I thought this book was going to be an incredibly well-researched character study on preppers that would cut through hysteria and mockery to a genuine attempt to understand whether there were any rational reasonable understandable human motives and experiences underlying the survivalist mentality.
Not sure where I got that idea, but it was obviously off-base.
Billed as a hilarious and engrossing read, some monumental “take on the American Experiment,” this is in fact a meandering repetitive story full of thinly sketched characters, all of whom are mocked, derided, hated, betrayed, lied to, or summarily dismissed at one point or another by the protagonist.
Hey, I’m all for a well-painted anti-hero: I love me some Don Draper. But this is no Don Draper. Lacking that inexplicable charisma, that tragic flaw that perpetually drives the character from the heights of dizzying success to ruin and disgrace, legal associate Aretha seems to have a chip on her shoulder about just about everyone she runs into, her disdain not quite rising to the level of a tragic character flaw, and here is no great success story.
Anyone who seems to have more money than her is obviously rich, even when in fact they’re not rich in any degree at all. Yet she wants to gain power and wealth and become rich herself – it’s the repeatedly stated desired outcome and payback for her law school debt and her relentless office grind. While yearning for riches, she hates anyone who seems to already have it, sneering at caricatures and two-dimensional cardboard cut-out meme-images of country clubs attendees in expensive clothes.
A new associate shows up at work and starts outperforming her. This is definitely grounds to resent the associate and a justification for some bitter low-level campaign of sabotage and misinformation aimed at derailing her.
Lamenting her dismal dating track record, she makes it clear that it’s obviously the fault of every other person she’s dated, because they all suck. Nothing wrong with her at all.
When she meets someone she likes, she’s already living with him in less than a month. What draws her to him are elements that she uses to push others away. His parents are dead – and so are hers. A perfect match. And anyone whose parents are alive – they just don’t get it, and how dare they. Even her ‘best’ friend is secretly resented for having alive parents. Oh, and for having money. Because she’s obviously rich.
While being drawn to this guy, she also sort of resents that he’s sober and doesn’t drink. When he finally relapses due to the stress of potentially losing his house she has nothing but contempt, and zero compassion or any solid understanding of the realities of how addiction actually works.
She is suspicious of the fact that her boyfriend and his two housemates live in a house – she even mentions it’s some kind of breach of the very contract of living in New York – you’re not supposed to own a house.
Yet looking back at the houseless apartment dwelling parents of her childhood she makes it clear she badly wants a house of her own as some eventual destination. Wants something, then resents those who already have it.
Initially drawn to his sunniness and optimism, she grows to resent it. How can he be so perpetually positive when she isn’t? When he finally has one or two moments of negative mood towards the end of the book, she nails him in triumphant victory, delighted to finally see that he’s human and flawed, and therefore completely unacceptable as a human being.
Meanwhile she’s been lying to him non-stop and has already cheated on him for no good reason with one of the housemates.
At first fearful to learn that the two housemates are preppers and have built a backyard bunker and appear to own guns, she eventually feels ‘blackmailed’ into helping them sell guns, despite in fact there being zero actual grounds for any real blackmail and no reason she could not have just opted not to do so. Next thing we know, having resented the preppers and what they believe in, she’s gaining an almost sexual thrill from gun-running. Until at the end when she decides in fact nope she wants out of this, and can comfortably go back to hating and despising these anti-social gun-dealers. But not before she’s stolen all their guns, at gunpoint, so that she can sell them for money and “revenge,” because she believes she’s owed something by them for the inconvenience of having lived rent-free in their house and willingly participated in their scheme.
I thought perhaps the boyfriend’s ongoing long absences, explained as scouting trips to far-flung locations to meet and sign deals with new coffee growers for the house’s coffee roasting business, might in fact hide some subterfuge. Would he turn out to be an imposter, masquerading as a quiet sunny coffee-roaster guy, hiding a sinister persona as some extremist far-right militia member, or anti-government network linked to FARC or other south American outlaw groups? No, just a coffee guy on work trips, ostensibly turning a blind eye to the gun-running aspect of the house’s preppers, until finally getting drunk and taking a gun for himself after the house’s roof caves in. Which is a natural reaction to that happening.
Close to the end of the book, termites are introduced as the deus ex machina the plot is calling out for. Wait – do they eat through the floor, and that giant coffee roasting machine splinters its massive weighty bulk down through to the basement, the entire house collapsing? No, just a section of the roof caves in. Even this golden opportunity to go big and go heavy with the story’s climax falls flat and falls short.
Aretha has a victim-mentality martyr complex and an extremely vague moral compass, with a repetitive tedious wandering inner monologue of bitterness and resentment, somehow self-satisfied and pleased with her eventual flight from those she had called boyfriend and friends, suddenly turning back to her ‘best’ friend who she had abandoned and avoided, now that she needs a place to crash. It’s unclear if the end of the book is supposed to sound triumphant, liberated, or smug, but my main reaction on reading that last sentence was “thank god that’s done.”
ronanconroy 