Thoughts On Today's Book Reviews From The Guardian

I have read a little of Freud, never had psychoanalysis, and have this hunch that Carl Jung might be of more interest to me. Yet, I read On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud review – the shrink’s shrink engagingly examined by Siri Hustvedt, Susie Boyt and others. I admit seeing the name Siri Hustved drove me to it.

I have wondered for a while if Freud had been a woman if he would have come up with the idea of penis envy, and I may have an answer - albeit from a third perspective.

And then there’s Jennifer Finney Boylan snarlingly tearing up Freud’s thesis that everybody has penis envy, even women – from the perspective of a transgender woman who, we learn, happily lost hers.

But this paragraph left me wondering if I am not more Freudian than I ahve thought myself.

But why bother putting Freud on the couch? Aren’t his Victorian views about women, homosexuality and much else besides as outmoded as crocheted covers for sexually arousing piano legs? It’s notable that it is the women here who make the strongest cases for the dead patriarch’s relevance to us. The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls for a return to Freud as cure for our age of inauthenticity, in which we are reduced to exploitable datasets that deny our inwardness, not to mention our polysemous perversity.

Orthodoxy Christianity makes much of personhood, that it is a bundle and not singular. Then there is Walt Whitman's "I contain multitudes." 

I like being able to experiment, write how I think the story wants to be written, and this headline I thought might encourage my proclivities: Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner review – an old-fashioned maximalist rush of storytelling.

One reason Beamer’s latest script is unsuccessful, one character tells him, is that it’s “not really of the time”, and the same could be said for Long Island Compromise. It’s out of step with literary trends, but there’s clearly an appetite for this sort of old-fashioned maximalist rush of storytelling, as we see from the success of Fleishman, not to mention recent novels by Nathan Hill and Jonathan Franzen. The reader sinks into it, submissively, and enjoys the show. This is not fiction that is efficient and controlled, containing only what’s necessary. It’s too much at times – do we need a diversion every time a new character appears? – but sometimes too much is just right.

 And it does - it justifies my inner Theodore Dreiser, piling on more and more.

More to my what I am working on is Monumenta by Lara Haworth review – Serbian house of horrors. Although, it sounds far more flamboyant (deservedly so) than what I wanted to do in my "Chasing Ashes" with its references to historical markers found during a road trip.

Haworth, born in Brussels and raised in London, says it was the grief she felt after losing her grandparents’ house and her father’s flat in Belgrade that impelled her to write Monumenta. It’s also a deeply political work. Haworth examines the difficulty (and absurdity) of memorialising the past in a region such as the Balkans, riven by conflict, with competing historical narratives and interpretations that change over time. Her novella fizzes with ideas and proves a lively, if occasionally perplexing, read.

I used two actual markers that seemed to unselfconsciously settler colonialism, and then the self-conscious absence of one about a lynching.

That I live a quiet, maybe hermit-like life in a small Midwestern city makes me self-conscious about the significance of what I know. There is a part of me that will not mind being published as a regional writer - so long as I am published! Only I think that what I have seen of where I am is transferable to a wider meaning. So, I looked at Bonding by Mariel Franklin review – a comprehensive vision of a devastated society to see what I might be lacking.

Zoning in on a milieu of tech and pharmaceutical workers in 2020s London, Bonding depicts western society as a juggernaut zombie, digitally reconfigured and bereft of a coherent system of values, that staggers onwards in flight from an all-pervading truth: “no one had any idea how to live”.

Juggernaut is not a metaphor I would have used - it conveys too much direction to what I see around me. Also, too much energy. This is the American Midwest, where things are done in a quiet, small-scale way.

Although Franklin doesn’t quite plumb the same depths of shame, the comparison to Michel Houellebecq really is apt: few anglophone novelists risk this kind of sweeping civilisational vision, let alone pull it off with such aplomb. Like the shit-stirring Frenchman, Mariel Franklin has her thumb right over the sore spot – my one hope is that next time she’ll press down harder. A zeitgeist-saturated salvo, Bonding is the work of a writer steely enough to peer into the abyss of societal catastrophe, and spirited enough to dream of something beyond it.

Pretty sure, I've not committed to a sweeping vision that might point to a future. However, the collapse of the automobile companies at the end of the Seventies is a devastation that has never healed. People linked their identity to their work. They attached security to corporations.  I am leery of broad societal prescriptions, I came of age when Marxism was seen as a political failure. In my "Only The Dead and The Dying Short Stories" the most that people want is economic security to return to as it was. The only solution I can find is individual creativity, or getting out.

I accumulate ideas and I need to get back to "Chasing Ashes". Maybe by the end of the month? If I can get the energy!

sch 7/7