Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

  This review is a hard one. I think Discontent by Beatriz Serrano captures a very specific experience and distinct voice. Specifically, the novel’s protagonist Marisa embodies the directionless ennui of modern corporate life. She’s a marketing creative crushed by the lifelessness of the workplace and is cynical about all of her coworkers and the whole “being employed” thing. She has Master’s students that look up to her, from whom she pilfers ideas and treats with disdain as they scramble for scraps of praise. She skips out for hours at lunch time to go to museums. She dreads the company retreat and greens out in order to avoid a team-building paintball game.

Serrano’s writing is competent. Other than some suspension of disbelief issues towards the end and a couple of structural issues, I don’t have any major issues with the writing itself. It’s descriptive and it’s tonally consistent. The dialogue rings as plausibly true. There’s a sarcasm to the narrator’s voice that delivers some engaging quips, my favourite of which being a reflection on a Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: “Bosch is off somewhere fucking a hydrangea, and I’m checking my work e-mail” (26). The main character is irreverent and potentially likeable.

Here’s my issue, though: it’s hard to elevate corporate ennui into an edifying artistic experience. Marisa is relatable, but her experiences aren’t particularly distinct. She goes home and watches YouTube videos while she eats dinner; she tweets and retweets causes she supports and overthinks her online presence; she has friends with whom she falls out of touch and then creeps on social medial; she has a neighbour with whom she has sex and has an unspoken intimacy; she does as little as possible for work and has that kind of existential ennui over major life decisions. The trouble with writing something so true-to-life is that it leaves the question: is this kind of existence worthy of being art? Serrano describes YouTube videos that I’ve seen; do I need to watch a fictional character watch a YouTube video? Does that just replicate my own boredom and doomscrolling? A similar issue that plagues the works of Douglas Coupland: it is so referential, so allusive, so intense in its pursuit of realism that it keeps me rooted in the banality of the world and runs the risk of getting dated quickly.

The novel is more or less a series of vignettes, loosely tied together with the looming work conference. One chapter is devoted to Marisa’s trip to the Bosch exhibit. One chapter outlines her relationship with her neighbour and their intimate routines. One chapter sees Marisa encounter an old friend with whom she’d fallen out of touch; the two immediately reconnect and have a drunken night on the town that actually establishes one of the book’s few tender moments. Marisa’s friend Elena serves as an interesting contrast to her. Elena has constructed a new self, while Marisa feels trapped. Elena has the freedom to pursue art, essentially by getting a boob job and playing up her sexuality to get men to pay for her life, while Marisa is floundering creatively. 

Marisa’s encounter with Elena compels her to finally open a box of artifacts left behind following the likely suicide of her coworker Rita. That’s another thread that runs throughout the book: this spectre of Rita. Marisa describes a connection with this other cynical employee, who looms as what Marisa might become. When Marisa opens the box, it’s revealed that Rita had a notebook on which she made artistic renderings of her coworkers, including one that doesn’t seem particularly flattering of Marisa. I’m not sure the payoff really happens for that—but also, I suppose that’s like life; sometimes we’re adrift and there isn’t really much of a narrative payoff.

That being said, the book does have a narrative culmination at the work retreat. Serrano really takes Marisa in a dark direction at the climax. At the best of times, Marisa isn’t particularly likable and this is where the book really took a turn for me. Marisa has a quick hookup with a paintball employee. Okay, whatever, I guess her and her boyfriend aren’t official. Then, she’s put on the spot to deliver a presentation about creativity. In a panic, Marisa decides that her plan is to drug all of her coworkers. She mixes MDMA into all of their lemonade and not only did it make her irredeemably insufferable to me, but it also stretched the limits of the plausibility. Would a generally normal but disaffected employee go that far?

That takes us through the first section of the book, which struck me as a surprise because we only had 20 pages left to go. This is where the structural problem emerges for me a little bit. Section two is about 15 pages. Section 3 is about 7 pages. This might come back to the ‘true-to-life’ aspect of the book; we have loose threads, tacked on vignettes, little experiments.

Even so, the second section of the book is actually kind of fun, if implausible. It’s a series of e-mails sent by the company to its different teams. As it turns out, someone who got drugged had to be hospitalized, and now there’s an investigation. The e-mails discussing the specifics keeps popping up and Marisa’s out of office autoresponse keeps popping up. It’s kind of funny because the conversation then also brings up the discussion of taking Marisa off the e-mail so that her out of office e-mail stops coming through.

The final section is an epilogue of sorts. It’s a description of what happened to Marisa when she returned from her vacation. I won’t spoil the specifics, but something pretty horrific happens. There was a set-up for it, so it feels like a reasonable payoff, but it comes across maybe more comedic or lighthearted than I was prepared for it to be. It rings a little false; the closing lines, in particular, offer a saccharine and overly clean reflection that makes all of our boredom and existential doubt seem trivial. Marisa narrates. “I’ve figured it out. In the end, all we need in life is someone who loves us, a bed with nice big pillows, a  few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something” (177). It seems like Marisa reverts to conventionality—a response to the horror of banal routines that itself lacks imagination. The ending just doesn’t quite hit.

Overall, I didn’t mind Discontent. It’s worth a quick read, but I’m not sure it really elevates our boring everyday lives into something more worthwhile. I’ve read some conflicting views on this one; some people praise the humour and relatability of the book and how perfect it is for describing corporate life. Others have a much more negative view of Marisa and the tone of the text. Let’s just say it’s messy.

Happy reading!

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

  You are reading your review of Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. You wrote this review following a two week pause after closing the final page and trying to process. You didn’t get far. Well, you did. You got through the over 600 page sprawl in what felt like record time. Rarely do you find a book that has such a lively and compelling voice and structure. You have very little idea of what the book is about, of its purpose. Yet, you found it weirdly compelling.

Here’s what you understand:

You are on a plane reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff. You’ve been enlisted to adapt this novel into a film and you’re excited but you’re not really sure how to make it happen because Your Name Here is a novel, in part, about you reading it. It’s also a collection of e-mails (real? tbd) between Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff, sometimes using fictional names, talking about their ideas for Your Name Here. Your Name Here is also about a novel Helen Dewitt is writing about a fictional writer, Rachel Zozanian, who is also struggling to write a book and e-mailing an irreverent Hunter S. Thompson type and also trying to get her older novel, Lotteryland, adapted into a film. There are also sections of Lotteryland reproduced in full within the text.

Okay, I’m going to give up the ‘you’ here because it’s going to spiral more than I’m prepared to do here.

A lot of the concepts of the book are fun and thoughtful. The use of second person is a clever device that is offered with some metacommentary (there are different ‘you’s—something I’ve thought about before—general ‘you’s, specific ‘you’s, singular, plural—or in Helen DeWitt’s conception, a European second person). In case it’s unclear, the work is extraordinarily esoteric and erudite. The tone is playful and referential, drawing on the works of authors from Italo Calvino to Tolkien to Theodor Adorno. The filmic references are peppered throughout, too—though the literary allusions landed more with me.

As I’ve sort of referenced already, the plot of the book is a bit sprawling and muddled. What really holds it together (if it’s held together) is a kind of raw energy and irreverent voice. I kept turning the page and turning the page, drawn forward by the language alone. There’s an excellent section in which the book outlines classic literary tropes: Chekhov’s gun, The MacGuffin, Plot Vouchers, and Unexposed Contents. The self-awareness of the book can’t help but make me feel like I’ve missed something. The book is hinting to and/or bludgeoning me that I’ve missed something critical. Towards the end of the book, I get another pang of that absence:

There are people who don’t see the need for a false passport until it’s too late. There are people who don’t see the need for credit cards under a variety of aliases until, again, it’s too late. These are friendless orphans, alone in the world. These are the very people who also see no need for a shell company in the Channel Islands until, once again, it is too late. They may, perhaps, see The Importance of Being Earnest and giggle at the jokes---perhaps they even see it at an early age---but the wisdom of the work is lost on them. (592) 

This passage comes up with less than twenty pages to go and I felt that despair: it’s too late. I’ve been lured in and strung along and now it’s too late for me to escape. It makes me think of that moment in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (oh oops, turns out they are also referenced in the text) when they contemplate how there must have been a moment that they could have said no before their untimely demise. I got that same feeling of mourning; I was swept away not realizing I was being trapped.

The whole book felt like a series of false starts (c.f. The “ultimately unsatisfying” If on a winter’s night a traveler) but before you realize it’s not going anywhere, you can’t escape. There are a number of warnings presented as interludes throughout. After the first twenty pages:

You still don’t know what’s going on. The fat guy is back. You and the girl get out of your seats, the guy wrestles his bulk to the window, you and the girl return to your seats. The girl is reading an adult edition of Harry Potter, not Harry Potter plus leather fetishist lesbian triangles, just same old same old with a marginally less juvenile cover, which means this could not be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You return to Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. To your left, the girl murmurs softly: Beckett!
          You glance, startled, to your left; implausible as it may seem to argue that the unspeakable Potter “gets people reading” so that they can ultimately move on to Murphy and Malone Dies, it’s surely infinitely less plausible to imagine a reading trajectory that starts with Waiting for Godot and moves on to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when the reader is old enough to appreciate it.
[…]
         
What’s going on? Is everyone writing PKD spin-offs these days? Is this something everyone knows about but you, something you would have known if you had taken out a slash-and-burn trial subscription to the New Yorker or Harper’s or the New York Review of Books? If so, you wish you’d known sooner and soberer. You like keeping up with new literary trends, but if everyone’s doing it you’d rather read an example that doesn’t involve revisiting Calvino’s ultimately unsatisfactory If on a winter’s night a traveler (24)

After 275 pages:

“You’re reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You’re extremely aggrieved. Instead of the wealth of stories you loved in the last book there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow. Also, you’ve always admired Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a real tour-de-force with 11 first chapters of novels in a wide range of genres. DeWitt just keeps bringing in new chapters of the same book within a book; a writer who is clearly no match for Calvino for sheer inventiveness has no business casting aspersions on Our Man in San Remo. Meanwhile Lotteryland is the only part of the book that makes you wonder what happens next, you get involved in the story only to be thrown back into the surrounding narrative chaos. You find yourself hoping yet another flimsy pretext will be found to introduce yet another totally superfluous second-person narrator, an anonymous reader, nothing too fancy, who becomes engrossed in Lotteryland, by the recluse Zozanian” (275).

After 475 pages:

You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on. Zozanian has embarked on a book with your character, so now we have a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you seem to be the minimost perestroikist in a nest of Gorbidolls. A cast of extraneous characters seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Rabbits in a Viagra trial. Rabbits in a Viagra trial designed to tackle the freak four-hour erection problem. Who are these people? What are they doing here? It’s like the finale of Blazing fucking Saddles. (475)

What I can say is that, probably more than any other book, Your Name Here is consistently aware of its audience. DeWitt and Gridneff know exactly what you’re thinking and pre-empt you at every turn. It’s pretty incredible that they can anticipate and craft your journey like that.

Of course, the book is a blend of styles. It’s equal parts literary and irreverent. That, too, is reflected on. The fictional author Rachel Zozanian comments on her desire to “write something clinical and cold, like manet’s olympia. she wants to place manet’s olympia next to aristide bruant dans son cabaret” (434). There are then lists of prices for different goods that she purchased or would like to purchase.

In fact, one of the major threads of the book is exposing the finances behind the art. There’s a whole sequence in the book of e-mail exchanges asking about payment. After selling information to a tabloid writer, Ilya Grindeff’s alter ego / character, a character is seeking payment and there are dozens of pages trying to locate and retrieve the cheque she was promised. Meanwhile, in Lotteryland, wealth and prizes are distributed at random and the character is doing ‘luck checks’ on a lotto machine. Meanwhile. Rachel is seemingly sleeping with men for money, or maybe writing about a character who does so, or maybe is writing about her years in University. I’m not really sure, to be honest. The focus on finances is a clever commentary on art. They foreground all of the illusions we like to paint over with the final product. The work of art independent of market forces serves to reinforce the idea that art has a special status, when in fact it’s always grounded in economics. Essentially, we get thrown into some pretty interesting Marxist discourse: is debating over payment an artistic experience? Is art ever free of the tether of feeding the artist that makes it? These kinds of questions guide the work: “If there is a disappearance or breakdown it’s important to have a line of credit; it was not clear that books should be bought on the small number of credit cards acquired since the last purge” (434).

The work is driven in interesting ways, too, by desire. There are unspoken desires that permeate throughout each of the narrative threads. What is most compelling to me, though, was some (shockingly) some of the authors’ commentary on Tolkien. Early on, the book presents a case for writing a book that incorporates Arabic; the goal is to build understanding between the United States and the Middle East (the book is set in the early 2000s during the height of the war on terror). They comment on the way that Tolkien invented languages and included fragments of invented languages. The end result of this is not that Tolkien has produced knowledge for his audience, but instead desire: desire to learn more. They want to do something similar with Arabic, and there are Arabic lessons in the book, complete with alphabet translators. I loved this idea, that the novel will somehow produce desire to know more about the Middle East (and beyond, obviously).

Your Name Here deals with a lot of complex issues and makes unlikely leaps. These leaps are what kept me reading; I loved the odd little meditations. If you’re looking to connect with characters, I’d say your opportunities are pretty limited. If you’re looking for plot…also, reasonably lacking. Style the book has in spades. The philosophical and aesthetic exploration in the text is really compelling. 

The book has so much going for it. I loved a lot of it. It was maybe “ultimately unsatisfactory”---but that’s by design. I was never going to get a story. I was never going to get an ending. Even the ending offered feels like a new start. I honestly don’t know what to make of this book; it will both linger with me and not. What I can say is it was definitely a unique and therefore worthwhile experience.

You’ve been meaning to read it; you probably should. What a feat!

Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball's Greatest Rivalry by Chris Wrenn

  I bet none of you would have predicted that I’d one day be writing a book review for a book that is, technically, about baseball. Let’s be real, though, what brought me here was the music. Chris Wrenn is the founder of Boston-based record label Bridge Nine, who primarily release and promote hardcore punk music. With B9’s initial claim to fame being the release of American Nightmare’s first EP, they’ve also expanded their reach and offered releases from bands like H2O, Strike Anywhere, Polar Bear Club, Terror, War on Women, and Crime in Stereo (go listen to …Is Dead, that album rules). 

Anyway, Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry is about Wrenn’s entrepreneurial powers to build Bridge Nine from the ground up. The genesis of the label is pretty bizarre: Wrenn recounts how he bankrolled his initiatives by selling novelty t-shirts outside of Fenway Park. He played into the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees, selling “Yankees Suck” shirts and stickers. The fact that he was able to squirrel away some funds and use that to record music for American Nightmare is pretty entrepreneurial and admirable, I will say.

One of the less palatable components of the book is, well, the reflection of a different time. Wrenn talks about fighting in parking lots for money, rolling with crowds that broke into houses to steal booze, and other youthful shenanigans that strike me as the kind of bro-ish machismo that drives so many people away from the hardcore scene.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is hearing about the politics of being a vendor outside a stadium. Wrenn gives background into how they had to operate under the radar and avoid being busted. Strategies included things like having one guy with a money bag and extra merch while someone sold a few things at a time—if they got caught, there would be less loss because the guy in the backpack could throw on a cap and blend into the crowd. The structure of the market also made it easier to sell, for example, stickers. Selling stickers at Fenway and later Hot Topic funded Wrenn’s musical projects, which is just wild to me. Back to politics, it was also interesting to hear about how the code enforcers built relationships with vendors. It was like reading about the mafia and / or crooked cops making secret deals.

More of the book was about baseball than I would have expected, which is my own naivety. Wrenn seems genuinely invested in recounting the glories and heartbreaks of the Boston-New York rivalry. The highlight of that component of the book was hearing about New York playing in Boston following the September 11th attacks and how the community changed around the time. Mostly, I didn’t really feel much towards the baseball drama.

Honestly, I wanted some more music stories from the book. When I heard about links to Converge or Sick of It All or Crime in Stereo, I perked up and felt invested, but the music faded into the background. With Wrenn’s long career of supporting music and being on tour with bands, I would have thought that there would be far more stories about the dramas and landmarks of the Boston hardcore scene. I wanted to hear those stories. Surely it would be appropriate to have a journalistic approach and share some fun anecdotes about Wrenn’s personal involvement with bands. Why did bands explode? What went wrong with releases? I mean, sure, there’s the time Terror got scooped up, but I feel like there are other layers of chaos that could’ve been addressed.

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience, but I would have preferred to spend more time in the pit than in the stands.

Happy reading!