Lee, Chang-Rae. Aloft. New York: Riverhead, 2004.
This is a book for the unfortunate reader who never got enough of Rabbit Angstrom or Frank Bascombe in the three books each that Updike and Ford, respectively, devoted to them. What a dull book! What tired, irrelevant character types! When will people stop wanting to read first-person accounts of middle-aged New England men who, despite being past their primes in terms of careers, still get to bed sexy, younger women and still utter long-winded banalities in the interests of coming across as poignant?Why are people still even allowed to write novels like this?
Q: Isn't it interesting that this is written by an Asian-American man who, in his jacket photo, looks to be much younger than those boring, bald assholes named above?
A: No. It's not at all interesting. This book is a total fucking bore, all 343 pages of it.
posted by Dusty at 7:21 PM
2 Comments:
Oh, Dusty, Rabbitt Angstrom and Frank Bascombe are both Mid-Atlantic(-ers? -ites? -ians?) because everyone knows people who live in New England have funny accents, old money, and wives nicknamed Bipsie or somesuch. Therefore, they aren't real by-the-bootstraps Americans and don't have the self-pity or slovenliness to ruminate on the passionless affairs they mechanically carryout with each other's wives nicknamed Bipsie or somesuch.
The one thing they have in common is children who turn against their values in ways that confuse and anger them both for the rejection of their own morality and for how it marks them as aged and slow. For the New Englanders, this leads to boarding school and trust fund conditions. For the Mid-Atlanticans, this leads to more self-destructive behavior that always works out both sexually and financially in the long run until an epochal death which they interpret, rightly, as the end of the world.
Ha! I love this post. I know -- and why are stories about regretful old men still allowed to run in the New Yorker every other week? And why is everyone so hot for Ford's latest book? Could it be that our publishing houses, magazines, and newspapers are run by frustrated New Englander men who wish that despite being past their primes in terms of careers, they still got to bed sexy, younger women and still utter long-winded banalities in the interests of coming across as poignant?
And yet... for some reason I can stomach James Salter. Why is that? He's like the more poetic version of these guys.
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