A gentle word of warning: things get a bit explicit in this post.
Just over a year ago I noticed all the super-cool kids at the back of the class seemed smitten with Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? This was the first I'd heard of the Toronto author and her second(!) novel, published by Anansi, perhaps the most prestigious of Canada's small presses. Slated for US publication, the internet hep-cats were expressing irony-free enthusiasm for the book, signaling How as the next "it" novel — which has indeed come to pass — so I gambled a stamp and placed my order.
I dislike the book, but
then I was hampered by several significant disadvantages going into
it. If teh interwebz is any indication, the book's ideal audience is:
A) female B) young C) not yet burdened with/enlightened by children.
Dudes pushing 50 need not apply — especially if they are the
fathers of adolescent daughters.
A tip
of the hat, though, for all those widely acknowledged techniques that
bring novelty to the novel — the first-person narrator named
“Sheila Heti,” who interacts with and records the conversations
of other similarly identifiable “real” people, the (Tina) fey
tone of voice that either belies or connotes a formidable
intelligence, the calculated use of extreme candor, and so on. I can
see why these strategies have made this book the toast of the Global
Village. Some of them even worked with me.
But,
man oh man, did I ever hate the sex.
This
is a problem, because this book meditates a great deal on sex. Just a
few paragraphs into the first chapter, “Sheila Heti” announces
this is the era “of some really great blow-job artists.” She's
too canny to declare herself one of them, but she's also canny enough
to let the reader know just how much she is willing to suffer for her
art — quite a bit, apparently: “I just breathe through my nose
and try not to throw up . . . I did vomit a little the other day, but
I kept right on sucking.”
She
soon takes up with a coked-up piece of work named Israel. A “9½ Weeks” scenario takes place, with some distinctions: Israel
comports himself as a low-rent John Gray, under whose ministrations
“Sheila Heti,” the would-be feminist playwright, is happy to play
Elizabeth McGraw. She recognizes the absurdities of this and even
comments on a few of them, but the relationship doesn't conclude
until she willingly trumps his degradations, finally provoking his
disgust. For readers wary of Sadeian extremes, if the passage quoted in the previous paragraph hasn't already removed the book from your “maybe” list, the scene
in question won't either.
Taking
these scenes at face value, it could be argued that when it comes to
no-holds-barred sexual congress, a person is likely to discover “how
to be” only after that person has gone too far and discovered how
not
to be. Not a jolly conclusion, to be sure, but also not a “bad”
lesson to learn, either — especially for readers who haven't yet
reached that point of no return.
There
are other filters through which to view these scenes, but they don't
make the sex any more joyful or ecstatic. Which might also account
for the book's enormous appeal: sexual congress might not be an
especially joyful or ecstatic business these days, particularly for
young women. Heti may be the natural response to Houllebecq.
Jessa
Crispin (aka, “Bookslut”), one of Heti's earliest champions, was recently gob-smacked by an unexpected addition to the “self-help”
shelf: Why Love Hurts
by Eva Illouz. Illouz dares to propose that when it comes to
expectations of love, an individual's feelings of unhappiness or
alienation within a given society might not be within the
individual's purview of change — that those “negative” feelings might not, in other words,
be that person's fault:
it might be society that is to blame. Shortly after taking a
survey of “Game” blogs (essentially platforms where “Israels”
boast at length of their “Sheila” conquests), Mary Scriver came
to a similar conclusion: perhaps the West has become a feral society.
These
observations raise (or ought to) burning questions for everyone.
“How should a person be?” is just one; “How should a society be?” is another. If that's the title of Ms. Heti's next novel, I
will hand over the plastic. If it proves to be a further account of
even-sadder-sex, however, I will forgo the pleasure of reading it.
2 comments:
That feral society suggestion is intriguing, especially since you borrow the expression from Mary Scriver but seem to be coming to it from somewhere other than she does. (Particularly caught my eye that she's looking at U.S. society as a peculiarly self-conflicted culture mix in contrast to 'mainstream' societies, while you speak of the West, evidently lumping mainstream societies together in the trend.) I've read Scriver's post a couple of times and am still having some trouble understanding where she's headed with it. She starts out clearly enough, but seems to get into the weeds within a few paragraphs, and I'm not certain she comes out of them by the end. You're much more circumspect about those weeds! But I gather you have your eye on some concerns that are only growing, maybe, as your daughters do.
I doubt I do Mary any favours by re-framing her proposition to better articulate my own concerns. Mary has explored the world of "Game" blogs at some length, and the preoccupation of a subset of young males who attempt to emulate "alpha" behaviour in an effort to increase their sexual (and, some would argue, social) cache. So long as the final goal remains exclusively that of sexual dominance, the outcome isn't really "alpha" at all, since alpha males in most species assume responsibility for the health and stability of their particular social unit. The behaviour advocated in most game blogs is narcissistic -- or, I would say, "feral." And I think Mary would agree.
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