Which Version of the ‘Odyssey’ Should You Read?

Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Scaachi Khol on Dave Portnoy’s Cancel Me If You Can, James Lasdun on Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on George Saunders’s Vigil, Dan Piepenbring on David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light, and Sam Lipsyte on Roshan Sethi’s The Simp.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“Publishing a book is a natural next step for a figure as basely detestable as Portnoy, so this week marks the release of his first book, Cancel Me if You Can, written with maximum disdain for its reader. ‘Barstool Sports was supposed to encompass anything that guys would discuss sitting around at a bar watching sports,’ he writes in the first few pages of the memoir. It’s the last cogent thought he has; the rest of the book is decidedly about settling scores, reminding everyone how great he is, and defending himself against accusations that he’s sexist while he says a bunch of sexist things in print. It is a book for an idiot or, rather, someone who thinks they aren’t an idiot because they’ve built a $600 million business. But there are plenty of stupid rich men in the world. Why would Portnoy be immune?

I’m not even sure if this book is intended to be read. Maybe it’s destined to be published and sit on a shelf, never to be cracked open. Portnoy admits he got a seven-figure sum to write it, this might encourage anyone to type out a few thousand words. But what’s left, then, is 300 pages of ‘I’m not owned, I’m not owned,’ a mortifyingly Trumpian ode to Portnoy’s own stupidity. He admits to how dumb he and his business are too, saying that when Barstool’s inanity was on full display, it ‘somehow ends up benefiting us.’ Surely, this book will benefit Portnoy and his business; it’s nothing more than hagiography for a dumbass.

…

“If you don’t know much about Portnoy, then this book does nothing more than introduce these scandals and his petulant responses to them. It’s the Streisand effect on full display. Did you forget that Portnoy once said the N-word on camera while rapping to a Ja Rule song? OK, well, good news, he spends several pages justifying it, poorly.

…

“Memoir, for these kinds of famous people, is all about effective hagiography. It’s a rare chance for a celebrity to be able to tell a story without interruption, and without interference from an audience or a journalist. Why else would all the Real Housewives be writing (or ‘writing’) their own memoirs? Portnoy did this for the money, sure, but also because he wanted to get his version of the story down. Everyone who likes him is a great person, an unsung hero; everyone who hates him is a bitch and a loser and a crying woke weirdo. It must be tiring to be this right and this misunderstood and this rich, all at the same time. If only he had a media company where he could publish his every thought, where he could settle every score. I guess he’ll just have to settle for publishing a book for morons.”

, Scaachi Khol on Dave Portnoy’s Cancel Me If You Can (Slate)

“Between the book, the play, the films, the prequel, the sequels and the cameo vehicles, not to mention the upcoming musical, Trainspotting has evolved from mere literary sensation into a one-man global franchise for its prodigiously gifted author, Irvine Welsh. Men in Love, the third sequel to date (though chronologically the first), maintains the brand’s mostly high standards, though delicate readers may find it a little too sulfurous for their liking, and even enthusiasts will probably wonder if, at over 500 pages, it isn’t a touch too long.

…

“If this sounds like an updated Victorian melodrama, that’s because (as Amanda’s surname indicates) it is at some level a travesty of Benjamin Disraeli’s classic novel of arrivistes and toffs, Coningsby. The difference here is the reductive perspective Welsh applies to all sides. His caricaturing can be very funny, shrewdly nailing the precise cultural, material and libidinal interests operating at any given moment, but it’s hard to care very much about which of his equally unlovable parties is going to end up in command of Cantley Lodge.

What keeps the book interesting (and saves it from turning into generic British class comedy) is mainly the appearance of the other two members of the old crew, Francis Begbie and Daniel Murphy, or Spud. Begbie and Spud are surely two of the greatest comic creations of any writer in recent memory. In fact, they don’t seem ‘written’ so much as summoned, surging into the narrative like a pair of archetypes from some fantastical Nordic cosmology.

…

“Trainspotting articulated the energies of an entire culture seething under the Thatcherite ice of 1980s Britain. Men in Love doesn’t aim so high, and its centering of Sick Boy, with his ‘essentially transactional’ worldview unaltered even by love, both narrows and skews its vision. Imagine Lear rewritten from the point of view of the bastard Edmund, whose own ruthless transactionality set the terms for this particular type. It makes for a cynically entertaining ride, but it leaves you feeling a bit battered.”

, James Lasdun on Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love (The New York Times Book Review)

“Saunders has never gone in for unleavened rage. His books are full of the degradations wrought by capitalism, on people’s lives, their surroundings, even their words and thoughts, but just as full of humane complications and sudden outbreaks of redemption. Vigil is, characteristically, a fantasy not of justice or retribution but of the mere possibility of second thoughts.

…

“‘Even a great and beloved writer,’ Saunders wrote in his newsletter, Story Club, earlier this year, ‘is going to show some range in the quality of his or her works.’ Saunders, as he often does in Story Club, was talking about ‘my beloved Chekhov,’ asking what might be learned by looking at a story ‘at the lower end’ of his range, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, concerned, as it happens, with ‘the futility of local action in the face of the larger, systemic, forces.’ It has to be said that Vigil, likewise, is at the lower end of Saunders’s range. It is brisk and charming, with that elegant, seemingly artless Saundersian way of stirring together wild metaphysical invention and slapstick mundanity, profanity and pathos and sudden stabs of horror. But much of it feels oddly out of focus. Jill’s devotion to her calling wavers now and then, her baroquely tragic death eventually emerges, yet she remains the same chipper, somewhat bland narrator we are introduced to on the first page.

…

“What Boone is justifying is as monstrous as anything in those stories, but this time it feels like Saunders is holding back. It’s not that the subject doesn’t lend itself to that kind of study in amoral justification, quite the contrary. Merchants of Doubt (2010), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s now classic study of industry efforts to distort public perceptions of the health risks of cigarettes and the effects of various forms of pollution, especially climate change, offers a dismaying portrait of the scientists involved. We are shown the origins of their arrogance, their feelings of resentment when the field rejects one or another of their claims or when their political goals are frustrated, and how those feelings harden over time into a mercenary antisociality; we are shown the mechanisms of their interference and obfuscation, committees derailed or manipulated, studies mischaracterized or ignored, scientific credentials and sweeping claims used to bamboozle mainstream journalists. Their mendacity is a process, a sustained descent into a very human evil. Nothing like that ever quite emerges in Boone’s bedroom.

…

“And yet the grief at the center of this book is immense, planet-size: ‘This lovely old place, ruined forever, maybe.’ Lincoln hinges on the denial of one’s own personal dying, and the solution is acceptance, difficult, but definite. Vigil takes up the denial of the dying of the world itself, and the solution is, what? How can we find it, until the liars repent?

…

“Vigil, in effect, turns against its own conception: repentance comes too late to matter, to Boone or to anyone else. All it brings is torment to one man, ‘possibly forever.’ Blame changes nothing, can change nothing, at this late date, but nothing is offered in its place. It is part of the book’s unsatisfying, unsettling effect that it goes to such lengths to stage these questions and then negates every answer it offers. Its rage and despair never quite win out over its genial humanity, and never quite lose. The most moving predicament it presents is not Jill’s or Boone’s but the author’s: a writer writing against his own nature, as hard as he can, in the face of the catastrophe.”

, Gabriel Winslow-Yost on George Saunders’ Vigil (The New York Review of Books)

“What if none of it matters? This, along with lunch, is the gnawing concern at the back of the critic’s mind. It eats at David Thomson as much as anyone. At eighty-five, he’s been moviegoing since before my mother was born. Anyone who’s sat that long in the dark, through Ben-Hur, Jaws 3-D, and The Legend of Bagger Vance, has sown and harvested many seasons of doubt. One of his refrains is that he doesn’t know ‘whether movies have been good for us.’ And yet he’s commended hundreds of them. More than that, he’s told the story of the medium compulsively, bardically, in upwards of twenty books that are by turns cantankerous, trenchant, eccentric, elegant, and elliptical.

…

“This rings like the final line of that James Wright poem: ‘I have wasted my life.’ But Wright was relaxing in a hammock when those words came to him; Thomson, in the stiff upholstery of the multiplex, is worse off. All our years of watching have corrupted the body politic, he fears. Movie has made us irresponsible fabulists, capable of watching but never seeing ourselves, as we follow pretty faces and cardboard mobsters into turpitude. The medium’s bequest is ‘a drab sense of powerlessness, of fact and principle being subverted,’ he writes, ‘that leaves few other recourses except violence.’

A book-length renunciation of his career would be quite the ave, but Thomson can’t commit to that. He pleads his case like a brilliant drunk representing himself at night court, you struggle to follow his zigs and zags, but on balance you feel that he deserves to walk without bail.

…

“You don’t read Thomson for sympathy, or necessarily for consecutive thoughts. Let him brood. I feel almost cheap pointing out that he’s still plenty fond of cinema, and that the revisionism promised in his subtitle is often MIA. Certainly it’s not revisionist to say that ‘The Godfather is a majestic achievement,’ or that Orson Welles is ‘the greatest artist in American film.’ And ruing the introduction of television? That’s practically a job requirement for a critic of his generation. Still, cherish the perfection of his hatred.

…

“You have to realize that this is a man who probably mutters ‘Sight and Sound poll’ in his sleep. He’s growing old with the medium, ’Yesterday for an hour I couldn’t recall Reese Witherspoon’s name!’, coaxing himself out of bad habits, away from the knee-jerk rankings and male gazing, toward some reckoning with Tinseltown in the rain. For good reason, he’s been writing progressively more pessimistic versions of the same book; it’s a long walk out of the movie palace. In his next history (and I do hope there’s another), he may finally set fire to the place.”

, Dan Piepenbring on David Thompson’s A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies (Harper’s)

“Beneath the novel’s deadpan, stinging depictions of this rarefied Tinseltown milieu, The Simp also explores the painful but, in Sethi’s hands, bleakly comic ways race and colonial history collide with the dream of fame. The story is set in 2021, after the Black Lives Matter movement has shaken but not upended Hollywood. ‘You guys have all the power now,’ Jim tells Raj, and though he claims he’s joking, we know folks like him are feeling rather fragile.

We also know, with hindsight, that despite some equity inroads, most of the faces at the studios and galas will remain pale. But what haunts the novel in an intriguing fashion is the question of how much of Raj’s showbiz flailing can be chalked up to his skin color, and how much to the fact that his chops and charisma are insufficient in a Hollywood system where nearly nobody makes it anyway.

The Simp is refracted, at times, through a potpourri of cultural sources, from Thackeray to Pilgrim’s Progress, King Lear, Slumdog Millionaire, the Zac Efron vehicle Gold, the life of the Buddha. But by the close, we are back with Raj, who may or may not achieve thespian success, but who has found a tiny arena where his talents might shine for a lucky few.

Still, what this exceedingly smart and funny novel finally suggests is that until the world isn’t run by rich, entitled monsters, most of us are going to pass at least a portion of our time on Earth in some degree of simpitude. Or as Howard, the couple’s Black cook, who seems to take a more philosophical approach to the situation, explains: ‘It’s a job.’”

, Sam Lipsyte on Roshan Sethi’s The Simp (The New York Times Book Review)