Scrambled eggs and revolutions
Hello, friends!
This new year has, so far, brought with it some interesting reads. I opened the year by reading Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass House and re-reading her Station Eleven, then enjoyed Danielle Evans’s first collection of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self.
Right now I’m reading, and nearly finished with, Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel, No One is Talking About This, a curiously experimental thing that examines life from the POV of an “influencer,” lived almost completely online (in “the portal,” as Lockwood refers to it).
The first half of the novel is more or less plotless, filled with rumination about social media, the herd behaviors of humans who are addicted to it. Here’s an example:
There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.
And:
“What are you doing?” her husband asked softly, tentatively, repeating his question until she shifted her blank gaze up to him. What was she doing? Couldn’t he see her arms all full of the sapphires of the instant? Didn’t he realize that a male feminist had posted a picture of his nipple that day?
The second half of the novel introduces a more traditional plot, one in which the narrator’s sister endures a medical crisis. The crisis is significant enough to jar the narrator out of their social media fog, to confront them with the reality of existing as a person in the world again:
“I can do something for her,” she tried to explain to her husband, when he asked why she kept flying back to Ohio on those rickety $98 flights that had recently been exposed as dangerous by Nightline. “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”
Recently a dental emergency—a non-serious one, but one of the sort that must be dealt with quickly—bucked me out of isolation and into the real world again. I wasn’t sure my Jeep would start; maybe it wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t have to go. But it did, and I did. I carried the Patricia Lockwood novel with me, and read it while waiting to see a new dentist. When an assistant led me back, she noticed the book and said, “Is your book good?” I was certain she had no idea what book it was; I’d left the dust jacket at home. “It’s…very different,” I said, and she nodded and that was that. When the appointment was over and she led me up front, she resumed the thread as if there’d been no break. “I’ve decided to take up reading this year,” she told me. “My friend loaned me a book. It’s a mystery, I think. I couldn’t put it down. Is your book like that?” I told her every book was different, and this one wasn’t quite like that. “I’m sorry it’s not good,” she said, and left me at the front desk to talk about payment.
A couple of weeks ago, while reading Station Eleven, I came upon these brief lines, in which Clark is thinking of his boyfriend, Robert:
Robert in the mornings: he liked to read a novel while he ate breakfast. It was possibly the most civilized habit Clark had ever encountered.
As I read that line, I was eating breakfast. And I looked up from the table and saw that Felicia was also eating and reading, and next to her, Squish was bent over a book while eating, too. I laughed, and they both turned around, and I read the passage to them, and observed, “I guess we’re civilized.”
I began watching a show called The Great this weekend. (I haven’t decided if I like it enough to keep watching yet.) There’s a scene in which Catherine, who has been deeply offended a dozen times by Peter (her new husband, emperor of Russia), reads a book, ignoring him. When she’s had enough of his interrupting, she suggests she will read a passage from the book to him; Peter, who does not like reading or ideas, and does not approve of women reading or having ideas, begrudgingly agrees to hear it. Catherine reads this bit, by the French philosopher Denis Diderot:
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest.
This occurs at breakfast, and therefore is also civilized, I think?
Next, I think, I’ll read Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, or perhaps How to Survive in the North, by Luke Healy. Or both!
Any year that begins with a pile of books and scrambled eggs is a good one, I think. I hope yours has begun similarly!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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