Well, it took about a month for me to fall
behind, but I’m only a week behind, which is not too shabby considering the
intense amount of work I’ve done in the past two weeks.
But it wasn’t just because I had so much work that it took
me so long to finish this book—it wasn’t particularly good.
On the surface, it seems like something that I would love--a
dystopian novel about a Jewish guy in New York. That’s a combination of the
three types of books I read the most (see A
Handmaid’s Tale, The History of Love,
and Let the Great World Spin for
evidence of this). But this book seemed…forced.
There are two main characters, Lenny and Eunice. They meet
in Venice. Lenny is convinced that she is the love of his life, while Eunice
awkwardly tells her friend about the kind of creepy, gross old guy she slept
with. This is kind of the theme in the novel—the two main characters view the
world in completely different, but equally horrendous viewpoints.
Neither character is likeable. Lenny is a slightly deranged
pushover, who obsesses over this girl he doesn’t know. She is vapid, with nary
a redeeming characteristic until the end. Was I rooting for them to stay
together? Was I rooting for them to fall apart? I don’t know. I’m not sure the
phrase “love story” is even appropriate.
At the same, I didn’t completely dislike this book.
Shytengart’s vision of a crumbling America seems not too distant from the one
we finds ourselves in now. However, this dystopia didn’t work in the way that
other, better-crafted ones do. Instead of bringing out societal problems that
we often over look, he brings out the most obvious problems—our credit is
failing, the Chinese are going to own our money, everyone is addicted to their iPhone.
A well-written dystopia provides a deep criticism of society, but his seemed
only cursory.
Maybe I’m just missing the point. Maybe the point is that
these are two extremely ordinary, kind of horrible people living in a disastrous
time who screw everything up. Maybe that’s what would happen to most of us if
society collapsed—we wouldn’t step up to the plate, but go on making a mess of
our personal lives, ignoring the government for the most part, until everything
crashes in around us.
I feel like I had better ideas while reading the novel, but
they escape me now (I finished on Tuesday. I just hadn’t had the time to write
it up).
Next up: The Hunger
Games. I know, I know, but no amount of elitism is keeping from reading this.
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