We Used To Write Shit In This Country

Jim Crace's Harvest is a tight novel revolving around the enclosure of common lands in pre-Industrial Britain and the societal upheaval that follows.

Now nothing gets me more excited than a yarn about ye olde historic tymes, especially British ones, but I have to say that Harvest did a great job of not seeming like a historical novel, with ripped bodices and luscious locks and, I don't know, jousting sticks or whatever. And it wasn't boring. And? What? Why can't I be honest? That's just what I feel.

And it's true, even though the setting seems esoteric — or at least it was to me; perhaps I was just zoning out during some British history class I never took — it's not overly historical, at least any more than Absalom, Absalom! or Beloved or some such.

Part of what really pulls you in is the simple formula — take conflict (societal upheaval), add personal conflict (everything that happens in the book) and round out with yet more conflict (an all-out final conflagration). And the poor subsistence farmers don't have any bodices to speak of, but they do "spend" and "disburse" themselves in an with one another: "Lying on her back with me on top, her creamy stomach sways and frowns like a shaken posset."

The final parts of Harvest are as great as they come. [Insert spoiler alert here.] As society as the characters know it is crumbling and falling away, the villagers scattered to some other village, or perhaps a city, the main character is left behind to tend to the burning remnants of the manor. He's taken a hallucinogenic mushroom and believes the arsonists have made breakfast and packed his bags for him — it's a wonderful image: decent society as one big drug trip; look at this chaos and try to believe that everyone isn't just one step away from burning the whole place down. It reminds me of something my Anthropology 101 professor said about culture being a "scam." I only half understood what he meant by this. He also taught the same class at the community college for a fraction of the tuition. (In retrospect, it's possible he was cribbing from Terence McKenna. I only now learned who Terence McKenna was.)

[Now I will proceed to make a straw man out of someone or something.]

The other thing I took away from Harvest is that it was refreshing to read a real goddamn story for a change. The more time you spend with normal goddamn stories, the more cheesed off you get with this glut of infantilized authors writing infantilized books about infantilizing subjects. Is it a US versus UK thing? Is it the fault of the Safran-Anderson Industrial Complex? (By the way, what did Steely Dan think of Moonrise Kingdom? I actually never saw it.)

Nothing against 25-year-olds, but would a 25-year-old do more than five and dime the beginning and end of the manuscript like Harvest? Or is it too, I don't know, middle-aged? What's the enclosure act about anyway? The size of stamps or something? And what's a letter anyway?

[Now I will backtrack slightly from the preceding.]

Look, clearly, not everything is ___________'s fault. I don't mean to complain. I'm very pleased and inspired by vintage A-line dresses and ukeleles. But sometimes it seems like we lost our way. We used to make shit in this country, write shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket and grimace knowingly when we remove our hand and find that in it is a copy of Miranda July's latest book, It Chooses You.