The Marriage Plot: Wrapping it up (1)

Having finally finished it (I stopped enjoying the book around halfway through had to more or less force myself to read the final three chapters), I think there are two really important things going on in this book. I'll deal with one today and the other tomorrow (UPDATE: Make that Monday). The first important thing is the portrait it gives us of a certain character traits you find in a lot modern men.  Defining this character is something I want to hold off on so I will start with an anecdote.

About a decade ago now, the Lemon Girl (aka the Serpentine One) and I were watching a movie. I didn't notice any problems but the Lemon Girl was clearly getting more and more impatient with him during a scene in which the male and female leads were interacting and she said, "Come on, just f__ her already!"

That''s a crude way of making the point but some points need to be made crudely and this is one of them. Some men these days just won't come clean about what they want. We might put it a little bit more "correctly" by saying, "Come one, just let her know you want to f___ her already." We pretend to be interested in other things instead of honestly letting ourselves want a woman. We may think we are being sensitive to her needs or we may think we are being independent and strong but, either way, what we are really doing is chickening out on life. There are, as I've just hinted,  two equally frustrating ways this trait manifests itself and both are represented in this book.

There is the nice guy; the man whose answer to "What do you want to do?' is always, "What do you want to do?" This guy never pushes, never leads, never even asks a woman on a date never mind trying to seduce her. We might excuse him on the grounds that he is worried about being accused of date rape or sexual harassment except that he shows himself to be a hopeless pussy about at just about everything in life.

The guy who represents this type in the book is Mitchell. He travels all the way to India to volunteer at Mother Theresa's hospice but he turns into a mass of quivering jelly at the thought of performing simple nursing duties such as changing dressings, bathing patients and helping them with bed pans. He actually runs away from the hospital when faced with this!

The second type is the pseudo bad boy who is actually just a needy loser. He pulls women in by being ambiguous and distant. Music is really important in his life because he uses it like a drug to trigger the emotional responses he is incapable of having on his own. Rather than tell a woman how he feels, he'll put some music on (always some moody, alternative stuff and never a happy song or something you could dance to) and turn up the volume so he doesn't have to talk.  His answer to just about any attempt the woman in his life makes to find out what he wants is to sulk and walk away. Again, he won't actively pursue a woman but instead sends mixed messages alternating between having sex with her when he wants it and sulking alone in the corner and refusing to make eye contact any time she needs other kinds of love from him. He sells himself as some sort of sexual gunslinger but he is actually incapable of taking care of himself never mind any woman who enters into his life so she ends up alternatively servicing and mothering him.

The guy who represents that type in the book is Leonard. His portrait is complicated by the fact that he is bipolar but he is a guy who has succeeded at school largely because he has never needed to try. He takes this attitude to everything in life only showing any enthusiasm for the things he knows he can succeed at and crumpling like Sonny Liston in the face of anything that will involve any struggle on his part.

You probably recognize those traits. If you are a man, you've probably fallen into one or both of those patterns. If you are a woman, you've had to put up with them from men. I know I have done these things. I did the Leonard thing a few times when I was in my twenties and nowadays I sometimes catch myself doing the Mitchell thing. But if you are a man at all worthy of being called a man, you will recognize those traits as weak and despicable and will associate them with your lowest moments. And if you are a woman you may associate those traits with moments when you put up with a lot of crap you shouldn't have from some creep because you didn't have the confidence to tell him to go away.

The problem with the book is that I don't think Eugenides sees that these two guys are really weak and despicable. He seems to think they are pretty normal guys whose life struggles are worth following and not as a way to identify traits you should hate in yourself.

The credentialed class
That is perhaps not surprising Eugenides is a member of the credentialed class of university-educated upper-middle class whites who have thrived under a system that is called "meritocracy" but is really just a rigged game like all the other class systems in history. This class is driven by a combination of entitlement and and an impostor syndrome that they have in response to their entitlement.

We see the entitlement, for example, in an offhand thought Mitchell has towards the end of the book.

He would come back to New York, and find a job, and see what happened.

He is imagining how things might work between him and Madeleine. She is now sort of free and they might pursue a relationship. And he thinks, "Yeah, I'll move to New York and get a job. That way I can be near her and we cans see what might transpire." What is so odd about that thought? To Mitchell, nothing is odd about it and that is why it is so significant because he thinks it in the middle of a recession. Unemployment was ten percent in the years this novel is set in and it was much higher for recent university graduates. And Mitchell just takes it for granted that he can just move to one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country and not worry because he'll be able to find a job.

And he isn't wrong. He is the member of such a class. I'm part of it myself, albeit much further down the ladder than Mitchell or Eugenides—if they are nobility, I'm part of the lesser gentry. But the types of despicable traits I am describing here are very much typical of university-educated white boys from the 1980s.

Similarly, while Leonard occasionally expresses concerns about his ability to make ends meet, he never acts like it's a real concern for him. When his life falls apart, he just goes back to Oregon and goes to live in a cabin in the woods with his buddy from high school. How exactly they are going to pay for groceries is never dealt with because people in the credentialed class never have to worry about this. They spend their entire life performing over a safety net. The big question in life for them is not, "Will I succeed?" but "Will I succeed well enough that I can be happy given my inflated sense of entitlement?"

The net effect of Eugenides writing about these characters without recognizing their flaws for what they are is to make them come off like dilettantes who are afraid of really living life and don't have to do anything about it because they are members of an elite credentialed class for whom everything will always turn out alright.

Religion
One of the ways these very male behaviour patterns show themselves in the book comes out regarding religion. And religion is absolutely central to this book. However, only male characters—if you accept Mother Theresa, who makes a cameo appearance—have any sort of real religious dimension.

Now we might wonder about this because if there is one thing that characterizes current religious life, it is that women are more likely to be religious than men. But the religion in the book is a weird religion. The central thing to this religion is a kind of experience and not a doctrine, belief system and, most emphatically, not a belief that we should live worthy lives as consequence of our religion. And this experience is very much an eastern thing: the two characters who pursue it value the experience because they believe it's going to bring about a loss of ego.

Madeleine, the lead female character has no religious dimension at all besides the fact that Mitchell craves her body because he accidentally saw her "Episcopalian breast". This is a troubling moment given that Mitchell is sexually attracted to Madeleine because she is a type he has a fetish for. Try imagining how this would read if he had wanted Madeleine because she was oriental or black and you might be able to see the problem more clearly.

To get back to my point, the weird sexist undercurrent running through the entire book is that the sought after religious experience is a male thing. Men are shown in a quest a quest for a certain kind of experience and that quest involves pilgrimage, suffering and loss.

The only woman to talk about religious experience at any length is a woman at a Quaker meeting in the last section of the book who babbles on foolishly about how her mother gave her butterscotch candies to keep her interested in going to meeting. Worse, this silly girly story harmonizes with, and is clearly meant to harmonize with, a thematic development wherein Madeleine deals with the loss and suffering she goes through because of the failure of her marriage by reverting to a girlhood. And not just girlhood, but a rather silly girlhood:

The only times Madeleine brightened were when an old girlfriend of hers came by the house. With her friends—and the earlier made and dippier they were, the better: she was fond of certain ex-Lawrenceville girls with names like Weezie—Madeleine seemed to be able to will herself back to girlhood. She went shopping with these friends. She spent hours trying things on. At the house, they lay by the pool, tanning and reading magazines, while Mitchell drew away to the shade of the porch, watching them from afar with desire and revulsion, exactly as he had done in high school.

The message seems to be that men deal with the dark, difficult challenges of adulthood by seeking religious experiences and women deal with the dark, difficult challenges of adulthood by reverting to adolescence.

At the same time, however, these men never stop being these hopeless jerks who just need someone go shake them out of their self-involved and self-indulgent uselessness. For all their interest in religion, the thing that Mitchell and Leonard seek never manifests itself in any thing outside themselves such as a change in behaviour.

A little light culture: The sexbots are coming! The sexbots are coming!

Well, no they aren't because they are sexbots. Okay, but suppose there was a sexbot that could simulate the reactions of a woman or man reaching orgasm so well that you couldn't tell the difference? Now there is a subject to get the wheels spinning.

Actually, I can't think of anything more boring than discussing sexbots but others apparently differ. It started with Heartiste who inspired Dr. Helen to respond and since she is married to Instapundit he naturally mentioned that his wife was blogging about sexbots and that inspired Ann Althouse to start musing.

I have no idea why but there is a deep human need to worry about virtual reality. Think of Plato who obsessed about the notion that shadows cast by light on the back wall of a cave could be so convincing that people would live their lives like zombies unaware that everything they experienced was false. No such thing was possible in his day and no such thing is possible in ours. But he worried about it and approximately every ten seconds another human being works themselves into a tizzy about this non-problem.

Here is is the key thing to keep reminding yourself of: there is no virtual reality! You are at as much risk of being fooled or replaced by virtual reality as you are of being attacked by Martians. Neither thing exists. Virtual reality has never been possible. Yes, maybe someday, some brilliant innovator in technology will pull it off. (And maybe someday space aliens will invade our planet.) But as of now it's all in your imagination.

We can be momentarily tricked. Go to an IMAX film shot from a plane and you will find yourself leaning to compensate when the plane banks. But that's an illusion and illusions aren't virtual reality. You have all sorts of ways of correcting for illusions. But try to imagine a technology that would simulate a swimming pool so well that you would believe you actually were in the water. That's the quality of illusion it would take to make a sexbot that was more than just a complex sex toy.

A sexbot, when such things become widely available, will be just a masturbatory aid. It will never be even vaguely like having sex with another human being (although I do have to admit that I had a couple of partners back in university who were so bad at sex that they might have been accused of trying to simulate a sexbot).

Of the four links I give above, Heartiste and Althouse are the most interesting. I think Althouse believes that Heartiste is just posturing. That's a reasonable conclusion as Heartiste does a lot of posturing. He knows he isn't really an alpha male but he plays one on the internet. Reading him, I think of those pathetic guys who are really into superhero comics and movies. He lives in a world in which caped Alpha men conquer evil, cock-blocking pussies everywhere! The world he imagines is full of harsh moral tests that clearly distinguish the winners and losers; a world that is just like a comic book world only the battle is sexual and not crimefighting.

In response, Althouse simply reverses the posturing and I suspect her tongue is in her cheek as she does so. The bizarre fantasies of the powerless are always vulnerable to being simply reversed and thus reduced to the point of absurdity.

But all that said, I think Heartiste has one realy solid point on his side and it's this:

Are lazy, apathetic, demotivated men unhappy? Surveys show women are the ones getting unhappier the deeper we get into the feminist and sexual revolutions. 

And that is where Ann Althouse's  joke stops being funny. I live right beside a university campus and the young men I see are a little more pathetic with every passing year. But they aren't unhappy! They could be happier but  they aren't unhappy. The problem, as Heartiste cheerfully points out, is on the other side. All the great feminist victories—birth control, abortion, no-fault divorce, Title IX—have made women unhappy.

Will sexbots catch on? My guess is that they will turn out to be like videophones; that is, a new technology some people anticipated with high hopes that turned out to be really underwhelming when it finally became available. But the key thing about sexbots is this: if you have one, you're a loser. Try this thought experiment if you don't believe me, you meet someone you really admire and start dating, do you think it will enhance your image in their eyes to learn you have a sexbot at home?

Human beings being human beings, we have all sorts of distractions to keep losers from having to face that they are losers: "Hey, you didn't fail at marriage, you're an independent single mother whose really making it on her own." And whether that works for you or not will depend a whole lot on how much your fantasies can compensate for the lack of an actual loving relationship with another human being. The difference between men and women, and the reason Heartiste has the edge over Althouse this one time, is that all the evidence suggests that men will be able to more easily accommodate themselves to being the loser with the sexbot than women will be able to do.  Men would prefer to be in love and they'd be happier if they were but, if that can't work out, they can get by being a fishless bicycle.

Women, not so much. No matter how great the orgasm the machine gives her, she will want love ultimately. Having one of the girls get obsessed with her vibrator makes for a great individual episode of Sex and the City but the longer plot arc always has to be about Pamela getting her Mr. B(ig) because that is what matters more to most women.

I wonder if women are collectively able to figure out what their problem is and if they are able to do what it takes to fix it? Over to you girls.

Neo noir Thursday: Chinatown

This movie seemed such a miracle when it came out. To sit in the dark and see the old Paramount clip and then that magnificent retro font they used for the titles and gorgeous music was to have a real sense of what it must have felt like to rediscover the Latin and Greek classics during the Renaissance.

So it's hard to admit nearly 40 years later that it drags and that the ending is just awful.

But prophetic it was. Just look at the opening scene for example. You see a garter belt and stockings, vintage fans, a glass block wall and wooden venetian blinds. Now, if you wanted any of those items in 1974, the year this movie came out, you'd have to go to a specialty source for them. Nowdays, you can buy all the above at any department store. The high style of American modernism—brash and optimistic, unlike the original European variety—is with us again. When this movie came out, it seemed gone forver.

And they really sweated the details making this movie. In the opening scene for example, Jake Gittes is consoling a working class client whom he has just confronted with evidence that his wife is cheating. Gittes turns around, opens a cabinet and, after studying his options, reaches to the back of the cabinet and pulls out a bottle of the cheap stuff (Old Crow) to offer his client.

(That touch, by the way, makes the movie very close to neo noir. We have a hero with what look like real weaknesses here—a hero who is more driven than a driving force in the story—but that doesn't hold.)

There are pictures of FDR everywhere and we see Gittes reading a racing sheet that features Seabiscuit so we know it's the late 1930s, probably 1938. This is perfect for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it is the very beginning of the noir era. At the same time, it is the very beginning of a period of great optimism. The depression is still around but the clouds are beginning to lift and America is about to enter the greatest period in its history. Over the next twenty five years, it will be the decisive force in the Second World War, become the world super-power, become the dominant world culture, and go through what is possibly the greatest stretch of innovation and economic growth in human history. While all this is going on, the long hard battle against civil rights abuses against black Americans will be fought and won.

All that is important because all that change will, despite the many gains, be hard to take for people living through it to adapt to. And it haunts the baby boomers because nothing achieved after 1965 will come close to what was done between the late thirties and early sixties.

And there is one of the two big problems with this movie. It was made by people who desperately needed to feel morally superior to the era they were portraying but had absolutely no reason to justify such a feeling. For starters, consider this, the disgusting villain of the movie is a creepy older guy who exploits innocent girls sexually. Got that? Now consider this: the movie was directed by Roman Polanski. Shudder! It's enough to make you want to shower yousrelf with disinfectant.

The other big problem is actually the thing that most people praise most about the movie: the Robert Towne screenplay. Towne has assembled a whole bunch of tasty ingredients but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. And although it starts great it really drags towards the end when Towne tries to shoehorn a series of sexual motives that just don't fit into the story.

The cool stuff
But let's look at the neat stuff.  Twenty-five minutes into the movie, Gittes goes to see a Mr. Hollis Mulwray and, as he is waiting at the door, he looks off to his right and sees this.

Now that scene does nothing to advance the plot. We already know Mulwray is rich. It's there as a tribute to another scene. This one:

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible.

The car in the shot above is a 1938 Packard Super 8 convertible. It's not Maroon but that is because yellow was the most common colour for Packards and while the people who own such cars will consider renting them to moviemakers. they won't let them repaint it. (Nowadays, of course, the thing could be done digitally.) The second scene I quote here is from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (published 1939).

That tribute amounts to more than it might seem. I suspect that Towne used it as a sort of grid for his screenplay. The Big Sleep is about a rich man with two wild girls who are a little out of control and ultimately turns on a dark sexual secret. And Chinatown is a variation on that plot. It's not the same thing exactly but, as I've written about before, you can take the same grid and build a series of plots on it.

Check out this interior:

Restoration Hardware can probably sell you a duplicate of everything in that room and you can find dresses just like that one on the rack today. In 1974, all that stuff was almost as hard to get as a 1938 Packard Convertible would be today.

The shot above shot was the cinematographer's way of saying, "Thank you Mr. Toland." I can't figure out if those comics are real or not.

A Woody! if you're a man and you don't want a Woody, then you aren't really a man.

Why it's noir but not neo noir
It's simply too much of a tribute to vintage noir. It's beautifully filmed but it's largely a recreation and not an adaption to our times.

And while it is more explicit sexually, it doesn't do anything interesting with the new freedoms it has. The makers have, for example, given the hero a sex life but that sex life explains nothing about him. He is too much like a Chandler hero who is impervious to the corrupting effects of sex around him. And the one bit of corrupting sex we get is the incest angle and that feels like it was pulled from some overwrought piece in a woman's magazine from the 1970s than anything that really might have happened.

It's also not manly enough to be neo-noir and is very close to being a chick flic.

But it opened the door. It was the first movie in a long time to be made by people who clearly revered the great noir films. It signaled the end of that much-praised but actually awful era when directors such as Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick spent more time "subverting" everything that made Hollywood great than doing anything worthwhile.

The Marriage Plot: Time to change gears

I don't think there is anything more to say about this book and its failures. It is time, I think, to switch to the larger culture and its problems. A good place to start, I think, is with an insightful review at The Guardian. James Lasdun notes many of the same issues I have here.

He argues that the premise that the marriage plot no longer applies because of no-fault divorce and pre-nups doesn't do the 18th and 19th century novels justice.

It's a likably quixotic challenge; but I think it's premised on a misconception about those earlier books. What makes them great, surely, isn't just that marriage back then was a much higher-stakes game than it is now, but that their heroines are explored at such astounding emotional and moral depth, and articulated with such wit and precision, that just about anything that happens to them becomes rivetingly consequential. They would be no less interesting to us, I suspect, if the options of divorce and prenups were available to them. By the same token, I don't think the removal of those options would make Madeleine and her suitors any more interesting than they are, which is to say: moderately.

And that's right. 

I'd go further and say that it's a problem with post-modern art in any genre, we'd have a lot more respect for modern artist and writers "choosing" to do something different than what was done in the past if we honestly believed they could do the genres they are rejecting. Lasdun thinks that Eugenides has idiosyncratic strengths. I'm more inclined to think that he has avoided being seriously evaluated by writing oddball little tales that prevented his being assessed against a larger pool just as an athlete might compete in unicycle races so as to avoid being compared to more serious athletes in better known events. As long as Eugenides was writing about fairly freakish stuff such as group suicides and hermaphrodites, he didn't have to withstand comparison with the big girls of fiction that Madeleine enjoys reading so much. Now that he has put himself out there, his shortcomings as a novelist are painfully evident.

And it's not just as compared to the great writers of the past. I just finished reading Emily Giffin's Love the One You're With and find myself hard-pressed to say why the terribly serious Pulitzer-winning, capital-A-Art guy is entitled to more respect than the Chick Lit bestseller. Yes, Giffin has her weaknesses but so does Eugenides and when it comes to moral depth she wins comfortably.

Beyond that, I think our culture doesn't get the issues that apply in marriage. It's not enough to be "in love". Any two morons can fall in love.  What makes the Austen heroines in particular so impressive is their grasp of a whole raft or moral issues that come with just meeting and getting to know another person never mind marrying them. If you could somehow insert Elinor Dashwood into 2102 complete with birth control and fully updated about modern sexual mores, she might have casual sex but she would still be a lot more premeditated and  circumspect about whom she formed an attachment that might lead to marriage. The problem is not, as some conservatives argue, that we have easy hook ups now but that we've lost the ability to do more serious hook ups.

Nowhere is that more clear to me than when when I read this from Lasdun:

What we actually see of Madeleine seems rather ruthlessly uncomplicated, in fact, and furthermore the book as a whole seems to vindicate her chilly instinct to avoid "unstable people".  

Taking the points in reverse order, don't marry someone unstable. That's like building your house above a crumbling cliff. By all means take a moral interest in unstable people and support them where you can but don't marry them. The weird thing about Madeleine is that she suddenly stops being chilly with Leonard. With him she bizarrely drifts into a relationship that is at odds with everything she is. That she would have a one-night hook up with this creepy little guy would be understandable and would make for an interesting story as she tried to extract herself afterwards. That she falls in love with him is emotional and economic suicide. If she'd listened to the inner voice telling her to avoid relationships with unstable people, she would have saved herself a lot of grief.

To go back to the first point, being "ruthlessly uncomplicated" is a very good way to go about negotiating your way to marriage. There are very few characters as ruthlessly uncomplicated in their pursuit of a marriage partner than Elinor Dashwood or Fanny Price. And both would have made polite conversation with and then  instinctively avoided Leonard and Mitchell.

Smooth song of the day, #7 for 2012

What the World Needs Now



Who was responsible for this stupid idea? Sorry but the song is great and the lyric is clever but the idea behind the lyric is just stupid. I'm guessing the idea popped up in liberal theology first and then made its way to the mainstream.

I'm not going to dwell on the philosophical issues for too long. Suffice to say, where do you get the content fleshing out what love is? If someone wrote a song saying that what the world needs now is more "goodness" everyone would catch the problem pretty quickly. To say that the world needs more love or that "All You Need is Love" is to say nothing at all.

But here is the cool thing about the song, it's in waltz time. That's why everyone in the video above is a little uncertain about how to move. It's also what gives the song its lovely swinging lilt. You get all these long-pulse, short-pulse moments but you never think of the time.

Try singing it. It's perfect in it's way. There are very few songs that feel quite so right in your mouth.

The joys of antencedents

The President is getting all sorts of abuse for saying this:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. [Emphasis added]

I'll be honest, I think Obama just doesn't get it and I hope he loses in November. That said, I don't think the quote above is quite as bad as it sounds.


I think there is an antecedent problem here. The two instances of "that" in the last two sentences refers not back to businesses but roads and bridges. The point is not that people didn't build their businesses but that businesses didn't build roads.


That's still a stupid and uninformed thing to say. Stop for two seconds and ask yourself how many roads your town could could build without businesses and you'll see just how clueless Obama is. But it isn't quite the moral outrage that it might appear to be.

What is operating in the background here, by the way, is Marxism. Marx constructed a theory that said that profit was created not by a wide variety of forces marshalled through capital but by the workers. On that theory all the wealth that capital creates in the west is really the product of the working class. Marx thought that, well he thought a lot of crazy things, but his central thought was that if the working class created the wealth, then they also held the power to change society. He thought the problem was that they didn't know this because of a set of false ideas he called ideology that made it impossible for them to see the real power relations in society. If this ideology could be swept away, then the working classes could seize power and create a workers' paradise.


All that was wrong when Marx first wrote it. To still believe it now is a a little crazy. But intellectuals just can't seem to let go of it. No, I don't think that Obama or Elizabeth Warren were consciously thinking Marxist theory when they spun this nonsense. The problem is that in the three decades since the total collapse of communism, intellectuals still can't get the opiate out of their bloodstream. It's the only idea they have and they can't come up with anything to replace it.

The Marriage Plot: My Generation cont'd

Mitchell had been reciting the Jesus Prayer for the past two weeks. He did this not only because it was the prayer that Franny Glass repeated to herself in Franny and Zooey (though this was certainly a recommendation). Mitchell approved of Franny's religious desperation, her withdrawal from life, and her disdain for "section men". He found her book-length nervous breakdown, during which she never once moved from the couch, not only thrillingly dramatic but cathartic in a way that Dostoevsky was supposed to be but wasn't, for him.

Are you getting a picture of Mitchell Grammaticus after reading that passage?

I ask because I'm not getting any picture at all. Mitchell, whose family name means teacher of literature and languages and whose first name means "Who is like God", never seems to have any existence outside his literary references.

I don't mean that he is an unbelievable character. I wish he were. Unfortunately, there are quite a few guys like Mitchell. They never experience life directly but always through some literary or musical reference. But, real though he may be, I don't know what we are supposed to make of such a guy.

You know, there was a significant Evangelical Protestant presence on most university campuses in the 1980s. If you wanted to write about a character who'd had a religious conversion at university, there are more likely routes to take than a guy who was inspired by Salinger and William James. Again, it's not that such a thing couldn't or didn't happen but, rather, why anyone should care about such a guy.

(By the way, it's an odd tick of "serious" writers these days that all religious belief amounts to a need for spiritual experiences.  All "religion" is content free. Later Leonard will meet and admire a woman with a strong evangelical streak but Eugenides will be sure to drain any specific dogma from her beliefs. These guys just don't get religion.)

Now, it says above that Mitchell's admiration for Franny and Zooey was not the only reason he took up the Jesus Prayer. So, the obvious question is, any others?

Still, even though Mitchell was undergoing a similar crisis of meaning, it hadn't been until he'd come across the Jesus Prayer in a book called The Orthodox Church that he'd decided to give it a try. The Jesus Prayer, it turned out, belonged to the religious tradition into which Mitchell had been obscurely baptized twenty-two years earlier. For this reason he felt entitled to say it.

"My what deep reasons you have for doing things," said all the girls visibly excited to have met such a man. (Again, we later find out that Leonard has met Mitchell before he met Madeleine and he is supposed to be a little intimidated at Mitchell's profound insight into religious issues. That just not credible given that we know about Mitchell.)

And it gets worse. Here is Mitchell analyzing the prayer, it turns out the only thing he really likes about the prayer is the repetitive, chant like quality,

... whenever Mitchell stopped to think about the words of the Jesus Prayer, he didn't much like them. "Lord Jesus" was a difficult opener. It had a Bible Belt ring. Likewise, asking for "mercy" felt lowly and serf-like. Having made it through "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," however, Mitchell was confronted with the final stumbling block of "a sinner." And this was hard indeed.

Well yes it is. But it kinda matters that you actually have some sympathy with the words you are praying. Otherwise, you may as well say "When it rains it pours" or "Alfred Lord Tennyson" or even "I want a blowjob" over and over again.

It's interesting, by the way, to note that Mitchell, like many non-believers gets here not by being morally lax but by magnifying the requirements of belief to the point that they are so rigorous that no one, save possibly a determined suicide, could meet them:

The gospels, which Mitchell didn't take literally, said you had to die to be born again. The mystics, which he took as literally as their metaphorical language allowed, said the self had to be subsumed in the Godhead. Mitchell liked the idea of being subsumed in the Godhead. But it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it.

Now, you may think, "that is just because Mitchell takes these things seriously and you, Jules, are a laxist. " But the problem is that, despite his insisting on a rigorist approach to some things, Mitchell does not, in fact, take anything very seriously. He is out looking for an experience largely for the sake of having experiences. He wants to go through this stuff without changing so he imagines that the only kind of change that will do is one so big it amounts to killing your "self" off so he won't have to do it.

(What is really happening here, of course, is that Eugenides is projecting Buddhism onto Christianity. Christianity as Christ taught it is based on self-interest—store up treasure in heaven—not self abnegation. When Christians talk about self-denial, we mean making yourself go with out things because you have a higher purpose and not the willful deletion of the self that drives Buddhism.)

We get confirmation of the shallowness of Mitchell by the way in an odd little segment in which Mitchell remembers an odd little nonconformist named "Moss" they met in school and how he and his friend Larry liked her.

Their silence registered solidarity with Moss against all the conventional people in their down vests and Adidas sneakers who were majoring in economics or engineering, spending the last period of total freedom in their lives doing nothing the least bit unordinary.

Think about that for a while. Here they are receiving a top drawer education at someone else's expense—and it's not just their parents, the taxpayers are also picking up a big part of the bill, along with alumni and various donors—so they can acquire an education and become adults capable of contributing to society, and Mitchell thinks about this period as "the last period of total freedom in their lives". (And the obvious question is, "Does Eugenides see this or is he as shallow as his creation?")

Yesterday, I suggested that Leonard and Madeleine were not very good representatives of my generation. Mitchell, on the other hand, is very much representative of a certain type you saw a lot of on campus back in the 1980s. (And, truth be told, of a type that I tended towards at times only snapping out of it when I graduated and was hit in the face with a stern dose of reality.)

But, the people in down vests and Adidas sneakers were also a representative type of my generation. In fact, there were many more of them. And you wouldn't learn much about them reading this book (or any other books favoured by literary elites). In fact, the whole of serious literature treats them with an odd contempt. (The only place you are going to see the story of the people who best represent my generation is in Chick Lit, which is one of the reasons I love reading it.)

By the way, I gave into temptation this morning and started Googling around to see what other people thought of the novel. Interestingly, I find that the three principals are a major stumbling block for a lot of people. Although many are willing to admit the book is well written, a lot of people can't like it because they just don't like Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. I have to agree. All three are the sort of characters that, as my mother used to say, "You just want to slap them after a while".