Maybe it's a minor quibble, but there's this thing Jessi Klein does at the end of each chapter of You'll Grow Out of It, which is a collection of personal essays from this comedic writer. It's this glib little kind of sort of couplet-sounding tag at the end, which is I think supposed to sound like a snappy encapsulation of the point but which comes off as lazily tacked on.
In truth, you see it all the time, and it seems essential if you've ever written anything — from an email to a memo to an op-ed piece — so much so that it just feels like you need to do it, sort of like that dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-duuuun in a blues song.
[It's called a "tag ending" or an "end tag" — this:
I tried to google it and immediately came across the concept in this "How to Write an Op-ed Article" piece: "Make your ending a winner."
The problem is that virtually nothing ends well. Novels end stupidly. Plays end stupidly. TV series end stupidly (Friday Night Lights excluded). Unless it's a trick, endings are inherently stupid. I thought The Usual Suspects had a great ending until I watched it years later with someone who'd never seen it and who saw it coming from a mile away. Plus, a suspenseful story is constructed with the ending in mind — sort of like a great country lyric. "Making your ending a winner" is so much of a vapid platitude that it . . . there, I almost got sucked into the cadence of point-making.
Anyway, Grow Out follows this format doggedly, and it comes across as fobbed off and lazy. It's another piece of writing that seems like a first pass (in retrospect, maybe it's unfair to single out any particular piece of writing, when really there's no real advantage to making something really wonderful when it can just be OK: blogs and comedy apparently share this; I'm sure there are other things). I'm pretty sure I can't read a room on this front, but I naively take for granted that if one is given the opportunity to publish something it should be the most completely extraordinary thing he or she can come up with, if not fucking brilliantly essential. Demand better: Fugazi at the high school talent show; Bobby Knight coming to career day; Daniel Day Lewis' bleak early years as a substitute drama teacher.
Instead, you have beach reading. Maybe a charmingly written column about this or that. An observational piece on Weekend Edition.
To Klein's credit, Grow doesn't shy away from the author's own hard truths: she's really successful, she likes nice things, she's privileged but you kind of feel she's earned it. Which is to say, if spa treatments are on her mind she won't hesitate to write about spa treatments. There's an honesty there that feels revealing, and that's still sort of bold. That said, every single person in our book club thought the thing was fucking terrible (I didn't think it was terrible, per se), and threw around words like "privileged" (do you know what a room costs at the Post Ranch Inn?!?!) "Manhattan," probably "vapid," maybe "vacuous" and (I'm pretty sure) "mostly unfunny" (or at least stuff like "I didn't laugh once").
Not to throw everyone under the bus (not that they give a flying fuck), but I didn't think Out was entirely terrible. I was surprised, however, given that Inside Amy Schumer, of which Klein is the executive producer, is so jaggedly transgressive — not to mention hilarious. So much of You'll seemed so tame. Not to say it has to be insanely progressively sun-blottingly poop-evacuatingly transgressive, but it felt positioned, calculated and — most deadly — safe. Like her management is positioning her to have a talk show or some such.
I did laugh at parts. And I thought there were parts that were more fleshed out and had smart — and inspired — takes. The epidural chapter toward the end ("get the epidural!") is one of those (it is adapted here — again, positioning). Part has to be the immediacy: I'd much rather talk about being a parent than being a dipshit struggling through a first job. But I also think there's room to dig deeper on those earlier anecdotes: weave stuff together, use the "winning ending" as a transition to two disparate ideas instead of a dull-thud paperweight.
Other moments were deft: she writes in one chapter about "lying about day drinking" then goes on to mention off-handedly about talking about day drinking with a guy she was flirting with — funny and perceptive but also maybe unintentional: which goes back to my point about how things seem a little undercooked (or maybe undersalted?) (oh fuck it, what I mean to say is that they're not as great as they could be). The chapter about Joan Rivers is good, too.
A point that I didn't make but others did, and really vociferously and pointedly, is that it's kind of a bullshit move (if not a "bad look") to perseverate on one's own perceived ugliness/use it as a bit when in reality one is actually very attractive. Some actually google imaged her while reading it to confirm a hunch/feel outraged.
Even if we all didn't entirely agree that it was fucking terrible, I'm pretty sure 100 percent of us agreed that You'll Grow was thin. Surprising to all was how universally praised it was ("hilarious" is a frequent — suspiciously frequent — adjective). It's as if there's something aspirational about wanting to feel amused, so much so that you can believe it to be true. I feel as if there should be some winning line that can be inserted here, so much so that I can feel it in my seat. It's just not happening. And so this must end.
The graphic novel version of the Paul Auster book City of Glass does an interesting job expressing visually the original work's mirror-filled meta-texture. Like that stab at being clever at the end of the last sentence, the original book in retrospect seems a little too clever — I'd say too clever by half, if I fully understood what that phrase meant [OK, I googled it, I think I've always understood it in basically the accepted way].
To walk that back somewhat, I read City back in either high school or college and thought it was good but didn't really understand it and moreover didn't really know what I didn't know. As an adult I'm more comfortable knowing what I don't know; I just don't care at this point. Rereading the graphic novel form of Glass, I remembered I never read Cervantes (it ostentatiously refers to Don Quixote). Once in a while, usually when I try to avoid using the word "quixotic" (which is only because I've never read Don Quixote) (even though it's a handsome word, what with that "x"), I think maybe I should read it, but of course never, ever would.
I mean, look, Paul Auster is a genius or whatnot, I get it. And I read some of the other stories in the trilogy. Or at least I think I did. Who knows, maybe I just saw the movie Smoke one night on IFC and believed I read more Auster than I actually did. Whatever it was, other stuff didn't seem so purposefully annoyingly heady.
I will say this — and the memory came back to me while I read the graphic version of of Glass — I remembered the vague outlines of the story: the child raised without language, the weird PI cosplay, and then especially the parts where the protagonist needs to get down to business and act serious and really start writing so he strips naked. For a time I assumed this meant that you had to be naked to get real work done — not the obvious work but smart work, like writing mystery novels or preparing taxes. Around the same time (or sort of around the same time, or at least within five or ten years of that time) I got obsessed, as a lot of others did, with the Silos' Cuba LP. The flip side of which features a zoomed out image of a dude on a bluff of some sort playing a Stratocaster — plugged into an amplifier (!) — and singing/strumming into the misty overlook. It's inspiring (the image is here). At the same time you're (read: I'm) also like, Why in the hell are you up there naked? What is this late 80s utopia where people are empowered to strip naked and create art? And why is this so? Do people really do their best work naked? It's occurring to me that I remember reading how U2 recorded something (The Unforgettable Fire) (Also, what a fucking obnoxious title for a fucking album, no?) naked. Why? Really, why?
So anyway, yeah, that part of City where the protagonist strips down and smears his lousy dirty ass on a perfectly reasonable chair in order to "focus," I remembered that part. Other parts, not so much. Especially with this — digging back into that "meta-texture" gem above — kind of weird author within author layers of meaning and there's something obvious but which is not immediately obvious but kind of "impressionistic" (the same word your friendly high school English teacher used to try to pawn off Heart of Darkness on you). Or whatever.
Which brings us to the graphic novel version of City of Glass: it's good! I mean, it's not a bad thing to tackle a laden piece of text this way — and the mopey tone and tenor of pre-Pixar comic storytelling is enigmatically suited to the tone of the book. But there were moments when it seemed like a storyboard for a movie of some sort. And that's the post-Pixar me seeing it as a reader. The DIY comics of the era felt right — conflicted (Clinton-era psychic malaise), personal (humble, yet outsized) and xeroxed (before the internet). The tone and tenor is local, lo-fi, incremental — which feels right for this atmospheric writing.
And then at the same time it seems trapped in that pre-internet, pre-Pixar moment. "Pre-internet" being salient because the internet made everything wider, bigger, more awesome, more biggerly staged, which is the complete antithesis to the hand-drawn comics scene in days of yore; this era was the opposite of clickbait. And "pre-Pixar" being salient because, Jesus fucking Christ, animated storytelling has been blown so far open now, and is so incredible and elegant and human and smart that those black-and-white panels of years ago kind of don't capture it. I understand there was a vacuum before the millennium but stuff — all stuff, from comedy to drama to action stuff, seems smarter and more with it. Wasn't that way before. Now it is. Which is where the storyboard slag comes into play: Art Spiegelman, in his intro to the graphic version of Glass, mentions that Auster told him that various potential film versions of the book were disasters. Now you can imagine these elegant black-and-white boxes turning into a miraculous animated film. Sorry, I think that. It's not a pleasant thought. I know that cassette tapes are experiencing a renaissance, but, really, the future is here, people.
And really, shouldn't a "graphic novel" really refer to a story that is explicit and/or violent? That euphemism/moniker always seemed a little pretentious, though having heard it so much it's become what it is (like "server" versus "waiter" or whatever else). I can't tell you the last time I read a graphic novel. Actually, I can: it was Chester Brown's Louis Riel, which we read for book club in 2009). It was OK. Moody. Cartoon-like. Sort of.
Not to sound belitting, but The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy is an interesting artifact. I mean, it is from like three centuries ago (1888), and a lot of old stuff is of an era, whatever era, and isn't really destined to be timeless, so . . . I don't feel bad about it.
It revolves around four young women who lose everything when their father dies and choose to make a go of it by starting a photography business, which is this crazy new technology in Victorian England. They soon find success. Things are good. It reads like a Nora Roberts book (or at least the one we read for book club, which was about four plucky young women who start a business [arch eyebrows] . . . hey, wait . . .). Then there are ups and downs and tragedies and life happens. But I guess the point is that they find a middle ground between on the one hand, independence and financial and professional respect and then on the other hand, finding a husband.
Set in Victorian England, it's amazing how "Victorian" it comes off. You're always waiting for some glimpse of a particular era that surprises you or confounds your expectations and in this case it just never comes. I'm feeling faint! Pass the smelling salts! That kind of thing.
Some of my favorite lines included these:
"I say, Gerty, all this is delightfully unchaperoned, isn't it?" [Phyllis the libertine to uptight Gertrude; next line "'Phyllis, how can you?' cried Gertrude, vexed."]
"We all know," remarked Lucy, with a twinkle in her eye, "that it is best to begin with a little aversion!" [Uh, no means no?]
"I particularly detest that sort of eye; prominent, with heavy lids, and those little puff-bags underneath." [In retrospect, this seems like a sort of foreshadowing, but it struck me at the time.]
"'What is this a little bird tells me, Lucy?' she cried archly, for Mrs. Pratt shared the liking of her sex for matters matrimonial." ["The liking of her sex for matters matrimonial" — makes you want to scream "ACK!"]
"It was a sober, middle-aged little function enough, and everyone was glad when it was over." [At some point it seems like Victorian era is mostly just Maggie Smith's lines on Downton Abbey.]
"Edward Marsh suffered the usual insignificance of bridegrooms; but did all that was demanded of him with exactness." [Just bridegrooms. Some things never change.]
"He had taken her in his arms, without explanation or apology, holding her to his breast as one holds a tired child." [This is when Lord Watergate snags Gertrude at the end of the book — kind of a odd scene where you're not too clear how self-aware the writing is supposed to be: is the author showing him being weirdly paternalistic (or appropriately weirdly paternalistic for the time, or remarking on the weird paternalistic, uh, paternalism of the time) or is she expressing what all people thought? It's the problem with parachuting into a text like this . . .]
