And then there’s this, which is one of those observations that so neatly encapsulates a difference, you actually want to put the book down and gaze into the middle distance for a minute or two: You can see pretty clearly why someone might begin to feel paranoid in this environment. When he doesn’t come to the Christmas party, the agency arranges for two ice sculptures to be placed either side of his front door. And his boss starts to point out to him the eligible girls in the office. He thinks of it, initally, as an investment, money he can make back when he sells. He only wants to be in the States for a year or two at the most, but suddenly here he is with a mortgage. When he arrives in America, the ad agency helps him out with the purchase of a beautiful old Victorian house, which turns out to be a major millstone. He began to talk like someone I’d known for years, dropping all use of the conditional tense in favor of the future. There followed a long moment of silence, which could only be satisfactorily explained by him punching the air in triumph and straightening his clothes before continuing. …that I was at the age where I was thinking about getting married. digression) During his phone interview, he tells the interviewer I reckon he’d have done better to call his Minnesotan town either Lacroix on its own, or Saint Something-Else. (We will gloss over the fact that a “Saint Lacroix” is unlikely, since “Lacroix” means “the Cross”. He works for an advertising agency in London, but gets headhunted for an agency based in Saint Lacroix, Minnesota. This, however, is where the book becomes valuable, at least to me, because what the oxygen thief does par excellence is describe the myriad horrors of corporate culture. Our oxygen thief, on the other hand, is plenty jaded, and so instead of being a howl of raw adolescent longing and confusion, his anger and bitterness curdles. He kind of wants to be, but he’s just too young to be there yet. Holden is not calculating anything for effect. Holden is a lot more innocent than this guy. I’m unwilling to call this the inheritor of Salinger’s mantle, though. And they’re not as easy as you might think: there’s an art to being casual. Millennials and hipsters like these things. It achieves the effect of being wry and conversational and ironic. The thing is that writing like this is totally passable to a lot of people. Not just mildly interested in the fact that there may be people who don’t necessarily have my best interests at heart. The blurb compares the narrator to Holden Caulfield, a comparison which I guess derives from prose like this:Īlso, I’m completely paranoid. Handy hint: if you’re a man and you want to purge yourself of your sins against women, you will never be able to. You can gather this from the first sentence, and also from the part where he talks about purging himself of his sins against women. The knowledge that this particular Irishman does not actually exist was, in places, the only thing that kept me reading. Its narrator is an Irishman living in London and then in Minnesota. It is a novel written by a Dutch person and originally published in Amsterdam ten years ago. Something that might comfort you (it did me) is that although this is written by “Anonymous”, although the narrator presents it as a memoir, and despite all of the seductive marketing around it that suggests its author has embarked on a decade-long guerrilla social media campaign, it is not non-fiction. They just might not be the parts the author intended. But there are parts of it that I think are very valuable. And did it completely redeem itself in my eyes? Not completely. Furthermore, The Pool describes the whole book as “as hipster as a £3 bowl of Rice Krispies on Shoreditch High Street.” So, am I its ideal reader? Is it even remotely my aesthetic? Hell to the no. Its very first line is “I liked hurting girls”, and the second line is “Mentally, not physically.” If you’ve spent much time around here at all, you’ll know that I have personal experience of men who like hurting girls mentally-not-physically, and that I don’t have a whole lot of time for that anymore. The point is to tell you how I purged myself of my sins against women, and indeed, against myself. Bouvard et Pécuchet, by Gustave Flaubert #ReadIndies.
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