Confessions of a Literary Mind

Forgive me, Father … but I fear it’s finally happening. I’ve started to change.

I know I haven’t visited in a while – let’s go ahead and add this to the ol’ Merciful Forgiveness Pile – but life is strange this way; when one must determine which melodramas to cede to a now 100-page novel and which to a confession booth like this one. I have lost something of the old stamina, living in a city that indulges my love of cinema and perhaps working in tech, that I hope to regain now that some recent plague has at last fled my body.

I like to think it was you I was looking for, when I made a foolhardy attempt (upon a Sunday) to claim my new library card from the Staatsbibliothek. It is indeed a beautiful and sacred-feeling place. It strikes the tragic pose of a brooding castle right there amidst the summer traffic of Unter den Linden. People who are passing by, perhaps to inquire like me, to see if evil like ours shan’t combust in the presence of so much ancient text, take photographs of the fountain outside – or otherwise watch it cascade itself with vape pens in hand. Even you, Father, must smile at how Berlin goes great lengths to fit itself into the most majestic evening grown, tattoos and piercings and all, just so she can pout into the most peculiar trick mirror and swear, You’re not the boss of me either.

I perplexed a man at the entrance with my request to simply look around the library. He is the first person I have said out loud to, Father, “I will be conducting some research soon, on the not-so-recent history of London.” It felt good. Like I could speak the old tingles, the old magic, right back into existence. He let me through wondering if there was some kind of catch. I knew I should have dressed slightly more formally. To look more my age, or at the very least like a person who would soon be compiling a history of London.

According to the website there is another, and I think larger, Staatbibliothek at Potsdamer Platz, which is slightly out of the question. I wondered, hovering past all the resting library faces, how it’s decided which tomes shall reside where. There is probably text on this, if only I would spare fifteen minutes more of YouTube or baseball time just once. Probably the man at the entrance, who will be kinder to me when I leave, can speak on this selection process for hours before social norm and propriety intervene.

I’m trying to make a habit of this in the summer: to practise my faith with the diligence and wonder of old. This feels like what it will take, Father, to land the plane on an endeavour with no plot, and which I have worked very hard and successfully so far not to despise. I hovered briefly on the floor with the complete works of Bysshe Shelly, Marvell, Blake, all the old demons, and gazumping annotations as to the Englands and Americas, and Englishes, in which they roamed. Solitary bastards, I like to imagine, Father, who took no prisoners when they swung at love.

I will be here daily, often, at the expense of the creature my comrades call the streets.

But I have sinned, Father – so let’s perhaps start from there.

I am reading Roth – finally, or unfortunately, I don’t quite know.

I recently shared, with a bit of a man-crush at my local hipster bookstore, perhaps under the influence of decent wine, that this is in fact my summer of lucidity. (I could have just led with that, couldn’t I, Father? Lols, good one …) I will be reading certain old white men whose greatness the culture, or is it the literati, is at pains to keep immortalised. I have calculated that this will help me thrust my feelings to one side, and enable me to be as gently dismissive of my emotional health as this wonderful city can sometimes be … No matter! — because I will write (gulp) endlessly.

I have made lighthearted remarks, near candle-light in tough guy bars, about having once closed the curtains to watch a Woody Allen movie I’d never seen, and expressing my sincere regret at how phenomenal Manhattan is. It is almost exactly the sort of movie, at least in its narrative progression, I liked to believe a book could emulate in kinetic energy. I went looking for exactly this feeling, and suspected I would find it waiting, in Goodbye Columbus.

This must be what we mean when speak about presence, Father. In Berlin I find it is almost rude to ask shopkeepers for assistance, even about wares we presumably both adore. So instead Columbus spoke to me from whichever Newark Roth inhabits now, cosmically, as if to say: begin here.

Part of the reason I’m here, finally, is I want to glean particular habits from Roth: of course the casting aside of feelings, I suspect excess compassion for the self, and more importantly his economy of prose. It’s not just in the weight of his sentences – it’s in the moments he reckons we miss for our day-to-day industrialism. The young black boy at the library. The ‘angel wings’ perspiration forms on the back of a young lady retiring from a game of tennis. The hill upon which countless single moms park to discuss their domestic affairs, while their children ignore a sign on a fence that says don’t feed the deer.

Roth’s characters owe each other nothing, are quite callous towards one another, and habitually miss the subtle magic of existence that he weaves around them.

I still want to burn ‘Rejection’ in a bonfire heap, and mostly out of grudging respect.

I took Tony Tulathimutte’s collection of very online short stories with me on a trip back to the motherland. I remember the odd juxtaposition of being feted gloriously with all the rice and oxtail a man can eat, and then returning to my chambers to digest this treatise against supposedly good Internet manners. How to put it simply, Father … ‘Rejection’ is a collection of short stories (maybe one can even call them polemical essays) about how playing by the rules of digital engagement, which now constitute our primary means of social engagement, is itself an arbitrary nonsense that eventually collapses in private or public catastrophe.

In roughly 65% of its tales, varying facades (bullet-proof social media profiles, best practise gender alliance, and/or rote participation in imbalanced relationships) slip into dangerous oblivion. ‘The Feminist’ ends with a chilling approximation of where mass shootings come from. In ‘Pics’ a low-stakes group chat turns volatile and combusts violently, over the course of several, well-orchestrated pages; and in ‘The Ballad of Sexual Repression’, a pornographic request goes several pages way too far.

There are clear highlights, resulting from a) Tulathimutte’s willingness to say very awkward things out loud and b) his pure and simple dedication to the vernacular of, say, text threads and comment sections. (It takes a certain savvy, but also a real appetite for chaos, to keep up the incessant bro-speak of ‘Our Dope Future’, in which a tech bro who’s essentially holding someone captive defends his attachment style to a vlog-like audience.) Credit where it’s due, Father … but my issue with Tulathimutte isn’t so much on ‘fiction’ – as the book’s sternum loudly announces, to help insulate the author from (I guess) cancellation – … It’s that his interest in our newfound depravity, how we use digital social currency to elevate or denigrate ourselves, doesn’t lead to counter-points or counter-arguments besides yes, for sure, the original point stands: everything is fucked (sorry, Father) and the worst part is you’re never ever getting laid.

The first few stories affirm that all Tulathimutte wants or intends to do is throw some shit in the air (sorry, Father), without any regard for the possibility that a few more of his supporting characters could be complicated, counter-reactionary creatures. That he does the shit-flinging (sorry, Father) in nearly the same parlance he blames for enacting unrealistic or unfair beauty standards, or invisible gag orders on commentary like Rejection’s, strikes me as wildly ironic. Tulathimutte knows the slant of his narration(s) leans heterosexual, but isn’t interested in having these very interesting conversations from multiple sides. (Even if the book eventually about-turns, with the same characters, to tell these stories from different sides …) It’s all special effects, and dick-punches, with not an awful lot of real-life consequence or context. Are conventionally unattractive people, and I merely paraphrase, just allowed to fester away in the carrot flower castles they build out of their own sadness?

Is that really it?

The purpose of ‘Main Character’ seems to be intellectualisation of all the carnage that’s wrought across Tulathimutte’s first 200 pages, to camouflage jokes and desires that are surely the author’s own in academic sheen. It’s an exhausting read, drowning in 21st Century coding but also unable to sustain any real locomotion for a protagonist constantly retracing and erasing their own steps. The very last entry, ‘Re: Rejection’, is an amusing letter from a publisher going above and beyond to express their disinterest in Tulathimutte’s manuscript – further evidence of the author’s astounding self-awareness as to what you’re thinking and have been thinking since the dedication page.

Tulathimutte wants at least some of us to shriek, “Gawd, if only there was a way to stop this clown from getting away with this shit!” (Sorry, Father.) But … is it even winking anymore when you’re doing it with both eyes?

I keep listening to bombastic book reviews, because I have a thing for declarations.

Father, I’ve cancelled and un-cancelled my subscription to The New Yorker multiple times. But once or thrice a month I need the warm froth of the crossword puzzle, for Louisa Thomas to wax lyrical about some stubborn tennis player or other, or (alternately) to have grown women tell me what to do. Normally that’s which books I ought to be paying attention to this summer, this fall, etc.

I used to be able to justify this behaviour with the logic that I was simply trying to be one with my community. Reading the books everyone else was, and actually in touch with the artistic and/or political concerns of my generation. (Much more than what had already found its place within pantheon, hence this unfortunate Roth business …) I say all this, Father, and yet I do not open the LitHub or Pub Lunch emails these days with the urgency that I used to. Like an eel that was heading upstream, towards the Upper East Side.

I have tastes of my own, Father, sure. I just feel … so naked wandering into Düssman, where it always looks like Christmas, or Shakespeare & Sons, where it’s sometimes (with love) paperback Glastonbury, without any incriminating evidence in my pocket. I need some proof that I’m not going to embark on this or that reading journey alone; that I’m participating. But too often, I worry ‘the community’ is uplifting what it feels it’s supposed to. Often the fault, I’m sure, of a canny young Brooklynite or Londoner that wants to be the first person to declare the next big literary thing. But I open these must-reads, these books of summer, and find myself, well, just wishing for that little bit more.

Take ‘Godwin’, by my good man Joseph O’Neill. Every time he reads something short on a Certain Literary Podcast, I drop everything immediately and write myself another reminder to purchase Netherworld, now that I have truly disposable income. This novel about an African football prodigy means to shine a light on what Western shadiness turns a teenager with tekkers into a global superstar in a NIKE ad, and almost gets away with being (really) a collection of hopeless conversations in rooms, mostly between disjointed interests. At times it’s even funny. But as soon as the story’s key narrator confirmed they wouldn’t actually make for West Africa, towards the book’s shimmering Narnia, I lost all interest in its final act, Father. Why won’t anyone just pull the trigger these days? And by that I mean, anyone on my shelf?

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was absolutely rollicking, tense as a wire, before Ms. Tartt decided she’d narrow things down to some group-quest for sexual enlightenment. Taffy Brodeker-Assner’s Long Island Compromise is doing all the same things Fleishman is in Trouble did: navel-gazing within a very small, very privileged world, which I’m fine with as long as an author’s sentences don’t navel-gaze themselves every other paragraph. (I can’t wait, Father, to decide to watch the limited TV series instead.) I’m holding onto hope that Good Girl (Aria Aber) will resist cliché and convention, and ultimately portray a Berlin I’m yet to hear of or encounter. It’s syrupy with lyrics, Father, but (alas) it begins in a building that bears a disappointing resemblance to Berghain – with a woman pining after, sigh, a brilliant and laid-back white boy.

I was saying to a friend, a proper bookworm, this one, that it seems I abandon novels the moment I don’t think they’re twisting the way I want them to. I’ll be better at the library, with a mission and maybe even a vape pen – a vape pen with something minty inside it … That isn’t sin, is it, Father?