Book Review & Analysis: Attachments by Judith Rossner

Attachments

by Judith Rossner

      What kind of a woman would marry a conjoined twin? Nadine, the main character of Judith Rossner’s Attachments would and she’ll one up your expectations too by convincing her best friend Dianne to marry the other conjoined twin. The refrain of “it’s complicated” when asked about a person’s love life is taken to a whole other level here. The author’s intentions are complicated too, so much so that it is not entirely clear what she strives to accomplish in writing this story.

Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.

When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.

By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.

Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.

The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.

One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.

Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.

Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.

Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.

Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.

Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.

 

Book Review: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

by Friedrich Katz

      The Mexican Revolution is a difficult subject to approach. It was a loosely organized aeries of uprisings that lasted a little more than a decade. Some of the key figures, especially military commanders were obscure people with obscure motivations. Alliances shifted constantly, sometimes inexplicably. Historical records of events in Mexico at that time were not meticulously kept. A lot of what people know about the revolution is apocryphal and based in folklore, legend, and sometimes propaganda and yellow journalism. It’s no wonder that historians who tackle this field of knowledge often contradict each other in their accounts. It’s hard to tell the truth when the truth is so uncertain. One way of reducing the amount of murkiness and confusion surrounding the Mexican Revolution is to write about it from a biographical standpoint so that one historical figure can act as an anchor, making it easier to organize and analyze the confusing mass of information. That is what the Austrian historian Friedrich Karz does in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.

The whole story starts out in the northern state of Chihuahua where military veterans of the Mexico-Apache wars were given land as reward for their fighting. As the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz grew in power, the increasingly unpopular oligarchs Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were encroaching on people’s land, establishing haciendas, and instituting a system of debt peonage. Francisco Madero started a pro-democracy uprising to unseat Diaz and one of his military commanders was a former bandit named Pancho Villa. This ex-bandit had a natural talent for military leadership and quickly rose in the ranks. His army unit was composed of mostly peasant agriculturalists and Indians and their agitation for land reform and redistribution came into the revolution along with them.

Understanding the mind and personality of Pancho Villa is not an easy task. A lot is known about what he did, but personal accounts of what he was like as a man are on the sketchy side. He is known for being compassionate and cruel in equal measures, he moved easily among the poorest and richest members of society, his educational level was low but he had a natural intelligence and a curiosity for learning, and he was a bigamist who married several women and had a large brood of children. None of this tells you much about the inner workings of his mind. But I also suspect that Katz is not the kind of author who has an aptitude for that kind of writing.

Nevertheless, Pancho Villa’s story is amazing. After helping Madero overthrow the dictatorship, Villa was imprisoned for some unclear reason. After Villa escaped, the military commander Huerta overthrew Madero and reestablished the dictatorship. Villa called up his armies again and the next phase of civil war began. After the revolutionaries called the Conference of Aguascalientes, Villa formed a loose alliance with Emiliano Zapata since both caudillos stood for the cause of land reform. Villa seized power in Chihuaua as acting governor for a while, then eventually returned to fighting in the war, this time against the faction of the revolution lead by Venustiano Carranza, the man who ratified the new Mexican constitution. Just like in the French Revolution, and so many other revolutions in the past, the revolutionary soldiers entered into combat against each other. By the end of the decade, Villa was losing favor with his followers but he kept fighting, probably because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. During this period before his assassination, he led an attack north of the American border on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This led to a brief invasion into Mexico by the American army that resulted in nothing but more chaos.

There is so much more to this story and most of it is written here in minute details. It is an understatement to say that Friedrich Katz is anal retentive. Ultimately, though, he is on the tolerable side of detail oriented writing, thereby making it just possible to digest. If he had given any more details this book would have been impossible to read. But the details are the best and the worst thing about this biography. By giving such long, drawn out explanations, Katz runs the risk of boring his readers to death and drowning them in information. But at least the information is relevant and, actually, it works to his benefit. Since the Mexican Revolution can be such a swamp of muck to unpack, something goes to be said for the excessive details. Writing it all out this way separates the different strands of the history, bringing them into sharper focus, and making it easy to examine each part of the story in clarity. A quality microscope can make a splotch of biological matter easier to see in its complexity by expanding and exaggerating its appearance so its disorganization looks more organized for our perception. That is what Katz accomplishes in this book. Even though this work is so thorough that it can induce migraines for the reader, it is worth the torment of reading it because it ends up being the most comprehensible and clearly written book on the Mexican Revolution I have encountered so far.

Another impressive aspect of this biography is Katz’s unwillingness to take sides in an argument when he feels there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion. A case in point is the issue of why American president Woodrow Wilson supported the Villista forces at first and then switched sides to support the Constitutionalist Carrancistas. Katz gives multiple perspectives on the issue, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion because there isn’t any documented records directly explaining Wilson’s stances. Other issues treated in this similar way are Madero’s reasoning for imprisoning Villa, Villa’s continued support for Madero after being imprisoned, Villa’s reasoning for fighting against Carranza and his troops, whether Villa was persuaded by a German agent to attack Columbus as part of a conspiracy to keep America out of World War I, and who was behind the assassination of Villa. He even contemplates the unanswered question of why Villa continued his campaigns of guerilla warfare for so long after the Revolution had lost meaning for him. While it is useful to speculate on unanswerable historical problems, it is even more commendable when a scholar is humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know what the right answers are.

To be blunt, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a pain in the ass to read because of its length, excessive detail, and Germanic writing style that could very well make your hemorrhoids act up. But if there is only one book you ever read about the Mexican Revolution, this one is worth the trouble. That’s not to say it exhausts the subject matter because it doesn’t. But it does clarify a lot of the confusion surrounding this hotly debated topic of Mexican history. And by the end, it makes it easy to see why Pancho Villa remains a hero of the poor and the working classes in Mexico, along with Leftists in other countries, and such a villain to heartless conservatives who think the world should only belong to them. And Villa is even a saint to some devotees of Santa Muerte.

 

Book Review: Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs by Brendan Mullen

Lexicon Devil:

The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs

by Brendan Mullen with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

      Punk rock took longer to catch on in Los Angeles than it did in the movement’s other major epicenters of New York and London. It’s not that Los Angeles wasn’t primed for it; glam rock was big there in the early 1970s and records from the east cost and the U.K. had found their way out West . For whatever reason, it just took a while to catch hold. But when it did, it exploded. The Runaways could be credited for being the first major band to catalyze the LA scene, but one band moved the whole thing forward by acting as a transition point from early punk to the hardcore punk of the 1980s. That band was the Germs with their singer Darby Crash. Brendan Mullen’s Lexicon Devil tells the story of the brief but seminal career of the band that took punk excess and degeneracy to a whole new level.

Like so many other books out there on the history of punk, Lexicon Devil is an oral history wherein quotes from interviews and articles are carefully pieced together to make a multi-voiced narrative about its subject matter. Scottish immigrant Brendan Mullen was a promoter and early club manager in Los Angeles and helped to get the scene moving. He works well as the compiler and editor of the story since he both observed and participated in the scene. Some of this information, and even some exactly matching quotes, appear in his other collaborative project on the Los Angeles punk movement We Got the Neutron Bomb. Some nitpickers might complain about that, but it works well especially when the re-used quotes fill in missing information, making the whole narrative hang together. If it works, you might as well do it.

Jan Paul Beahm was born into a broken family. His father was absent soon after the early years of his childhood and his mother was overbearing, manic, and histrionic. He went to an alternative high school based on the practices of Scientology and est. Only in California, right? Beahm considered L. Ron Hubbard to be a major influence on his thinking for the few short years he had left to live. It was at that high school where he made friends with George Ruthenberg, the kid who later became Pat Smear, the guitarist for the Germs (and Nirvana and Foo Fighters after that). (Damn, Pat Smear played in two legendary bands whose lead singers both killed themselves. How’s that for rotten luck?)

Beahm, who took the stage name Bobby Pyn, threw together a band of no-talent musicians and called themselves the Germs. Their concerts were little more than pranks where the band made noise and Bobby Pyn did Iggy Pop impressions, cutting his chest with broken glass and throwing food into the audience. They got a well-deserved reputation for being the worst band in L.A. But they weren’t taking themselves seriously and other people weren’t either. They developed a following, especially because Bobby Pyn, who changed his stage name again to Darby Crash, had a strange kind of charisma. He wasn’t a good looking kid, but he had an interesting face and a look of menace about him that was attractive to other punks. He was especially attractive with women and he always had a clique of female groupies around. He actually aspired to be a cult leader and Germs fans began wearing black armbands with blue circles on them. They also burned their wrists with cigarettes to mark themselves out as different from those who weren’t followers. But naive teenager with a philosophy cobbled together from the ideas of other cult leaders could only be limited in scope.

The overall context is not ignored. The growth of the West Hollywood punk scene is well-documented including a wide cast of people like The Go Gos, Rodney Bingenheimer, Joan Jett, the publishers of Slash fanzine, members of X, and all kinds of other people who participated in the scene. Stories about the legendary underground nightclub The Masque are told and the early punk lifestyle, heavy on the drugs and alcohol, is well detailed. Also of important detail is the rise of hardcore punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s after the Germs released their only album GI. The hardcore scene grew rapidly and attracted a lot of kids who didn’t fit in with the early punk scene. The new punks were more violent, more macho, and attracted a lot of negative attention from the police and local rednecks who became notorious for their violence against punks.

The narrative makes it look as though the transition of punk from a fun, ironic nihilism infused with gallows humor to slam dancing, gang fights, and hyper-aggresive adrenaline binges contributed to the downfall of Darby Crash. The singer just couldn’t adapt to the punk movement’s growth that he instigated with his band. The scene appeared to be leaving him behind. Darby Crash struggled with other issues too. He had gotten hooked on heroin and felt as though he had to keep his identity as a gay man secret, especially because the second wave of punk was decidedly more masculine in its presentation. He had also been talking about 86ing himself long before he put the Germs together.

The tragic ending and eulogizing isn’t overdone. Darby Crash’s suicide was ugly and depressing; it probably angered people more than it surprised them. The narrative says what it has to say and then ends. But the last paragraph is a quote from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Temple ov Psychick Youth fame. You can agree or disagree with what Genesis says about the meaning of Darby Crash’s life, one that hit the LA punk scene like a lightning bolt, but you can’t deny that the quote packs a powerful punch to finish this biography off.

There isn’t much to criticize in Lexicon Devil. It’s a thoroughly researched and detailed portrait of a young man, a time, a place, and a counter-cultural music scene. In the end, your appreciation will simply rest on how you feel about Darby Crash and punk in general. If this music and lifestyle are too abrasive for you, you will probably hate this book no matter how perfectly executed Brendan Mullen’s project is. And if you really must know what the inner life of Darby Crash felt like, and the reason so many punks were drawn to the Germs, I recommend you get a copy of their album GI and play the song “We Must Blled”. Play it at high volume. Play it over and over and over again. It’s an absolute nightmare and when Darby Crash, with his raspy snarling voice, sings over and over again “I want out now” you’ll know what kind of pain he was feeling.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Car by Harry Crews

Car

by Harry Crews

      What would you be willing to do for fame? What if you want to be famous but have no talent? If popular culture in America has proven anything, it is that some people will do anything, no matter how degrading or humiliating, just as long as they have a camera pointed in their direction. In the 1970s, there was The Gong Show. It was a talent show for people who had no talent. They would get on stage and make fools of themselves and if the celebrity panel hated them enough they would bang a gong and whoever was on stage lost. There were rarely ever any winners. I do have to say, however, that the recurrent guest Gene Gene the Dancing Machine was an all around cool contestant. I’d share a six pack with him any day of the week.

Fascination for this kind of junk entertainment isn’t limited to America or any one time and place. Previous times gave us carny freak shows and circus side shows with geeks who bit the heads off live chickens. There might be an artistic side to boxing, but in the end all the audience wants to see is somebody being beaten to a bloody pulp. Entertainment in the Roman Empire made a spectacle out of gladiators fighting to the death. Medieval times made bear baiting a sport. Even Shakespeare satirized a talentless theater troupe in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In more recent times we’ve had TV shows like Fear Factor and The Jerry Springer Show. Jackass was all about people who intentionally hurt themselves for the sake of comedy. In the 1980s, a man from India made it into The Guiness Book of World Records for growing the longest fingernails; he said he did that simply because his life’s goal was to be famous. The contemporary porn industry is partially about people voluntarily subjecting themselves to sexual degradation and humiliation in exchange for large sums of money. In the middle of all this, we’ve got the short novel Car by the master of grit lit himself, Harry Crews.

The lead character of the book is Herman. He grew up in the presence of wrecked cars. His father came up with the idea of making an auto graveyard in Jacksonville, Florida. Open to the public, people can spend a few quiet moments with a car they had crashed or one in which a loved one has died. His sister Junell’s job is to collect the wrecks in her tow truck and stack them up in the yard. His twin brother, strangely named Mister, puts the cars through compactors so they can be sold as scrap metal. The auto graveyard didn’t turn out to be lucrative enough so the family had to start selling the junked vehicles to make money. Herman grew up in this atmosphere, surrounded by auto wrecks at a business that didn’t live up to the vision his father had conceived. The theme of deferred dreams runs throughout the novel and sets us up for what comes later. Speaking of conception, Herman also wonders how many babies are conceived in the back seats of cars. In American culture, the automobile is all pervasive. It is alpha and omega and everything in between. Automobiles are fetishized for sexuality and status, and in Herman’s case, automobiles are food.

Herman is a dreamer. His dream is to become famous. How does a man whose talents extend no further than running a junkyard become famous? He captures the attention of the world by announcing that he will eat a car in public, piece by piece, over the course of several years. The news spreads all over America and even gets as far as Japan. When the time comes, he appears on stage in a hotel ballroom in front of a packed audience twice a day. For the morning show, he eats little pieces of the car and for the late show, he poops the pieces out after passing through his digestive system. The pieces are then sold for outrageous amounts of money and some are made into model replicas of the car he is eating. This is broadcast live on television and Herman’s fame keeps growing.

Herman is narratively paired up with a prostitute named Margo. She works at the hotel where Herman’s car consumption takes place. As the two bond with each other, she offers to have sex with him for free. She has a bit of a car fetish and sleeping with him will be the closest she ever comes to having sex with a car. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. The two becomes friends rather than lovers since they connect at a human level. Both of them attempt to consume something that can’t be entirely consumed. Herman wants to consume a car and Margo wants to consume sexuality itself by sleeping with as many men as possibly. Both of them attempt to fill a void resulting from past experience. Herman is haunted by a childhood trauma that happened in the auto graveyard and Margo was disappointed with her first sexual experience in the back of a sports car with a complete stranger. These are their interpersonal connections. The wider social circumstances link them together too because both are victims of financial exploitation.

Mr. Edge is a businessman who owns the hotel where Herman is eating the car. He is the promoter of the show and also the one who hired Margo to sell her body there to draw customers. Crews uses Mr. Edge to attack the dehumanizing institution of show business. His sole motivation is money and making it through the exploitation of Herman and Margo is his means. He cares nothing about their physical or psychological safety just as long as the money keeps rolling in. In the tradition of P.T. Barnum, he gets rich by making a spectacle out of degradation. If Herman and Margo are paired as objects of exploitation for profit, albeit willing ones, Mr. Edge is equally paired with Herman’s twin brother Mister in the way they both capitalize off Herman’s stunt. Mister sees the potential for getting rich off Herman, elects himself to be his business manager, and bullies Mr. Edge into signing a contract giving him a large percentage of the earnings drawn from the performances. But poetic justice is served when Herman is in too much pain to continue eating the car. Mister, being his identical twin, is forced by Mr. Edge to take Herman’s place on stage without the audience knowing the difference. The results are not pleasant for Mister and you can’t feel sympathy for him because he places money making before family. His wealth derives from using his brother for entertainment, not caring how that might be effecting Herman.

As for the audience, the only reason this kind of entertainment is possible is because millions of people eagerly pay money to watch it. There is something in humanity that is amused by watching people make fools of themselves. It allows us to point our fingers at them and say,”I may not be anything special but at least I’m not the one doing that.” It appeals to our sense of superiority. And as a reading audience we are just as guilty of this as the ones in the ballroom watching Herman eat the car and shit out the pieces. After all, the reason you read this is because you want to watch a guy eat a car. This book confronts you with your own morbid sense of curiosity.

Harry Crews successfully critiques the sleaziness and dehumanization of the entertainment industry. He also critiques the way that cars have become an all consuming fetish in American culture in the way that people celebrate the beauty of the automobiles’ appearance and use, the sentimental attachments people form with their cars, and the fascination with destruction in the form of car crashes and junkyards. But Harry Crews is a humanist and underneath the steely surface of this novel, he finds humanity in the forsaken dreams and past traumas of some of the characters. The world in this book is a rotten world and people like Margo, Herman, and his father are caught up in it. They may have made bad choices, but that is what happens to most people at some time so you can’t fault them for that.

There are two parts of the story that don’t quite work. One is the reason Herman gives for wanting to eat the car. I don’t mean the desire to be famous; I do mean the connection between his childhood trauma and his strange fascination with wanting to devour a motor vehicle. The trauma did involve cars, but I can’t see why he would think that his publicity stunt would compensate for that. The other part is Margo’s self-disclosures. Her explanation of her trade is hard to buy as most prostitutes don’t enter their profession because they love promiscuity. It’s also hard to swallow her explanation for why some prostitutes don’t have gag reflexes (pun intended). It looks like Crews felt he needed to have Margo explain herself, but didn’t have a solid idea of what he wants her to say.

Still, Car is a great book to read. The writing is rough around the edges, but Harry Crews does here what he does best. He lures you in by tempting you with something so sick and absurd that you don’t want to turn away. In the process, he confronts you with observations about human nature you might not have considered otherwise. This novel might comfort you or it might disturb you. It depends on who you are. But never will it bore you. Otherwise, it’s a whole new way of looking at consumer culture.