The Hero of My Book/Men in My Situation: Not My Cup of Tea

 

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK (Elizabeth McCracken)

MEN IN MY SITUATION (Pers Petterson)

 

Sometimes well-regarded books knock your socks off; sometimes you wonder what the fuss is about. Here are two recent ones that didn’t resonate with me. Maybe they will or already have with you, so feel free to let me know what I missed (if I have).

 

 

Elizabeth McCracken used to be one of my favorite writers, but I didn’t like Bowlaway (2019) nor was I fond of her latest, The Hero of This Book (2022, Ecco, 192 pages). It’s a self-reflexive work about an author who hates memoirs, tries not to write one,   though she really is writing one, and hates that. Got all that? Methinks the author doth protest too much. She’s in London, which she doesn’t seem to like very much either. She reflects upon her parents by trying not to do so, but eventually surrenders. Mainly the book is a litany of the things she doesn’t like (besides memoirs): Barbie dolls, bagels cut in half, ballpoint pens, fiction writers, inappropriate cellphone use, eavesdropping, colored hair, writers as characters in fiction, audience participation, men with long hair, Mark Rothko…. I could go on. She does.

 

I actually share some of her dislikes, but do we pick up a work of fiction­–and she is a fiction writer–to read this? McCracken is a fine writer who has things to say, when she gets around to the task. I enjoyed her wry observation of the lengths Western society goes to avoid the number 13, the contrasting uses of the word mudlark (noun and verb), and ironic sentences like this: “What doesn’t kill you won’t make you stronger, but at least you’ll recognize its face on a WANTED poster.”

 

McCracken eventually gets to the task of telling us about her mother and father, and they are characters in several senses of the word. What she doesn’t do is tell us another truth: almost no one’s actual family is as fascinating to other people as the real-life narrator thinks they are. It’s the job of a fiction writer to invent things to make them interesting. McCracken’s attempts at self-parody humor are often quite amusing, but I simply got tired of the whining. Some have hailed this as a feminist work. I hope it’s not, or other side has won. Had it been a longer book, I would have quit midstream. 

 

 

Per Petterson is a highly regarded Norwegian author, so maybe Men in My Situation (2022 in English, Graywolf, 304 pages) loses something in translation. From where I sit, Petterson made trauma boring. It follows the inactivity of author Arvid Jansen from ages 38-43, a time in which his parents die in a ferry fire, he gets divorced, picks up women he doesn’t care about in bars, smokes Blue Master non-filter cigarettes, drinks too much, and does his best to hate everything his ex-wife liked, including Morrissey and “colorful people.” (Get it? His world is gray.) He goes from one dumb thing to another, which means he, in turn, loses a lot of access to his daughters. His friend Auden is his only significant human contact and he’s not doing much to keep up that relationship.

 

The novel is told in the first person, which is a problem, as Arvid doesn’t really have a point of view on much of anything. Petterson compounds the problem with weird punctuation or lack thereof. (What does he have against quotation and question marks? Why does he love run-on sentences?) I suppose one could call this an honest look at grief, but one could just as easily call it an unexamined life. That is certainly the consensus of detractors on Goodreads, where readers have used phrases such as “pity party,” “selfish,” “cold” and “self-indulgent.”

 

My take is that it’s the kind of book that literary critics want to love so they exaggerate its virtues. Like Arvid who likes to take meandering drives, Men in My Situation has no plot. There is a lot of description of externalities, but they are in no apparent service of anything. Like the insomniac Arvid, who tries to sleep in his car, the novel tosses and turns but does not refresh. Try it if you’re curious, but whatever do, do not believe any hype comparing Petterson to Sweden’s Fredrik Backman. There’s more humanity in one of Backman’s subordinate clauses than in the entirety of Men in My Situation.

 

Rob Weir