in my life. I walked away so quickly from everything.” (A completely superficial sense of other cities.)

“A great lesson: When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they’re not on your side.” (Or maybe they’re being kind?)

“The six-packs of yogurt, all different flavors, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, an entire drawer just for cheese. I did not want this life, the husband, the kids. But I did want that refrigerator full of food.” (Pathetic ramshackle gluttony.)

“Rosie brings me lasagna and Julie brings me a tuna casserole, and I have more food than I could ever eat for weeks, and I think: That was my problem in Los Angeles, I didn’t know enough Jews there.” (Gluttony and narcissism walk into a bar. You know the end of the joke.)

“We got drunk very quickly, perhaps she more than me, but I didn’t know her well enough to be able to tell, and then a few of her friends showed up, two men, and we drank a little more, and we decided to drive around town with them. Everyone was kind of a mess except for the driver, who I was trying to flirt with because I was free and in a new city I hadn’t ruined for myself yet.” (More drug addict greed.)

“I am still flattered when people want to be my friend. The chubby child wonders why anyone would want to have her over after school, is grateful to be invited. If someone asks me to meet them for a drink and it feels like something good might come out of it, some sort of future relationship, I enter into it with an open heart.” (Man, I’ve heard this bullshit line from so many narcissists before.)

“I picture her on her barstool now, this writer in Brooklyn. She is slightly older than me, but much better kept. Someone who has been found sexy her entire life. A more accessible type. Taller, more lithe, softer curls on her head, more specific lips, lips with a wry, saucy point of view, pursed, it seems, always.” (Narcissistic jealousy of other peers.)

“Can you imagine viewing everything in your life through two sets of eyes? Yet surely, I have viewed myself through thousands of sets of eyes in my life. Without even knowing it.” (More egregious narcissism.)

“The main dramatic crisis of the film is her relationship with an angry, aggressive driving instructor who has an unrequited crush on her, and who ultimately is abusive toward her in a confrontation one night. She escapes uninjured, too precious is this character for permanent damage.” (A complete misread of Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky.)

“On my first book tour, sixteen years ago, a male bookstore owner hugged me too long after an event at his shop. ‘I could tell you were special by your picture,’ he said. I wondered if he’d even read my book.” (Narcissistic victimhood by way of wild assumptions.)

“Once I did an event where a man standing in my signing line said to me, ‘You remind me of my daughter; she’s also a narcissist.'” (No examination of this truth. Perhaps it’s too uncomfortable for Saint Jami. But the man in question here was spot-on.)

“I post another picture of myself in a hotel room on Instagram before I leave for the night. This is me, this is where I am, this is what I am wearing. I post it so people can tell me I look OK. I post it so people know I’m alive. I post it as a proof of life. I grow accustomed to seeing myself in a box on my cell phone. Did I live in the box?” (Jesus Christ, do you not listen to yourself, Saint Jami? What remarkable narcissism.)

“What’s it like to wake up every day and not worry what anyone else thinks?” (Saint Jami says this of a man who is not on social media. How can he not know of the “struggle” it is to be judged on social media? Well, maybe if you’re a narcissist, it consumes every hour of your day. But if you’re a well-adjusted human being, who honestly gives a fuck?)

“My boss was tall, a burly Australian man, actually physically intimidating, with a booming voice, and not a day went by that he didn’t comment on my facial expressions as he passed my desk. Particularly if I wasn’t smiling. That loud voice could be heard all across the office. Why aren’t you smiling? What’s wrong? Sometimes tapping his finger on my desk. Why don’t you smile more?” (More cartoonish description to bolster the book’s weak and shaky commitment to “feminism.”)

“At my event I am introduced as living in Brooklyn. From the crowd I hear it. A boo. For being from Brooklyn. I had traveled all that way just to get booed.” (Again, who cares? Maybe if you weren’t so concerned with what other people think and actually listened to them, you might be able to win the crowd over.)

“In 2020, a therapist tells me I’m hardwired for anxiety. I was screwed from the get-go, I think. I’m an excellent compartmentalizer of my feelings. I can organize my thoughts and emotions to protect myself and to build a shield, but that will only take me so far. I say, ‘I have been doing it for years.’ I can tell, she says, with what sounds like sympathy.” (Or maybe the therapist was probably thinking to herself, “Do I tell this solipsitic client that she’s a narcissist? Or do I continue to take her money?”)

“He sold himself to my mother, too.” (Because, as we all know, love is transactional.)

“In his stories, things happened. His characters were physical and often violent. They engaged in sharp dialogue, and they said things they’d regret. They drank a lot.” (Because, of course, every male writer who dips on the dark side of life is clearly a monster. I’m sorry to hear that Attenberg was assaulted. But there’s no need to stack the deck like this.)

“I could always see right through them because I am them: an absolute living nightmare in exactly the same way they are, except slightly more tolerable, because I’m a woman.” (Finally. One slight moment of honesty — near the end of the book. Although let me assure you that Jami Attenberg is more of a “living nightmare” than even she knows.)

“Then I read a status update on Facebook by someone who had been in our writing program, and he mourned him and said, ‘He was the best writer in our class,’ and I wanted to fucking scream, because I was the best writer in our class.” (I don’t think you were. Particularly if this is the way you write as a grown-ass adult.)

What’s particularly calculating about Attenberg describing her assault is that it brilliantly inoculates her from criticism. “Oh, you don’t like my book? Well, clearly, you stand on the side of toxic masculinity!” Hardly. But I have to wonder — in light of Alice Sebold identifying the wrong man who assaulted her — how much of this story was invented or embellished or even fact-checked by the people at Ecco. It’s easy enough to suss out who “Brendan” is. (It took me three minutes to find him on Google.) And since the dude is now dead, we have no way to corroborate the story. We also get a casual detail about a suicide attempt, but no effort by Attenberg to examine what led her to this state. Victimhood has become the currency of “memoirs” of this type. Victimhood is also the very quality that a narcissist flails about to anyone who will listen.

Perhaps the literary sphere is drawn to Attenberg’s work because they too believe themselves to be victims in some way. And when a victim presents herself as largely infallible and as the hero of her own story, you can then wallow in your own collective victimhood and sell multiple copies of your terrible book.