Pushing back against the hype

I have always had a deep mistrust of anything that is hyped, be it a book, a movie, a song or a lifestyle trend. It doesn’t matter what; whenever ‘experts’ use their pulpits to push ad nauseam this or that wonderful book/film/song/lifestyle trend, my hackles go up. I don’t mind reading what professional reviewers of books, movies, and music have to say, but frankly, as I’ve gotten older, I no longer really trust what they have to say. They have a lot invested in keeping the status quo going, and that means promoting the same modern authors, movie directors, and musicians over and over.

Take books alone. Whenever I read about the new ‘hot’ book being pushed by professional reviewers for the mainstream media (often in top-notch publications), I find it on Amazon and read the ‘verified purchase’ reviews submitted by ordinary readers, not those of the publishing houses, media houses, established reviewers or journalists invested in keeping the status quo going. I read the 5-star reviews and the 1- and 2-star reviews. Many people dismiss the latter as the rantings of disgruntled or envious individuals, and while that may be the case sometimes, in my experience it is not the case most of the time. In the same way that not all the 5-star reviews are believable; you get the feeling that this is too good to be true. The 1- and 2-star reviewers are surprisingly honest when they write ‘I couldn’t get into this novel no matter how hard I tried’, or ‘I got to the halfway point and couldn’t get any further’, or ‘I’ve read other books by this writer that are very good, but this one missed the mark’. And so on. I read those reviews because that’s often how I feel when I am reading a book that was pushed on me by the media or by literary pundits. I think to myself, I am going to write a review of this book that I don’t like, even if most readers did like it. And sometimes I do. I mostly post them on Goodreads, but sometimes on Amazon as well. Nowadays it’s difficult to push back against the hype, but sometimes you have to, and I say that as a writer that has gotten reviews that both like and don’t like what I’ve written. As long as the less-than-stellar reviews are not rude or unprofessional, I accept them as being part and parcel of being a writer. You can’t win them all, but of course you hope for stellar reviews. But accepting the negative ones about my own work means that I am also free to write about what I dislike when it concerns others' work. I am free to be negative about a book/movie/song as long as I remain polite and professional about it.

I can’t tell you how many Kindle books I’ve downloaded to my iPad to read over the past decade or so. I persist with some books that I simply cannot abide, merely to finish them so that I can have an opinion if the book comes up in conversation with someone. But I have given up on two or three books in my lifetime; I found them either so boring as to put me to sleep or so chaotic and unintelligible that I simply didn’t want to waste my time trying to sort out the plot or the lack of one. I lost interest, plain and simple.

I am currently reading Joan Didion’s works, and have gotten through Play It As It Lays (fiction) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (essays). I’m halfway through another collection of essays The White Album. I have not prioritized reading her books earlier. Joan Didion is considered to be one of America’s great writers, an icon as it were. She spent years as a journalist documenting an era in American life (the 1960s and 1970s) where everything seemed topsy-turvy, where conservative values were tossed out the window, albeit by a minority of the population, in favor of free love and a hippie lifestyle. She writes about the hippie lifestyle in California at that time, as well as the privileged life in Hollywood where anyone who was ‘anyone’ hobnobbed with actors, actresses, celebrities, movie directors, agents, and wanna-bes. Her writing is permeated by a sense of anxiety about the meaninglessness of life. She and her husband wrote screenplays for major movies and were quite successful at it. It all sounds glamorous but it isn’t and wasn’t; she makes sure that you know that. She managed to remain outside of all of the nonsense and hype for the most part, documenting it as the keen observer she was during those years. She’s a very good writer, I'll grant that, but what she writes about holds very little appeal for me. I’ve never really wondered about or been interested in most of the lives or topics she documents and I’m not sure what that says about me. I grew up in the era she writes about, but in New York and not California. I remember a lot of unrest and political turmoil from that time, but her presentation of California creates a feeling of hopelessness. It seems to be a wasteland of sorts. I did not like Play It As It Lays because of those feelings of hopelessness and nihilism. What was the real point of the book? It portrays a wasted life in a wasteland filled with wasted people who are wasting their lives, living in a bubble where they think they are so important. We all know they are not. Perhaps that is her point, to show that these people are lost. If so, she succeeds, but I don’t find anything really uplifting in her writing. It could be due to her desire to remain detached, I’m not sure. Her writing comes across as rather flat emotionally, indicative of a depressive state of mind. Adam Kirsch wrote in The New York Sun in 2006 that “She always seems to be writing on the brink of a catastrophe so awful that her only available response is to withdraw into a kind of autism.” That is a very good description of her writing, in my opinion. For all the chronicling of her life and the lives of others, she remains an enigma and that is rather strange considering that she often writes about herself and her life. Perhaps that is not enough to discover who you really are. As a writer, you can hide behind your descriptions of yourself, especially if you don't want to be known. Perhaps the best explanation for why she is who she is can be found in her essay On the Morning After the Sixties in the collection of essays The White Album. She writes 

"We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure. I am telling you only how it was. The mood of Berkeley in those years was one of mild but chronic “depression...Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after."

The problem for me is that it's hard to tell if this mood describes many people at Berkeley during that era in American life or just a few. When you are depressed you have a tendency to 'see' that in the world around you. She is honest in saying that perhaps she doesn’t really know what she thinks or feels about a particular situation. Perhaps she says it best when she describes herself as a writer but not an intellectual, not a thinker. When I googled the definition of an intellectual, I found that she is literally correct. The formal definition of an intellectual is ‘a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and thus gains authority as a public intellectual’ (Wikipedia). Didion observes and writes about what she sees in society in a coolly detached way, but she does not reflect very much upon her observations, which is what an intellectual might have done. She is an observer and a reporter. I miss the reflections and critical thinking. But that’s me. She is an example of a writer that has been praised to the hilt but one that I cannot really relate to no matter how hard I’ve tried, and I've read two essay collections and one novel by her. I find myself just wanting to be finished with the essays in The White Album. I know that their essences will not stay with me because they have had very little impact on me. 

Other authors who have been hyped in recent years and whose books I really did not like/did nothing for me are Sally Rooney (Normal People), Camille Pagán (I’m Fine and Neither Are You), Andre Aciman (Call Me by Your Name), Dana Spiotta (Innocents and Others), Anna Burns (Milkman), Michael Crichton (Prey), Teresa Driscoll (I Am Watching You), Camilla Läckberg (Gullburet—The Golden Cage), Charles Lambert (The Children’s Home), Matt Marinovich (The Winter Girl), Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me), Stephenie Meyer (Twilight #1), Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman), and Scott Sigler (Infected #1), among others. These are modern novelists, but I am not a huge fan either of some of the ‘classic’ writers who were pushed on us as teenagers and young adults. I think of J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), Herman Melville (Moby Dick), Philip Roth (any of his books), and others. We had to reflect on the symbolism in some of these books and write about it for class; these books did nothing for me and I found analyses of them tedious.

You can agree with me or not; it’s fine. That’s what makes the world an interesting place—the heterogeneity of individual opinions. You can say that I have eclectic taste, and you might be right. You can say that I’m opinionated at times, and that would be true. But I’m not going to follow the crowds running headlong to overpraise overhyped writers. A number of the modern writers I’ve listed in the previous paragraph are mediocre in my opinion. But they enjoy a huge following and they sell a lot of books. There’s no accounting for taste. But I do know what I like and don’t like. Writing about what I don’t like helps me push back against the hype. It’s becoming more necessary for each day that passes.