I do read, despite my mother’s oft-mentioned false memories which indicate a contrarian stance. I am, however, bad at committing to novels, for which this blog’s section is dedicated. So while I might not be consistent with chronicling verbose prose, I spend a good deal of time learning to fix things around the house, or…studying contemporary male psychology and the implications of its general neglect. I could easily explain why mass shootings occur in America, and it has little to do with gun control. But where’s the fun in an Occam’s Razor thesis?
I jest, naturally, at my own parent, whose escapist romance-themed decade-long reading preference created a self-deluded elevation of the genera to great literary status. In the artistic form, I might enjoy a photo of a beautiful naked woman, and while I might tell myself that it’s an appreciation for the perfection of human evolution and an esthetic experience, no one’s going to buy that explanation when they find my adult media stash.
Or they wouldn’t, anyway, when I was young enough to have one. Such is age.
But back to the subject at hand: I read a novel! Or rather, a collection of short stories: The Stories of John Cheever. I chose this work as I’m attracted to Americana, so “Great American Novelists” pull me in. Specifically, I wanted to read his short story, The Swimmer. Now, as a product of the American school system, I’ve read The Jungle and Heart of Darkness, but 5 or so short stories into this collection and I was ready to kill myself. Good lord was this guy negative. Here are the core themes of everything he’s ever wrote:
- Capitalism is exploitative (cue Upton Sinclair here).
- Nothing you ever do will get you ahead in life.
- Being rich disconnects you from the rest of the world around you.
- Class divisions will always undermine an attempt to understand one another.
- Self-delusion is a powerful coping mechanism (see above).
When I did finally reach The Swimmer, it proved to be a decent story in its own right, but by that point the above themes were so hammered into me that I set the book aside. The story itself is about a once-wealthy socialite who takes a literal and metaphorical journey through his past and back to a home that will never exist again how he remembers it because of his own actions. Sort of a “you can’t go home again” thing going on, but it’s all the protagonist’s fault. And self-delusion. And with a heavy dose of how badly people speak about each other behind their backs. And wealthy people are terrible.
So, not light-hearted by any means. But it’s telling of the time period – the dying social divisions of the Guilded Age, and the lack of unity in the country following The Great Depression. It’s definitely Americana, but with none of the warm fuzzy postwar bit.
(Also no nighttime lovemaking to the backdrop of a rainstorm, lightening flashes briefly illuminating masculine bulges and such.)
–Simon