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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.
It seems strange that a Rabbi would proclaim himself agnostic and have his first sermon be about how Adam ought to have eaten the whole fruit of knowledge and not just part of it, but I have to agree with the introduction that there is an authenticity to it. Beerman, if he is to be believed, was inspired by the Spinozan God-as-nature idea, and argued that authentic doubt can be a religious stance.
The tropes fit perfectly into today's leftism: social justice, activism, inequality, racism, oppression, but these things must have made a different impression before Current Year. Various dubious aspects pepper the narrative, like support for the Rosenbergs. If there's one thing I've taken away from it, it is the reminder that I'm not exactly a church-goer myself, and that perhaps a renewed study of my relation to God is in order.
Finished Nell Zink's Doxology on Friday.
Easily the most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book this year. Have you ever been at a standup comedy gig and the comedian tells a joke which doesn't land, and there's just this awkward silence? Doxology is that in literary form. There were so many attempts at humour which simply fell flat. While reading it, I found myself constantly rolling my eyes at some of the really lame attempts at humour. Zink seems incredibly smug and pleased with herself for some reason beyond my capacity to divine — her attempts at humour are neither funny nor even clever enough that she gets brownie points for being obscurantist. For some reason, I pictured Zink making this expression the entire time she was sitting in front of her computer typing. There's one point where one of the characters tells her husband that she's looking for a collaborator (i.e. in a business startup), and her husband "quips" back something like "You mean you're going to shave my head?" And then the narration adds a parenthetical literally explaining the joke, that the husband was referring to the French women who dated Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation. I'm not saying the joke would have been funny to begin with, but explaining it didn't help any and just made me feel annoyed in addition to not laughing.
Awhile back, someone on this forum complained that, when writing fiction, Scott suffers from "MCU disease", in which he's unable to stop himself from cracking jokes even when it's inappropriate, thereby puncturing the dramatic tension. I agree that this is a bad strategy, and the chapters in Unsong where he's able to restrain himself are some of the strongest, showing that he's perfectly capable of generating real dramatic tension and power when he wants to. But in Scott's defense, at least a lot of his jokes actually work. The only thing worse than disrupting the tension of a dramatic scene with an actually clever joke is disrupting with a joke which isn't funny and which just annoys the reader.
Nell Zink is attempting an ambitious family drama charting three generations of a family from the 1970s right up to the start of Trump's first term. But with half of an exception, all of the characters (regardless of age, sex, race, which state they grew up in, which state they live in, their political affiliations, profession, education etc.) sound exactly the same. If one of the characters makes a reference to some obscure hardcore punk musician from the 1980s, the other characters will always understand without any explanation required. In written fiction, dialogue is the primary means of making characters feel like distinct entities, and Zink completely fucking whiffs it. Dialogues in this book sound like two chatbots with identical training data talking to one another. Because none of the characters feel like real people, all of the melodramatic soapy efforts at generating emotional torque (corporal punishment! sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! 9/11! death by OD! family reconciliation! May-December romance! infidelity! indeterminate paternity!) go nowhere. A character must feel real before we can feel affected by their travails, and none of these do, because they're a league of interchangeable sock puppets.
And my God, the politics. This is some of the most sophomoric, Boomerlib, TDS-brained "political commentary" I've ever read. In the final third of the book or so, it's 2016, immediately prior to the election, and one of the characters decides to become a political activist travelling to various purple states canvassing for Jill Stein. Of course Trump gets elected and all of the characters are devastated. Zink is not even the least bit interested in honest speculation as to the nature of Trump's appeal: in her view, it does really seem to boil down to "Trump is evil and full of hate, and half of America voted for him because they're so hateful and evil". In Pennsylvania, immediately after the results are announced, the narration observes a man driving around in a pickup truck and speculates that he's "probably looking for some black people to shoot", a goal in which he's bound to be frustrated because Pennsylvania is 98% white. Oh, please.
In a particularly outrageous act of historical revisionism, Zink even has the nerve to more or less directly argue the reason Hillary lost was because her campaign was too positive. One of the characters is a political campaign advisor who strongly encourages the DNC to go hard on attacking Trump sooner rather than later, but they ignore his advice in favour of a campaign founded on hope and optimism. "When they go low, we go high" etc. The clear implication is that if the DNC had followed this character's advice, Hillary would have won. With respect, Zink — are you fucking kidding me? Have you completely forgotten about the basket of deplorables? The "grab them by the pussy" tape? "America's Bully"? "Mirrors"? I don't know how anyone could possibly claim in all seriousness that the reason Hillary lost was because she was too positive and hopeful, and didn't spend enough time attacking her opponent. This kind of self-serving cope might be excusable if Zink was Hillary's campaign advisor trying to keep her career afloat after a shocking upset — but no, there's nothing for Zink in this, this seems to be what she really believes. (For clarity: I'm not saying I found the book annoying only because of its politics. The plot arc involving the 2016 election only appears in the final ~third of the book or so, and my goodwill had been more or less exhausted well before that point.)
I donated it to a charity shop this afternoon. Probably my fastest ever turnaround time between finishing a book and disposing of it. Next up is SE Hinton's The Outsiders.
Why would you read the book to the end if you found it boring and frustrating? Sometimes I get gifted books where I can intensively disagree with the author, think the author's a fiend who wants to make the world worse but admit the logic and argumentation given the premises and goals is tight and coherent. But that's non-fiction. If I read fiction and I'm not having fun, I dump it.
One of my new year's resolutions was to read at least 26 books this year. About halfway through the book I rather strongly felt I was no longer enjoying it, but I didn't want the time I'd invested so far to go to waste.
To be fair to Zink, the book wasn't boring as such. Her style isn't funny, but it's at least easy to read.
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