Back when men were boys and bisexuals existed — in 1985, I guess — it was OK to write about rich kids. I don't know when this stopped — The Official Preppy Handbook was in print for a while there — but in this economic climate especially, the last thing I want to do is ponder how a bunch of prep school jacktards perceive the world.
Such is the milieu that greets those who crack open Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction.
I always love the book review trope that sketches out [blank] [blank] and [blank], takes a paragraph break to let you take that in, then introduces the title of the book with a word like "such." Maureen Corrigan's NPR reviews hew to this cadence exactly, which is probably where it first sunk in.
Attraction follows some rich kids during their fall term at a fictional(ized) Northeastern liberal arts college where they sex, drug and abort fetuses. I seem to remember a time, not long after 1985 even, when it wasn't cool to reveal oneself as a rich kid. Maybe it was the rough-and-tumble neighborhood I grew up in, or maybe my peers had a sharp sense of self-hatred, but I just don't remember that being a thing.
Now maybe Rules actually exemplifies this psychology, which is why the characters are written as such jabrones. That's a take I haven't thought of until just now, except I'm still not sure why we should waste time thinking about them in the first place.
I should step back a little: My initial response to The Rules was wondering whether all the culture that existed in the 1980s came from rich kids, and well, what's that about? because fuck these people. It makes it look like everyone during the Reagan era acted like the cast of Gossip Girl or something. It just seems nutty to construct novels about teenagers. Today we have Lauren Conrad for that.
But Ellis (or Easton Ellis?) isn't enamored with the characters, and Of Attraction exposes how meaningless the characters' lives are as they pinball through their fall semester. The novel has this mid-1980s "grittiness" to it, where sex scenes are "painfully real" and rich people use the N-word in jokes (seriously, was that joke in the James Van Der Beek movie adaptation?). But he's also got this Evelyn Waugh-type satirical streak happening, which often gets lost amidst the full-frontal vérité. I was flipping through the book looking for one particular part that was actually funny and couldn't find it, though if you squint there are some other parts that qualify.
Part of the problem is the first-person conceit: The chapters, such as they are, flit around from the first-person perspectives of three main characters (with some extra characters thrown in there). We already know they're all clueless twats, so there's a built-in obstacle that obscures a lot of the satirical moments. Ideally, this would be third-person — or at least follow one character in the first person — so the satire would shine. As it is, it reads like a thought experiment, or maybe a first draft: Good background for the main story.
The story itself, such as that that is, has a few mysteries that emerge but which are never answered. Which, in my layman's opinion, sucks donkey dick: I know it's a "thing" to screw with our "expectations" about "literature," but come the fuck on — give us an ending, for reals. Because he was building up to it and then let us down worse than a French film, except then you're supposed to skulk out of the theater thinking you "got" it.
A final word about the morality in Rules Of — if you take away the first-personness (which you have to, unless you want to go down a rabbit hole of semi-autobiographical sleuthing), it's kind of incredible how heavy handed it all is. The drugging, sexing and fetus aborting is so over the top that you kind of start gravitating toward Flannery O'Connor, thinking that BEE is telling us something about this lost generation.
Now perhaps kids at Bennington really did do that many drugs — it was the 1980s, I suppose — so maybe he's not telegraphing anything about that. But the discussion about abortion comes off as so grisly and uncaring that you can't help but think that he's moralizing a little there — which makes it a fundamentally conservative work (like Flannery O'Connor). I only saw American Psycho, and slept through most of it (me, not him — I drank sangria beforehand), but that's the point of that satire, right? That a logically hyperbolic extension of American culture is that . . . [Wikipediaing that book] oh yeah, totally.
So ultimately it comes to this, BEE. Come on board with "consumer culture"! You do have an iPhone, right? It's high time you overpaid for coffee, rent or whatever else you have with you that makes life bearable in Texas, because it's 2012, baby, and the only middle class people left are in the Mountain or Central time zones.
Douglas Coupland's Generation X is one of those books you always read about but never actually read. Maybe that makes it the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time.
Just kidding. Generation X is totally not like Fifty Shades of Grey. For one, X is a serious novel. For another, it's square, and Shades is more rectangular. Well, I guess it's not quite square, but it is an odd size: 8 1/4 inches by 9 1/2 inches. And the characters use heavily italicized dialogue, like this because I think Coupland means to make them sound like Lovey Howell or something.
That said, at one point while reading both books, the reader might be tempted to put the book down and exclaim to no one in particular something along the lines of, "Holy Christ, these people need a national fucking tragedy in the worst goddamn way." And thank god Saddam Hussein finally invaded Kuwait when he did, because if it weren't for him, then American troops wouldn't be stationed in the Arabian peninsula and Saudi women wouldn't be driving around in cars and all the sexually frustrated future jihadists would have nothing to be upset about and then the Cole wouldn't have been bombed and aspirin factories wouldn't have been bombed and the Towers would still be standing today and most of all, these three jokers in this goddamn book would probably still be hanging out in Baja California playing with each other's hair for the rest of their adult lives.
Which is to say, thank you Saddam, for saving us from ourselves.
Of course, it's not Coupland's fault that this really exceptional generation turned out to seem like such whiny navelgazers 20-plus years later. It's not his fault that these characters had the freedom and resources to not only get careerish jobs but actually turn their backs on those jobs. It's not his fault that a twentysomething today might look at these entitled pieces of shit and think, "Holy Christ, these people need a double-dip recession in the worst fucking way." No, it's not his fault, but at the same time you're kind of thinking that someone somewhere should have had some perspective, you know?
Now you could argue that Coupland may be fully aware of how unlikeable these characters are and that's the point of the book except that I don't think it's the point of the book. It doesn't read like a Flannery O'Connor-style takedown or a Neil LaBute-esque pillory. I think you can tell when the writer is critical of a character and this isn't that (plus, his own biographical details seem to match up too well with the characters).
The ironic thing — and I think this might be actual textbook irony and not just Alanis Morisette irony — which is to say that it's the Reality Bites definition of irony (which is when everything threatens to roll in on itself) — is that for all the distrust of the media and mass culture and whatnot in X, Coupland's book really sucks up to the whole zeitgeisticism of the era. We actually have a term for that in the 2010s, which is "fuck you."
The problem with contemporaneous periodizing is, one, periodizing is kind of a dopey OCD way to look at time, and two, time doesn't have to treat you well. The Lost Generation has scoreboard compared to these nitwits.
Here are some things, in no particular order, that scream "time capsule" about the book:
The intellectual foundations for "first world problems" (sometimes also sloppily/imprecisely/offensively referred to as "white people problems")
The protagonist's weird obsession with physical fitness
OK, so that's out of the way.
I think there are some other aspects that make the book seem less important in retrospect. One of the most striking things is how poorly whatever countercultural/anti-mass market impulses of the 1980s translated to today. The slogans in the margins in fonts that look like photocopied 'zines are ridiculous when you think about how fully youth culture has embraced big business and technology today. People — young people, 25-54 people, whoever and everyone — seems to care like not at all that Facebook basically owns your privacy. That's a sea change. It's like Douglas Coupland never happened. Can you imagine countercultural kids in the 1980s embracing a publicly traded company in the way that a gazillion weirdos deify Steve Jobs? You forget, until you read a time capsule like X.
And to expand on the technology angle, one of the more salient points of the book seems to be that absent strong familial bonds and a strong faith in career, young people are left floating and make new random families with other similarly rootless young people. I think that's there. And if it's not there then it's a fuckload more interesting than the other salient point, which is that cubicles are somehow bad for your health: If I had access to a photocopier and an endless supply of Microgramma typeface Letraset, I'd write something along the lines of, "Get The Fuck Over Ourselves" or "Lay Off Yourself" or "Like All Good Things In Life, You Eventually Have To Pinch It Off."
Which puts X of a piece with Bowling Alone, another book I always read about but never actually read. And like Alone, X seems really moot — what people may lack in real families these days they more than make up for in virtual families. No one today seems that rootless or moody or rootlessly moody because no one ever has to be. No one today is wanting for self-expression, self-reflection or whatever you want to call it. And no one has to worry about a cubicle because you're probably working shit freelance assignments from home. Tom Friedman pwns you, you Gen X pussy.
Meatball and Goober started this meme the other day about how my problem is somehow that the perfect ends up being the enemy of the good, which is fine, whatever, I don't care. But the mediocre and inane is also the enemy of the good, and without picking too much on Coupland's book in particular, which I don't think merits a come-to-Jesus about shit being either perfect or good or even just OK, I think of something a professor said to his classes about building a solid argument holds true here: A table needs four legs to stand, otherwise it's not really that useful as a table. Which is to say, even though he was a Yuppie asshole, I don't think Tobias was all that bad in the end. But maybe I just didn't get it at all . . .
A lot of times it seemed like the thinking was something along the lines of it was probably relatively easy to string together rhymes along to a vaguely rhythmic beat, thus rap was less important and more dismissible. This was back before the Beastie Boys were considered artists in their own right. This was back when you could "rap" by saying "My name is [blank] and I'm here to say . . ." and then rhyme something with "say" because the long "a" vowel sound is one of the laziest rhymes in the English language.
Anyway, point being, sometimes genres are deceptively simple. You never want to think that [X] medium is easy to do because that's exactly when you will realize that it's so basic, it's actually quite difficult to master. Haikus are probably like this. So is abstract art. You've probably heard someone say something along the lines of, "My four-year-old could do this!" Except not really. Except if you're talking about Ad Reinhardt, who is a freak-o charlatan creep.
Which is to say, you might find yourself reading a book, say, something along the lines of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, and say to yourself something along the lines of, "Jeez, this Mommy jerkoff fantasy genre is a fucking goldmine — we could absolutely do this!" Except that you can't. Writing something this inane is actually pretty difficult to pull off, and requires a lack of self-awareness that few actually possess.
Sometimes it's fun to read a book that is part of the cultural conversation or whatever. Sometimes it's a kick to read "trashy" things. Maybe you enjoyed Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl books. Perhaps you once killed some time on some beach or lake with something Nora Roberts shat out in a few weeks time. Maybe you snickered at the rapture porn of Left Behind. Maybe you even knew someone who got sucked into one or more of the Twilight novels.
And sometimes it's just a tedious slog through hundreds of pages of poorly written shit that you can't for the life of you see what the appeal is. It's depressing when you get to this point. Why are people reading at all? What is it about paragraphs, capitalization and punctuation that appeals to people? Why do bookshelves take up so much room in our homes? It's sort of like how Lana Del Rey sounds.
In fact, so much of Fifty Shades of Grey seems like Lana Del Rey. Fifty Shades could be the Lana Del Rey of popular fiction. Where did this come from? Why are so many of us reading it? Why are they going to make a movie out of it? It's just so fucking terrible . . .
How bad is it? For one, it suffers from that problem seemingly inherent in trashy books which is that it seems like it's a first draft. That's not the absolute worst thing, though it is a lot of what makes it such a slog to read. Who uses the word "clamber" at all, much much less 23 times in a book? It's distracting after a while. I had to look up "taciturn" because, well, I think the last time I saw it was during a SAT prep course. Then there's the Shift-F7-ness of the sex scenes: ". . . my thoughts are in riotous disarray. Wow . . . that was astounding." Or "The pressure is building slowly, inexorably inside me." Or "His breathing is mounting, his ardor . . ." Wow, hubba hubba — this could be the hottest use of the thesaurus this side of that porn site synonyms.net.
But the part that really drives home — hammers home! — the idea that it's a first draft is lines like these: "The pleasure was indescribable." Never, ever trust a writer who says something is "indescribable."
In some ways it's really cool to read a first draft. It's a straight shot into someone's mind, long before the better sense of editing or an editor comes into play. Can you imagine how interesting it'd be to see a first draft of The Corrections or Everything is Illuminated or something like that? They probably read like complete shit. I'll say this much: Those pussies hide behind "editors" and whatever. Not this lady.
In some ways you want to preserve all these quirks because they are what makes the book, or at least they are what makes the book so homespun. It's funny to read Britishisms peppered throughout the text: A "DIY" instead of a "hardware store," talk of "prams," a world where stepdads are actually distracted by MLS matches ("I call Ray, who is just about to watch the Sounders play some soccer team from Salt Lake City, so our conversation is mercifully brief"). In a way, it's kind of like the author is telegraphing that she's out of her element.
Which is useful to remember when people talk about how Fifty Shades is somehow bringing BDSM to the masses, because I'm pretty sure this is not what BDSM is about. I don't know what it's about. I don't care to know what it's about. Nothing seems more boring than tying up people and "torturing" them them with feather dusters or whatever the fuck people use. But I have a sense that BDSM isn't about men beating on women and then three-thrusting themselves to sleep. Seriously, if you omit the two or three "sexy" times when the characters "make love," the rest of it is a bunch of pound-pound-pound-squirt scenes where this carnal novice of a character somehow gets sexually satisfied. It's ridiculous. And when something is "hot," it's Q.E.D. hot, like "Why is that hot?" or "Jeez, this is hot" or "Demeaning and scary and hot" or "it's hot, freaking hot" or "He's harder, intractable . . . hot." If you say a word too much it sounds pretty ridiculous. "Hot" sounds like a bubbly moss roof or something similarly dopey. At any rate, so much of the book is "hot" because the character says it is. Which gets absurd after a while. Especially when nothing is particularly hot.
That's especially the case with the main character, Christian Grey. His only real defining features are his "molten gray" eyes. Other than that, he sounds like a real creep, who, if it weren't for his money, impressive girth and voracious appetite for breakfast, would just come off like a sanctimonious, humorless dick. But this is sort of nitpicking: Christian Grey's desirability is because the author says it is. Maybe the book is "smart" that way: "Fwachoo!" goes the whip! You will think this character is hot! Mama, so so hot!
But I guess "Christian Grey" isn't really the focus more than "Anastasia Steele" is since she's our guide into this "kinky" world. But she's also kind of unlikeable. All through the book — which, I should get out of the way right now, is just part one of a trilogy — she's complaining about how this aloof sexhound who is into BDSM and commands his submissives to sign non-disclosure agreements is somehow being less than forthcoming in their burgeoning relationship. As Angelina from the Jersey Shore once said, "Um, hello, are you fucking stupid?! They're taking their underwear off in the fucking Jacuzzi! Are you dumb? Hello!?" Or something like that.
We could go on — and on and on — but let's let it go. All of it. The product placement (who or what did Twinings have to blow to get mentioned six times in this thing?). The "long index finger" that, like Chekhov's gun, induces foreboding and fear. The ridiculous anthropomorphization of Anastasia's "subconscious" (I think she means something along the lines of "superego," but I can't quite tell for sure). The absurd elevation of WSU's Vancouver campus into some hallowed center of learning. "Charle Tango." The author's insistence on referring to a vagina as the character's "sex." "Right now, Miss Steele, I couldn't give a fuck about your food" (Location 6332 of 14900). Christian Grey "pouring" himself into Anastasia Steele. The wetness!!!! The list seems endless.
No, instead I'll close out with a couple of small points. One, the book works best when it's seen as a brutal indictment of the U.S. higher education system, degrees like "English" in general and the corrupt and decrepit intern-read-work-for-free racket that exists in the post-collegiate world. In short, Anastasia Steele is a perfect submissive because she's a high-achieving English major who has been trained for only one thing in her abbreviated life, which is to please others — specifically the world of publishing, which seems to be her one and only goal in life until Christian Grey's long index fingers come along. It's a subtle point that's lost alongside all of the groan-inducing sexalogue, but I held on to it.
Two, as a new father, I made a mental note not to spank my son lest he ends up some sort of Freudian example.
Three, and most important, Fifty Shades was originally written as as Twilight fan fiction, which underscores just how fucked up — "fifty shades of fucked up," as Anastasia Steele might say — the premise of Twilight is, and how hard it will be to walk back that whole thing. Because what's happening here is a character-for-character distillation of what that story is really about — an emotionally abusive stalker. In that sense, Fifty Shades might be the most important book of the year. Aw, fuck it — I'll just watch the movie. But it better star Matthew McConaughey, reprising his role as David Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. And maybe Zooey Deschanel as Anastasia. That lady should really be spanked. Hrm. Maybe I could get into this after all . . .
