It was the TLS review that sold me this book. Long-awaited debut novel (15 years) since his book of short stories, the new big thing, as well as the fact it sounded alright.By page 26, I suspected they might be right, all those who had been awaiting the second coming. I ordered the short stories, Sam the Cat, and made a note to compare it with Donna Tartt,
We didn't discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn't believe in any of that.
Rich Fischer is a cartoonist/graphic novel writer who teaches at a summer school where he has an affair with Amy one summer and re-kindles it the next, the affair being contrasted with the dull compromise of his marriage to Robin. Amy is an erotic obsession, but if the relationship with Robin is struggling, he adores his two kids.
I run into some difficulties of interpretation wondering whether a cartoonist with aspirations to encoding his life into graphic novels can be a part of the 'cultural elite'. But that's what he says and in a token paragraph, the penultimate of the whole novel, he does add in some thoughts on the 'unreliable narrator'. So maybe that is irony in the proper sense of the word although it shouldn't need to be pointed out unless it's another layer of irony that the narrator goes beyond his own unreliability. It's a hall of mirrors that could go on forever.
Then I wonder if the 42 year old's obsession isn't more appropriate to a 14 year old. There is quite a lot of it and I was supposed to be taking a break from Julian Barnes. It's not men who are alleged to peak at that time of life but there are some passages that are recognizable, like, at home, with regard to his wife,
...I stood naked where she'd been naked, as though an echo of our once-naked selves intermingled on some alternate plane.
Maybe he is just an addict.
And then, for all the hard-bitten prose that soon had me replacing Donna Tartt as a reference point with every other American epitome of cool, from Hemingway, through Salinger, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson to Brett Easton Ellis and their English surrogates, Martin Amis and Will Self, he can, among the litanies of passing-by characters that people the text, describe someone's gonzo hairstyle, like Phil Spector's, provide reams of wonderful description of the debased culture where 'walleyed' is a character trait used more than twice, and yet he also says 'undies' which strikes me as prim and proper as if the New York Dolls suddenly covered a Perry Como song completely sincerely and didn't realize.
The title is a bit obvious. If we are going to see the world as post-cool, hollowed out, where excitement is only 'dog-eared', see the bad work of students at summer school for what it is and be generally contemptuous of the culture around us -and, by all means, let's do that- we should also be beyond worrying about life's worth and who is spitually rich.
In Rich Fischer's name we might here 'fisher', fishing for whatever he can get, but also 'fissure', the sort of textual nicety the real cynic might think cornball. But, after the chapter about the party at Marty Azamanian's place, grotesquely well-off and kitsch, we know we are 'through the looking-glass', the world has become uncoupled from any moral values but literature has been through those looking glasses before in Lear, Timon, Volpone to cite only early C17th English plays and every generation thinks it's only just happened to them.
Cynicism, from the Greek kynikos meaning dog-like, thus seeing things for no more than they are, can always be outdone by somebody else insisting on being more so, so whether Matthew Klam allows Rich Fischer his little caveat on page 318 as a get out clause or if Fischer is not only the vehicle of Klam's implicit critique of where America is now but also the victim of it, at least one can't deny the novel is many-layered.
There is much to like about it. It does convince, through its prose as much as its entirely credible excess, and it seems to know itself, or can recognize itself in others,
He was pretending to be angry at me, but he actually was angry, which made his pretending less convincing.
In considering marriage, Rich finds contradictions in it but then concludes,
People who stayed single were children themselves and their genes were weeded out by natural selection.
Yes, by all means the first part but surely it is very naive to think that procreation is predicated on marriage.
If the penultimate paragraph suddenly brings in the 'unreliable narrator' in person (after all that), it also, before a soft, poignant last paragraph, then undermines even that, with,
the inevitable letdown of having produced anything at all, of putting myself into it and giving it away.
which is one of many beautiful, brilliant things in a book that might have arrived too late to become a classic if we are now, as it suggests itself, somehow post-classic, even if it could have been.
We know too much but what we knew got us nowhere and then it was too late. Who is Rich? presents plenty to consider, benefits and suffers from all the post-Post-Modern world it has arrived into and should be admired or disregarded depending on whether you would buy books on the strength of a review in the TLS. I did but my subscription is under constant review.
I thought for a moment it might be on a level with Donna Tartt and be a 10/10, then there were times it could have been only a 6. I think it scrapes a 9 but I've done some of the work that put it there.