My Heart is a Chainsaw: a mixed review, spoilers

Spoilers ahead.

I hear NPR described the author as one of our foremost talents today, and I cannot fucking believe that NPR thinks that, because that would mean putting My Heart is a Chainsaw on the same shelf as the Patrick Melrose novels. Like many other novels today, MHC is another tiresome book about trauma, written by someone who understands how it’s inflicted, what it’s like to live with the coping mechanisms adopted to numb oneself against it, but without much to say about it.

The protagonist, Jade, spends most of the book rambling about slasher trivia, even in the heat of the moment when she finally is being chased by an axe murderer, and half the chapters are papers about slasher movies that she wrote to her history teacher in an attempt for extra credit that he never gives. Here are samples: “Her lead-in example, and where she got the title, was that hurting the leg of a slasher, instead of slowing it down, it actually makes the slasher faster, just, now, it’s got a scary limp.” “Unless it’s the anthropophagus from 1980, of course. In which case she’s screwd, as she doesn’t think she can run right now.”

It’s fairly clear, even before the body count starts rising, that Jade’s incessant obsession with slasher films is escapism from some kind of trauma–and this is what makes me think that despite the glut of trauma stories we’ve seen on the market, maybe we need more, because from what I can tell, the book’s fans were all surprised by the reveal that Jade’s obsession with slasher films comes from hoping that a serial killer would put a chainsaw through her sexually abusive father’s head. You’d think that devotees of genre stories would’ve figured out by now that it’s called “escapism” because the goal is to escape from a disappointing reality, and the worse the reality, the more committed the escapism is. If you see the reveal coming though, the book doesn’t read as a tender exploration of how the horror genre can save a life, but instead, as one of those trauma plots (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot).

MCS is not a bad book, and it gets points for execution. Jade is tedious, unlikable, and so obsessed with slasher films that everyone in the book finds her offputting, but it’s psychologically true. Her problems are written in a way that ought to feel familiar to anyone who knows someone who’s undergone long, complex trauma, or anyone who has suffered it themselves. It’s normal to become oblivious to reality, distracted by the inability to stop replaying the same thoughts over and over, which does wonders for your social skills. Trauma survivors tend to be rigid thinkers, fixated on the few things that make them feel safe. The problem is that even though it made complete sense to me that Jade was trying to think of which slasher movie the axe murder chasing her reminded her of in medias res, it is a bad reading experience.

What’s most infuriating is that the attempt to resolve Jade’s trauma at the end of the book was narratively unsatisfying to me as well. Jade attacks her abusive father and while she doesn’t kill him, she does get the satisfaction of watching a girl she admires administer the coup de grace. She also stops the real murderer and saves the town, but Jade apparently gets no emotional satisfaction from that. Finally, she sees a literal mother bear protecting her cub from a papa bear, which…somehow makes up for her own mother not doing enough to protect Jade and vanishing from her life. Then the book ends.

To me, while the bear action reads well as a healing moment, it doesn’t really read as cathartic enough to be the ending. Throughout the book, Jade idolizes the beautiful and rich Letha Mondragon as the only possible girl who is pure, innocent, and determined enough to be a final girl. It’s quite clear that Jade thinks of herself as too worthless to be a final girl herself. While one piece of her trauma is the belief that no parent will ever protect their child, the other is the belief that she, specifically, does not deserve protecting. By not addressing that, in my mind, the ending dances around the idea of recovering from trauma without quite committing to it. And frankly, after putting up with this character for so long, we deserved a little more emotional payoff.

once a runner: a very negative review

I started running regularly after finally giving up on riding my bike around Boston recreationally. The roads are narrow and I was spoiled by living only a 20 minute bike ride away from the chaparral and redwoods back when I still lived in Palo Alto. You can keep going for hours in the Boston area and still keep running into tons of houses and more traffic than feels comfortable on those narrow roads. Anyway, now that I’ve defected to the running tribe, I’ve been reading a lot of running forums, and I came across this little snippet from the novel Once a Runner:

‘What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared, to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heartrending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could they be expected to understand that?’

That looked good. It looked really good. I bought the book on Kindle and set to work. I read about it online first, of course. The author, John L. Parker, tried to get it published but couldn’t because publishers thought it was too niche, too targeted at elite runners. His Wikipedia page has this quote:

‘I got the rejections, and I kind of went, “What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand that this is like sending a writer to the moon and having him come back and describe it?” Parker said. “There aren’t many writers who get close to a 4-minute mile, or who got to be roommates with an Olympian, and who can tell other people what that’s like.”‘

At the time I read this, I felt deeply sympathetic. Quite a lot of first-class fiction is just thinly-veiled autobiography. James Joyce is the worst and most famous offender I can think of, and it would be easy for me to rattle off five or ten more. Maybe the literati were all couch potatoes who couldn’t relate to running hard. Parker was wronged! But I, with my credit card and $12.99, would help right this wrong!

Then I read this book, this godawful book, and I thought no, no, this book’s rejection actually restores my faith in publishers as gatekeepers. The problem is that Parker is the kind of guy who can go to the moon and back and can’t tell you what it’s like! He can’t come back with anything to say but duuuuuuuude, that was SICK man. (Except he seems like the kind of bookworm who doesn’t know any slang.)

In some ways, this book is sort of the inverse of David Foster Wallace’s delightful essay on elite tennis, “The String Theory.” “The String Theory” is about an untalented athlete, Wallace, looking in on the world of a talented athlete, Michael Joyce, while Once a Runner is about a talented athlete trying to describe his inner world for all us schmucks who’ll be lucky to get an eight minute mile, let alone run a sub-four minute mile.

The problem with very elite athletes, as Wallace points out, is that the timeconsuming demands of their training don’t leave much space for a personality or thought in general. You can see Wallace struggling to keep his personal snobbery in check, but he fails horribly: “Close-up, he looks his age, which to me is basically that of a fetus. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial-paperback sort that one reads on airplanes.” He goes on to call Joyce a “grotesque” and possible virgin. It makes you want to rescue all promising young tennis players from ever trying to go pro, lest they turn into a grotesque like Michael Joyce.

Once a Runner is essentially what you’d get if Michael Joyce had a good prose style and was an elite runner instead of an elite tennis player.

It’s possible to delve so deeply into a niche subject that you come out the other side with something that touches on a universally relatable aspect of the human condition, but that requires a sensitivity to life that is totally lacking in this book. Aside from some very fine passages that capture the experience of masochistically running mile after mile after mile, day after day after day, which is only enough material for an essay in _Runner’s World_,there’s no plot worth speaking of, no memorable characters, and the book could have been set anywhere in America with enough racist white men. Parker is not an observant author. He was clearly too busy running.

joyland: a mixed review

I don’t understand the Cannes audience. If you believe the stories that come out of that festival, people literally fainted when they watched Julia Ducournau’s movie Raw. Everyone in the theater where I saw Raw managed to stay upright. Are they just very emotional, very fragile, sort of like butterflies caught in the strong breeze of emotionally moving cinema, or is it just lies told by marketing departments? The Cannes audience supposedly stood up and applauded the end of Joyland, so adjusting downward for either emotional volatility or marketing exaggerations or both, I was expecting something that would keep me in my seat, but was solid.

This movie has further calibrated my ability to interpret the Cannes audience. They must not know a lot of trans people, and it seems pretty likely to me that they don’t have a lot of queer friends, period. I read a few reviews that were impressed by the transwoman character and I honestly could not understand why. Alina Khan, like the rest of the cast, puts on a tremendous performance, but her character fits neatly into the bitchy gay stereotype. Worse, she still remains a more interesting character than our limp-wristed protagonist Haider, but like Haider’s wife, Mumtaz, she remains a prop to Haider’s story.

The most frustrating thing about Joyland is that it is a good and nuanced depiction of how patriarchy and suffocating social norms are bad for everyone, regardless of gender. One of the most intelligent side plots concerns Haider’s father, the elderly, aging, and autocratic patriarch of the family. The widow next door, who is close in age, has a crush on him and stays the night, causing a neighborhood scandal and the widow’s son to angrily break off the attachment. Both Haider’s father and the widow are made lonely for the sake of keeping up appearances, pointlessly so, with absolutely no benefit to anyone.

Still, Joyland gives the last word, not to the people most hurt by patriarchy in Pakistan–not to Biba and Mumtaz, Haider’s wife–but to Haider, a straight cisgender man, who is far more passive than either Biba or Mumtaz in struggling against their society. On a train ride earlier in the film, Biba tells Haider that he ought to see the ocean if he can. Haider asks Mumtaz if she has ever been, and she says yes, but she was not allowed to go into the ocean by her aunt. Mumtaz commits suicide, Biba vanishes from the screen, and the final scene is of Haider riding the train to see the ocean and stripping off his shirt to wade in the waters. In other words, in a movie about how patriarchal norms that disproportionately burden women and queer people thwart the desires of every single character in this movie, the straight cisgender guy is the only one who gets to do something he wants. Somehow, it feels extra sexist that he didn’t even come up with the idea of wading in the ocean himself, but got it from Biba and Mumtaz.

It’s really not a bad movie, and I suppose I can see why the Cannes audience applauded it, but Joyland seems to me to be another example of this phenomenon that blights the prospects and representation of marginalized groups. I don’t know the pithy name for it, but it’s what happens when the most prominent members of a marginalized group are the most privileged members of it. For example, wealthy white women are the most privileged women, so of course the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Katherine Graham, was a wealthy white woman. That was back in 1972. 2009 was when we saw the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. At this rate, we’ll see a Native American woman right around when the Midwest sees its second Dust Bowl. Joyland is notable for being the first Pakistani film to ever premiere at Cannes, so it’s no wonder the protagnist is a straight cisgender man. Some Pakistani director could have made a brilliant film focused on transgender people and it just wouldn’t be able to make the cut right now, probably because the only Pakistanis able to get the resources and connections to make a film like this are going to be the kinds of Pakistanis who benefit from the status quo–cis, male and well-off, unlikely to know much about being trans.

Basically, I feel a minor version of the disappointment I felt when Obama became president. I thought it was a big progressive deal, and then he turned out to be more or less like any other Democrat who’d gone to Harvard. I don’t regret seeing Joyland, just as I don’t regret voting and volunteering for Obama, but just like Obama, it’s not really that progressive.

the secret history: a bad review

It’s a rich enough book that you could do some decent lit crit, but I couldn’t finish it and can’t be arsed. Tartt’s obsession with class is even more obnoxious here than in The Goldfinch. She’s like a third-rate Evelyn Waugh. Where his class-worship had at least the benefit of a satirical distance that gave his books nuance and the space for some really good jokes, hers is completely uncritical. Waugh loves his rich boys and girls like a longtime resident of New York loves the city. Tartt’s like a tourist from Plano gawping at the big buildings for the first time. Ugh, just ugh ugh ugh ughhhh.

Ninefox Gambit: a disappointed review

The basic premise is really thoughtful, and politically incisive. The universe is dominated by an empire known as the Hexarchate, which has achieved galactic domination by forcing everyone to use their calendar. I know this sounds unbelievably dorky and beside the point, but trust me, it’s actually brilliant. Within the novel’s universe, physics is affected by consensus, and so the idea is that different calendars enable different kinds of weaponry. Within the real world, the kind of cultural imperialism imposed by the Hexarchate is common, and necessary to expanding a colonialist empire. Not only do colonizers for realsies force everyone onto their calendar (I am still annoyed that January 1 is the beginning of the new year, and that the whole world doesn’t use the lunar calendar instead, since that actually tracks the seasons), they force the people they colonized to use the colonizer’s languages, and to elevate the artistic works that the colonizers consider canon. In the most extreme cases, colonizers perpetuate their culture by kidnapping the children of indigenous people, cleaving them from their ancestral culture, and turning them into vessels of the colonizers’ culture. It’s the most stomach-churning way a meme has of perpetuating itself.

Unfortunately, the book is terribly tedious. I have made more progress through The Brothers Karamazov in the past week than I have in the past year, mostly because reading five pages of this book is enough to make me want to read something, literally anything else, and I have nothing else on my Kindle that remains unread, and I’m too cheap to buy more books right now, and too squeamish to pirate something else.

If you’re the kind of person who likes hard sci-fi–like, say, if you’re a big fan of Ted Chiang–you’ll probably like this book, but if you prefer something with somewhat livelier characters–well, there’s a lot of good Russian novels out there.

pet sematary: a slightly disappointed review

Spoilers abound.

The first signs that I was starting to age–not necessarily mature, or grow up, mind you, but age–were developing a fondness for the scent of lavender, and another for the faces of Persian cats. Judging by my reaction to Pet Sematary, I am now on an accelerated decline and will probably need to be put into a nursing home soon. I was never a dedicated Stephen King fan, but I used to be able to soak up his stories with a wide-eyed credulousness, an openness to taking his stories on their own terms.

Now that I am about twice the age I was when I first read Carrie, and have finally been exposed to a smidgen of actual literature, I can’t do it. I still think King is a good author, but I can’t push the line that “he’s got themes” with the same faith as before. Sure, sure he does, but he really bludgeons you in the head with them to make sure you got it.

The emotional core of Pet Sematary is the grief of outliving your loved ones, and the ensuing madness. The protagonist can’t cope with losing his toddler-aged son, and buries the child in a cursed graveyard that resurrects the dead, but in a murderous, zombified sort of way. That’s fine, great premise with a great payoff, but it’s a bit too heavy-handed that the graveyard itself is manipulating everyone in the situation–the truck driver who runs over the child, the old neighbor who tells the protagonist about the graveyard, and of course, the protagonist himself. Humans are more than foolish enough on their own without supernatural powers giving them that extra push to do evil. The thesis of Pet Sematary is that it’s better to learn to live with grief than to go into denial about death, no matter how twisted, menacing, terrifying, or final death is, but it’s really hard to believe that learning to live with grief is an option when you can blame your problems on a demonically possessed graveyard.

 

the goldfinch, by donna tartt–a strangely overrated and underrated book

The Goldfinch came out a couple years ago, so I’m late to the party, but Donna Tartt spent eleven years writing it. If she can take her time, so can I. I picked it up not knowing anything about the book proper, or even that that’s supposed to be a painting of a bird on the cover. All I knew was that there was a huge controversy over its winning the Pulitzer. Half of the literary establishment thought it was amazing, the new Dickens–a definite black mark, as I am a Dickens-hater–but the other half thought it was horrible, that it was a children’s book posing as literature and a sign of the decay of the modern reader. That sounded like the kind of snobby sentiment I could sympathize with, but the hater half included Francine Prose, who I hate as much as I hate Dickens. How to balance these two heuristics? So I was very excited about this book. I thought my reaction would reveal something important about who I was as a reader, as if the discovery of my feelings about it was a literary version of the Sorting Hat.

So how disappointing was it when I fell smack in the middle? I neither loved the book nor hated it. While I was reading it, I was engaged and entertained, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about either way. Some of it, I suppose, is that my heart thrills to the tropes of bad fantasy fiction most of all–if I’d been raised on books that weren’t Dungeons and Dragons manuals, maybe I would have loved this book more.

One criticism I’ve seen of The Goldfinch is that it is a book full of ridiculous, implausible coincidences, starting with the very premise itself. The book begins with the narrator losing his mother in a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, an old man, who in his dying throes regresses back to his life in WWII Europe, rescuing priceless works of art from invaders, encourages our hero Theo Decker to steal the titular painting, “The Goldfinch,” to keep it safe from said hallucinated invaders.

Having read the book, I do not think that the psychology of the old man seems implausible. I don’t see why the combination of the shock of a large explosion, and a failing mind from mortal injury, might not scramble his brains. The old man was an art-lover who knew that works of art were under threat, he sought assistance in rescuing it–is more required? Perhaps it wouldn’t ever happen that particular way in real life, but this is what artistic license is all about. No real-life situation survives the novelist’s transcription, and to quibble too strongly about implausible coincidences would mean throwing out all of Charles Dickens’s oeuvre. (Not that I would be personally opposed to this, but a lot of the Tartt-haters really like Dickens and seem offended she’s compared to him, so presumably this argument is a gotcha for them.)

But probably the premise would have seemed more plausible, had the rest of the book been more emotionally sound. The very best part of the book is the middle, where a teenaged Theo, still deeply traumatized from his mother’s death, bonds with another damaged boy, a Russian with an abusive father named Boris. If I had to guess, Tartt was the kind of goody two shoes in school who was a bookworm after school, but she puts on a convincing and fun display of juvenile larceny and dissipation. Boris introduces Theo to vodka and worse drugs, and eggs him on in all sorts of petty theft, but nevertheless, he becomes the best friend and brother Theo could have ever wanted. It is here, in the friendship between Boris and Theo, that the true heart of The Goldfinch beats.

But then Tartt ruins it with a strange and snobbish fixation on the glory of antique furniture, and Renaissance-era painting techniques. I finished the book feeling rather cheated–the book so clearly wants to be about art, its ability to link the far past with the far future, and the possibility for grace and redemption that loving and protecting great art can offer–but the book is really about trauma, and attempting to process it. Theo spends a great deal of money self-medicating on any pill he can get his hands on, for instance, and his endless misadventures with drugs play a far greater role in his character development than keeping the painting does. I read the last thirty pages or so, a sophomoric disquisition on the beauty of The Goldfinch, the painting, and on the power of great art in general, that felt like a high-schooler’s thoughts on art–and I kept thinking, surely this is Theo being an unreliable narrator, surely this is some postmodernist trick, and there will be hints that all is not well, Theo is deluded about the role of art in helping him to heal? But no, evidently it was entirely sincere.

And that, I think, is the truth behind the accusations of “implausibility”–Tartt wrote a book about one thing, and then insisted at you that it was really about another. Much as I don’t like Dickens, his books hang together better than that, and he never had the bad manners to lecture at you.

So there you have it, I suppose. The critic James Wood accused Tartt of writing on a level fit only for children, thus infantilizing adult literature, but I suspect he felt a need to push back against the enthusiastic overreaction this book received. The truth is, The Goldfinch is a deeply flawed book, but it’s still a good, readable book, which puts it on par with most every other good book that is still bad enough that it will be quietly forgotten.

swing time, by zadie smith–a negative review

Like many others, I often worry about the effect of digital devices on the human attention span.  Swing Time is the culmination of my worst fear–that the modern world is now so full of distractions, nobody can write a decent novel any more.

This is not to say that the book is a disjointed series of tweets. Smith has a fine eye for characterization, though the protagonist is yet another one of those passive, socially awkward introverts that is so clearly inspired by the writer’s own personality. The prose is unquestionably good–at times aphoristic, it is always fresh and amusing. The problem is that Swing Time is the product of a mind that is intelligent but not wise–an observant mind, but one that is not particularly good at making connections, elaborations, or drawing implications. Just the kind of mind I’d expect to result from an age of truncated attention spans.

The central relationship of Swing Time, if it can be called that, is a My Brilliant Friend-esque frenemy-ship between the nameless protagonist, and her childhood friend, Tracey, who is a dance prodigy. Both girls are black, and grow up in council housing (that’s affordable housing for us Americans–like Section 8 but a great deal nicer, I gather). Our loathsome blank of a protagonist, while as interested in dance as Tracey, possesses only modest gifts. Regardless, their life paths diverge since the protagonist’s mother insists that she go to college, while Tracey’s mother is negligent, and poor Tracey never manages to get out of the ghetto, despite her superior talents.

You know, though, I err in saying that it’s the central relationship. Smith is one of those writers who abuses the use of broken narrative threads as a cheap shortcut to establishing verisimilitude.

This is an example of what I mean by “abuse.” Tracey and the Nameless One end up parting ways about a third of the way into the book, and we see only rare glimpses of her afterwards, mostly secondhand. Tracey is darker-skinned than Miss Nameless One, and comes from a broken home. It makes sense Tracey would remain in poverty, while the lighter-skinned narrator, with her intact family and educated mother, would escape. It makes complete sense that they would lose contact. But this consequence of racism and poverty doesn’t go anywhere–the tragic divergence in socioeconomic circumstances just happens, and there are no further implications, no emotional heft. Later, in the novel, they do reunite once for an incredibly awkward and strained conversation, but nothing happens. It’s awkward, as one might realistically expect, and that’s it.

That’s the problem with drawing too much inspiration from real life–when you part ways with a childhood friend, that generally means the end of learning anything from that relationship. You move on, you forget, it fails to affect you further. Such a development can be inevitable in real life, but it is a fatal flaw in a book. Real life is noise, books are about signal. It’s good to fuzz your book a little bit to make it more convincing, but too much, and any signal is lost. The point of a book is to unfold a story, and so, letting a character drop off the face of the earth is a waste of the time spent developing that character.

This would be excusable had Tracey’s friendship left some sort of notable impact on the narrator, but as I said earlier, the narrator is one of those passive low-reactors who feels nothing, and carries emotion about as well as a colander carries water.

What infuriates me the most, though, is that the book is trying to say something about race, but it never manages to say anything interesting. It’s like reading a series of superficially glib blog posts, instead of an actual book. We don’t need any more books on race that have no more insight than, “hurp durr, it sure is complicated!” Nor do we need any books that regard that message with no more emotion than one might feel for a funny tweet.

Crazy Rich Asians: Some cultural context for non-Asians

I don’t have a lot of thoughts about this movie, so this is going to be short. Fundamentally, it’s a rom-com, and the demands of that formula soften the keenness of whatever social commentary was buried in there. But I do want to clarify one thing for any non-Asians watching this movie. I don’t think I’m spoiling too much to say that the movie hinges on the difficulties Asian-Americans have navigating the filial duties demanded by more traditional Asians, and that the resolution is ultimately positive and uplifting. I want to explain why, given the realities of East Asian culture, the happy ending is psychologically unrealistic.

It’s common for Western leftists to discuss these axes of oppression: gender, race, and class. Disability, fortunately, is also achieving more recognition. I’ve often thought that the discourse ought to include age as well. Because very roughly speaking, Chinese families are run as gerontocracies, and age-based oppression, where the youth are firmly under the thumb of the old, is one of the organizing principles of Chinese culture, and East Asian cultures in general. (And probably many Indian cultures too, though I intend to stay in my lane.) Any good leftist worthy of the name should want to abolish age-based oppression as well.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that children are property, in the way that enslaved humans were treated as property, and to my knowledge, there aren’t explicit laws enshrining younger people as second-class citizens. As far as I know, it’s a matter of informal custom. Regardless, older people are at the top, and people at the top have little incentive to develop empathy for their lessers, and even less reason to develop any respect for them. Imagine a white person listening to a black person’s concerns about police violence, and imagine that white person telling the black person to get over it. Or imagine a man telling a woman that she’s silly to be afraid of walking alone at night. Get on Facebook, and see all the abled people who don’t know a single disabled person, confidently expound that disabled people don’t need plastic straws and the straw ban should go full speed ahead. Take that breezy, unconscious, even unintended, contempt, take that inability to admit that the other person might know something you don’t, or have different feelings that are as valid as your own–now imagine a country full of old people doing that to their children, and any younger person within striking distance.

A happy ending for Crazy Rich Asians is even more impossible when you apply some intersectionality and account for the fact that the main antagonist, the potential mother-in-law, is a woman. Chinese culture is pretty sexist, and when I think about it, I’m quite surprised that the story of Mulan is as popular as it is. When you’re a Chinese woman, doomed to being a second-class citizen your whole life, you really, really look forward to being the mother-in-law and getting to boss around your daughter-in-law. Who else are you going to boss? Up until your own mother-in-law kicks the bucket, you’re the bottom of the totem pole. When your mother-in-law isn’t even dead yet, are you going to put up with any guff from your potential daughter-in-law? Oh hell no. At the very least, you will make her suffer. And you will believe that you deserve to do so. It’s your reward for putting up with so much crap in your own life. This is somewhat analogous to the psychological wages of whiteness, as first explained by WEB Du Bois.

Is it a bad thing that the movie didn’t address these nuances of East Asian culture? Well, Roger Ebert had a delightful sentence in his review of Shaolin Soccer that I’ll never forget–“It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle.” Meaning, that one ought not compare apples to oranges, or in this case, a rom-com to the output of an Asian Spike Lee. For what it is, Crazy Rich Asians is superior. But I don’t want anyone to mistake it for something more than piffle.

guardian angel, by jake ritari–a story about extreme introversion as a rational response to an irrational world

As a software developer born and bred in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m no stranger to odd people. It is the only place in the world where you can meet young devs who will stare into your eyes and explain, with all sincerity, that the only reason they can make as much eye contact with you as they can right now, is because they took a class at the Center for Applied Rationality. I have not been to CFAR myself, but my understanding is that if you go to the bathroom there, you will see flyers strategically positioned by the exit that say, “Have you been rational today?” So. My homeland is a magnet for quirky, shy nerds, but even so, I don’t think it has anything on Japan. Because Japan has hikikomori.

Predominantly young men, hikikomori are those Japanese people who have chosen to stop leaving the house completely, in a kind of modern monkhood–though with video games and anime in place of religious contemplation. The standard stereotype is of someone with extreme social anxiety who lives with their parents but does not leave their own bedroom, keeping the door shut at all times and communicating through notes. The technical definition, as used by the Japanese Health, Labor, and Welfare, Ministry is someone who has not left their home or interacted with someone for at least six months. Some half a million Japanese citizens fit the definition, though due to social stigma, and the private nature of the phenomenon, the official number is likely to be a significant underestimate. Unofficial estimates are around a million.

Guardian Angel, a novella by Jacob Ritari, has an excellent premise. Protagonist Kyouko Satsumura is a Japanese millennial laboring beneath the same burdens that curse her American peers–a poor job market, and student loans for a worthless college degree. And like any American millennial, her income is inconsistent and she has to resort to–well, I don’t know what catchy slang they used to describe intermittent piecework during the first Gilded Age, but these days we call them “side hustles.” One of her side hustles is coaxing hikikomori out of their rooms and back into the real world. She’s delightfully cynical and blunt about the job in a way that truly warms my heart. In her own words, “The best part about the job is, I get to see that there are even bigger losers than me.”

While Kyouko’s problems (and maybe some of that attitude) will resonate with any American reader of a certain age, the story maintains a convincingly Japanese feel, thanks to little touches like a school club named the Fighting Carp, or characters asking Kyouko what the proper kanji to use for her name is. It reminded me of the conversations my parents have had when meeting new acquaintances–“ah, your name is Li? Is that li like the character for ‘beautiful,’ or li as in ‘powerful’?”

The plot follows Kyouko as she accepts a job to bring out a particularly recalcitrant hikikomori, Ryoji Tamura, out of his room. What makes Ryoji a difficult case is that his hikikomiri-ness is not due to some innate mental illness, but a considered, rational response to society. And why not? Work sucks. As my friend Larry is fond of reminding me, there’s a reason it’s not called play. Being a grown-up period, sucks. If you’re sufficiently introverted and your parents aren’t willing to let you starve, why not retreat from the world?

There’s the potential for a lot of interesting parallelism and a well-matched psychological cat and mouse game, as Kyouko turns out to be just as much of a misfit as Ryoji. Both of them have failed to live up to the standard norms of what a successful adult should be, and each of them have chosen their own form of rebellion. Overall, I enjoyed the story, and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend reading it, but it feels incomplete. The ending comes together well enough as Kyouko’s hikikomori side hustle unexpectedly collides with her yakuza side hustle, but it’s something of a pity that Ritari doesn’t take his premise all the way to its logical conclusion. If it’s true that Japanese society is insane enough that becoming a hikikomori is a sane response (and frankly now that I think about it, I don’t understand why more Americans aren’t doing the exact same thing), then what kind of reintegration is really possible, and on what terms? What’s wrong with Japan, and why would it be worth returning to? There’s questions enough for a thousand-page novel here, but sadly, Guardian Angel just isn’t long enough to answer them.