Every Shitty Book Is Shitty In Its Own Way

Someone, I can't remember who it was, once said that good books are all alike, while every shitty book is shitty in its own way.

That said, when it comes to shitty books, there are some through lines. Shitty books are a chore to read. Shitty books make you want to watch TV. Shitty books make you want to clean the basement.

Indeed, we've read a lot of shitty books, but I can't think of any as thoughtless and unsatisfying as Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, a book about a man in the professional-managerial class who has a condition whereby he must start walking until he collapses and falls asleep. Over the years he and his wife have managed the condition so that she'll know where to find him but one day she decides she has enough and lets him wander all over God's green earth until he — spoiler alert here — loses several toes to frostbite. Even though he's just an attorney he somehow has endless pots of money to use to indulge this condition and maintain a house in Connecticut. His wife eventually succumbs to cancer. He dies somewhere, maybe in a tent I think. I forget the ending because you kind of don't give a fuck in the end.

I can overlook effusive book jacket praise — great gobs of flabby unctuousness like "written with uncommon grace" or "rich and profound." I can overlook the self-serious author photo. I can overlook the thoughtless dialogue that sounds like it's the same person speaking over the course of 300 pages. I can overlook a seeming allegory that goes nowhere. Look, I can overlook a lot of things. What I can't overlook is the protagonist's wife telling him toward the end of the story, "Tell me you don't miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come."

Mama always told us that boys would only jerk you around and that it took a man to really make sweet love to you, and now I know what she meant by that. Which is to say, under the guise of supposed literary fiction, Unnamed does a bunch of genres in a really shitty, unsatisfying manner: there's a murder mystery that is never resolved; there's some kind of love story, I suppose; there's some sort of allegory that says . . . something?

Unnamed does none of this stuff well: The murder mystery falls by the wayside; the love story is a cardboard caricature of an older couple "in love"; The allegory crunches under your feet like so many dead bees which, along with the bad weather, are a sign of environmental despoliation that has to mean something but which you can't really see how it fits in. You wonder if pressed, the author would plead that those are your expectations and that this work is meant to challenge your expectations. You know what else challenges my expectations? Creighton University's men's basketball team. But at least they make some sense.

Two hundred and seventy-seven pages into Unnamed there's a moment where the protagonist talks about his journey and condition to a preacher out in the middle of the country somewhere. The preacher finally tells him, "So all you life you've searched and searched for a rational explanation, while presuming there is one. But if there isn't?" This is the precise point in Unnamed that makes me want to tear off my own toes. We — I — don't read books to be hectored about my expectations by marginal characters. If there's no rational explanation then we're done here.

Toward the end of Unnamed your mind wanders — you want something freaky to happen with the working class security guard the protagonist befriends. Like he's really a foot fetishist, who doesn't mind toeless men. Or that the real murderer of the high-powered client's wife is actually the protagonist, who doesn't even remember doing it. You want something bold to take place, and then the only thing that's bold is the protagonist's wife whispering about where she wants him to put his tongue. Not what I was thinking. Then you start to perseverate on the details of this overly researched book: Where does the money come from? How would you get a prescription for anti-psychotics from a clinic in the middle of nowhere? Toes just fall off like that? Seriously?

There's a joke — What's your writing process? Spellcheck! And that's how it seems — that it's kind of a vague idea, almost a first draft or maybe someone's MFA thesis. There's some sort of too-clever-by-half idea buried in there under a mound of self-important metaphor. It all feels heavy, burdensome.

The tone and tenor of the book remind you of something. At first, you're not really sure what — it's a familiar feeling that scrapes against the inside of your skull like a dull salon brush. And then it finally occurs to you — oh right, the video for Collective Soul's "The World I Know":

Wait a second, those ants are . . . us? Sublime!

There's no big gaping reason why Unnamed is the biggest piece of turd we've ever read, but I have some ideas. It feels like an allegory that you can't explain — and allegories are unentertaining enough without having it be so opaque that you're not sure what they're allegoring; a man, on a . . . journey! One of us wondered if it was borrowing from some other source, which would also make it seem burdensome and unentertaining — like the Odyssey or, uh, something else that people base stories on; in which case, you'd be lost and unentertained if you had no idea what that clever homage was. Ultimately you just kind of feel disappointed by current literary fiction — it's not particularly good, it doesn't mean much. Unnamed sticks out like a sore, uh, appendage in how little it says and how little passion there is. It feels like a book. It looks like a book. It appears tightly written but somehow says very little. And then you put it down and feel nothing, just unentertained by it all.

If I Read It, Here's What I Thought

I always thought the strangest aspect of the OJ Simpson trial was Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I wonder what the Goldman and Brown families think of it, whether they're especially troubled by it, or just troubled by it in the way that most of the rest of the country is troubled by it.

There was just something really strange and rich about this supremely successful celebrity family, and how their start came from the ur-reality show — OJ's Bronco ride-live suicide watch and subsequent trial. The whole thing mirrors the arc of TruTV; turning courtroom drama into reality programming.

I always thought that part was the strangest aspect because it was: If you were an alien or a ǃKung bushman or Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson it would strike you as one of the more asinine and egregious examples of karmic capitalism — the family of the attorney defending the celebrity murderer (according to the burden of proof in a civil trial) become celebrities themselves. Oh, and their stepdad is one of the most recognizable Olympic champions of all time, and not just for any Olympic event but the marathon; straight up, they put the man on cereal boxes. Seriously, What the fuck? It's as if Paris Hilton never even existed.

You could say that it's easy enough to ignore these people but they're moving from popular culture to fashion to music to sports. One day one of them will probably run for office. And then I swear to god I'll stop voting.

Here's the thing: Were it not for Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the very strangest thing about post-6/12/94 OJ Simpson would be If I Did It.

If I Did It always promised to be salacious, but there was something genre-defining about the triumph of the third conditional in modern literature — also, the breakout moment for counterfactual history, which until OJ was relegated to a particular type of person, and not always someone you'd want to have a conversation with.

The concept of "If I Did It" was poised to become a major cultural moment, with artists quickly embracing the third conditional, a genuine response to the sampled/appropriated/blockquoted culture of the mid-2000s. And then Keeping Up with the Kardashians happened.

To be fair, good sense also prevailed for a while, until it didn't; the publisher canceled the project and it wasn't published until the Goldman family got the rights to the manuscript as part of the civil judgement and were compelled by a court order to publish it. Which just makes it all weird again: The family who doesn't want this quasi-counterfactual confession thing published is forced to publish it themselves. (I would — maybe — almost — argue that this near-confession might be kind of nice the family, as far as "closure" goes — I'm sure a lot of criminals never admit as much as OJ does in If, and in such a free-wheeling, nakedly moronic manner — the obscene aspect of profiting on crime is another matter, of course.)

So with some — some — moral cover you can read If knowing that at least the money is going to the victim's family, though if you sat there long enough even that seems rotten: If I Did It seems like a strange way to work off one's debt. And the cover is clever: The "If" is buried in tiny dark letters in the "I" of "If I Did It," meaning that the cover looks like it says "I Did It."

Once you get into the actual book, there are almost 70 pages of introductions, prologues and various explanations for why the book exists, written by the Goldman family. Some of it sounds defensive. I don't think they had a choice. This isn't really a text that can exist on its own. There's an introduction by Pablo Fenjves, the ghost writer who worked with OJ — that part is pretty fascinating. After the world was outraged by a confession in the third conditional, OJ distanced himself from the book and called it fiction made up by the ghost writer. It's interesting to hear Fenjves' view of the process. One of the things that stands out is something he observed while interviewing OJ about how many people want to shake OJ's hand and take his picture.

So anyway, after about 70 pages, you get to the actual book itself, which feels creepy — creepier than if it just began from the front of the book.

It's crazy, but the first thing that emerges — very early on — is that pre-6/12/94 vision of OJ: the dutiful, well-spoken sideline reporter, the playful luggage-vaulting Hertz pitchman, the great side character in Naked Gun. It's been almost 20 years since I remembered this OJ, and what I forgot in the meantime was how weird an idea it was that this guy killed two people. It's almost like if Ryan Seacrest, Mario Lopez or Michael Strahan killed some people — it was so weird to think about and so counter to his public persona, which I think is in part what made America crazy in the months and years afterward. Some athletes or celebrities you could maybe see doing something rotten. Not OJ — he was just too funny acting alongside Leslie Nielsen.

Anyway, that happy-go-lucky image of OJ comes back almost immediately. Along with that is a guileless version of OJ, which, to be honest, you can kind of see through. I was unaware of his domestic dispute past, and never paid that much attention to the trial itself, so when he uses this guileless affectation to gloss over what seem like textbook abusive situations, it's not terribly convincing.

Along the way, I have to admit, I was feeling sympathetic toward OJ. Did he create this absurd straw man in Nicole? Yes, no question. Is it sinister and fucked up? No doubt. Do I see how he might have been a little cross? Well, kind of . . . I mean, this is a lady who had relations with Marcus Allen — fellow Heisman winner Marcus Allen! — and OJ's cool, calm and collected best judgement was to be cool with it. That takes some restraint . . . which is where the perniciousness of I Did It comes in: without even knowing the other half of the story, it just doesn't read right. No one, except someone trying to prove he didn't murder someone, would think it was cool that Marcus Allen had sex with your ex-wife.

And that's not even getting into the absurd mental gymnastics of some of the situations he describes: "I will admit to you [. . .] that some of my arguments with Nicole did indeed deteriorate into shouting matches, and that we tended to get in each other's faces. But most of the time we resolved our differences peacefully, without getting physical." I don't know what the italics are about, but my strong suspicion is that its meant to distract you from the previous part: "most of the time." A lot of the book is like that. And Nicole is such a caricature — a wonderful lady who is obsessed with her weight and has a horrible temper but who would be a great girl if she wasn't running with all these damn no-good friends of hers — that it's hard to take anything OJ writes seriously.

So anyway, OJ goes on for five chapters, 115 pages, until he gets to the "If I Did It" part. The chapter itself, "The Night In Question," is weird for a couple of reasons. One, he gets McDonald's with Kato Kaelin like less than two hours before. Not sure what that all means but it feels weird. Two, he leaves a booty call message for a LA Raiders cheerleader who he thinks about after Kaelin shows him a picture of some lady in Playboy on his way to the Jacuzzi (talk about weird images): I want to know who that lady was! Can you imagine getting a message like that on your machine? Then there's the conceit that there was a "friend" of OJ's named "Charlie" who accompanied OJ to Nicole's house. Charlie appears nowhere else in OJ's book, and the discussion OJ has with "Charlie" while driving over to the house sounds more like schizophrenic rambling than anything else. As for the murder scene itself, there is a lot of yelling "motherfucker" and then he claims he blacked out only to discover Nicole and Ron Goldman lying in pools of blood. Oh, and Nicole's dog is named Kato; I don't know what to make of that, either. The murder scene reads like a bad dream of some sort. The remaining two chapters talk about the details leading up to his arrest and the Bronco chase.

As absurd and ridiculous as this book is, it's really hard to read Did It without thinking about chronic traumatic encephalopathy and football. It's not until really recently that CTE has come to the fore, so there's a sense of dramatic irony going on when you read OJ talk about how banged up his body is. To be clear, OJ definitely doesn't talk about having the kind of symptoms you hear other players talk about, but every time he mentions some physical toll from football it enters your mind. Most of the time he mentions his knees and arthritis, but there's one moment when he's being questioned by the police about what he remembers and he jokes that he can't remember a lot of stuff — it makes you wonder is all, especially when the symptoms include aggressive behavior, a short fuse and depression.

So yeah, there are so many weird things about It, but the weirdest thing may just be that this trial of the century that the public and media went cuckoo bananas over was set into motion years before by an irredeemably violent sport that the public and media go cuckoo bananas for. And if that's the case, then don't you feel just a little bad about the whole thing?

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.