Whomp Whomp
Two Brave Ladies: Emily Wilson and Lionel Shriver
I got “ontracked1” by writing a short story so my post about Mycenaean genetics will have to wait.
Wow, just wow.
Emily Wilson has given Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a pan.
It’s not polite. It’s a direct hit. Read the whole thing — but I can’t resist some quotations.
Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring2, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely.3
Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible4.
But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat…
But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.
Since the piece is not paywalled, you have no excuse not to read the whole thing.
Onto Lionel Shriver, whose A Better Life is a very brave and very bad novel. (Click the link for a description of the book’s plot, no need to waste words here.)
Also: spoilers ahead.
No one was a better potential audience for Shriver’s book than me. I am all in on protecting the border and on wokeness, her two joint targets in this book.
If anyone should love A Better Life, it would be me, but I didn’t.
I’m not saying Shriver has to “tell both sides,” “be fair,” and pull her punches. Punch away Lionel. The best parts are the one-line zingers distributed liberally throughout. But a novel is more than one line zingers.
Honestly, the book should have been called, “We Need To Talk About Nico,” because the most fully realized character is the slacker incel son, Nico Bonaventura. But even he falls flat. He’s represented as a shlub from the start, so his fall after graduation (from an engineering program? — engineering programs are ball busters and Nico doesn’t have balls to begin with….) isn’t a surprise.
The mother, Gloria, is an AWFL who personifies Gad Saad’s suicidal empathy.
But here’s the thing: Gad Saad lifted his idea from a superior previous theorist, James Burnham, who told us in Suicide of the West and other books that affluent managerials aren’t truly empathic, they are performatively so, and only enact empty gestures because it helps their brand. True, the combined effect of their behavior is to create conditions for societal collapse but on an individual level they’re all phony. Yet Gloria really does sacrifice. She digs $30 thousand from her IRA to help a migrant moocher who has given her some jive about her kids being kidnapped. (At this point of the book the true nature of the migrant is obvious.) And at the end she dies for her sins. I don’t think that Shriver meant her to be a tragic heroine - she was just a chump.
Characters so thin you could see through them, worse than cardboard - cheap flimsy plastic, and plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through. No one, not even the sensible absent father, thinks about calling ICE, even to dismiss the idea. Brooklyn-born and raised Nico is such a worm he lets a “thug” (his word) brush past him into the house. Carlin, the sensible father, comes up with a crackbrained idea to swarm the house with an armed posse, something a guy like him would never do. Use of Brit-speak totally inappropriate to Brooklyn. Even the basic copyediting was trash: within two paragraphs a character is taking the B train and in the next, the 1 train - without a transfer? No this is not a nitpick, it’s a basic “get it right” that any professionally edited book should nail down. An out of date satire on a minimalistic restaurant that is misplaced in the Upper West Side…I could go on, but you get the point.
None of it adds up. It’s a rant disguised as a novel.
For tackling a subject bravely, I take my hat off.
For botching it as even competent art, I put it back on.
Yet the book does have something important in it, apart from the entire subject matter, the notion of Xenia, which Christopher Nolan distorted recently.
To be continued….
The opposite of sidetracked. This Sub is a huge sidetrack.
Ouch and it’s great to find another person who hates Nolan for the most basic reason: his movies are boring.
Double ouch. He didn’t mess it up entirely — because no one could.
Mixing petty with substantive is devastating.