My American unhappiness

Review by New York Times Review

IT'S hard to think of a less privileged creation than the second novel. When we admire a writer's debut, it's like falling in love across a crowded room; we are seduced by a part that we have mistaken for the whole. And when the follow-up reveals, as it must, a more complex picture than we at first believed we saw, our feelings are mixed. And so Dean Bakopoulos's second novel, "My American Unhappiness," is already at a disadvantage; if you liked his first one, you can be certain only that this one won't be the same. That first novel, "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon," was a clever and occasionally affecting take on masculinity and working-class childhood. Like its spiritual antecedent, Jeffrey Eugenides's "Virgin Suicides," it begins with an ingenious conceit: all the men in a small Michigan town, humbled by the weaknesses of the economy and of their gender, abandon their families and depart for the moon. The town's boys awkwardly fill their shoes, drinking and fighting and pursuing women. The book works well at first, giving us an elegant and lively portrait of the vicissitudes of early manhood. But in the end it strains against the limits of its conceptual framework, transforming itself into a too-conventional exploration of male angst and desire, underscored by a mawkish, if endearing, mash note to the literary world that fostered its creation. If "Please Don't Come Back From the Moon" wasn't an unqualified success, it did showcase Bakopoulos's strengths: an unpretentious and versatile prose style, a keen ear for dialogue and a willingness to openly engage those workaday emotions often regarded as insufficiently complex for contemporary literature. The author approached his subject with good humor, intelligence and restraint: fine qualities in a first novel, and ones that left open the possibility of a strong follow-up that exploited them to their fullest. So does the new novel deliver? I'm not so sure. You couldn't accuse Bakopoulos of repeating his formula, anyway. He's working here in a new, hypomanic prose style; the jokes come fast and furious, and the steady narration of the previous novel has given way to a wry, edgy self-mockery. But the author seems a bit lost, adrift in unfamiliar waters, and the book feels less like a second novel than it does another try at a first. "My American Unhappiness" is narrated by Zeke Pappas, a twitchy man of late youth infected by class discomfort, higher-education fatigue and liberal guilt. In his college town, Madison, Wis., Zeke is the last of his social circle, a disbanded group who once spent their time slumming in an old-man bar, "discussing weighty books and foreign films, drinking can after can of Miller High Life in ironic appreciation for the cheap things in life." He lives with his mother and with twin nieces orphaned by the Iraq war and a car crash, works for a fading nonprofit agency and distracts himself with recreational empathy: his startlingly accurate guesses of what people will order at Starbucks, based on their appearance. Zeke is hard at work on a professional project, intended to reveal the human misery behind his nation's cheerful facade: an inventory of American unhappiness. He has conducted hundreds of interviews, asking people why they're unhappy. (One respondent traces it back to fourth grade, when she realized that "almost every day of my life I would have to get up and go somewhere I didn't really want to go.") Meanwhile, Zeke's terminally ailing mother, a gentle right-winger who reads women's magazines and doesn't know what a barista is, worries that he's running out of time to get married. Vexing as Mother can be, Zeke agrees with her, and so he goes on the make. A few possibilities stand out: there's the cutie at the coffee shop whom he delights with his uncanny consumer insights; the lithe, single mother of three next door; the leggy administrative specialist at his office he'd like to kiss from "hips to toes." They all seem pretty hot for him, this 33-year-old bureaucrat, but he is plagued by self-doubt, and people keep telling him he looks as if he's been crying. Complicating matters are mysterious e-mails from a woman named Valerie who may be Zeke's presumed-dead wife, lost a dozen years before on a canoeing trip and never seen again. But never mind - Zeke gives himself a year to get hitched, a plan his mother codifies by stipulating in her will that he'll get custody of the beloved nieces only if he succeeds. So now it's an imperative: find love or lose the kids. This narrative ploy arrives on Page 125, and not a moment too soon. As zany plot twists go, it's a good one, and adds needed urgency to a story that has so far demonstrated its protagonist's ennui by chewing, perhaps excessively, its own cud. With Mother on the wane and federal regulators closing in, Zeke sleeps with his sister-in-law, and then his barista, and then things really get out of hand. But plot does not occupy a significant number of these pages. Instead, they are filled with idle banter between characters, or with Zeke's musings - on Facebook, on Ben Franklin and depression, on the real lives of J. Crew models - and the musings of his study subjects. All of these things are funny, as is the surreal turn near the end: a government conspiracy, the Tasering of a houseplant, an unlikely phone call and an even unlikelier Friend Request. But they feel like the author's jokes, applied at random to whoever or whatever is at hand, rather than the kind of organic comic flourishes that can emanate from strong character development. At times "My American Unhappiness" is a winning distraction, a smart entertainment for smart guys. But its insistence on its own profundity is wearying. The book's copious pop-cultural and commercial references - Amazon, Target, SmartWool, NPR - feel like attempts to buttress thin material with a layer of timeliness. Its many contemporary literary name-droppings - Cormac McCarthy, Charles Baxter, Nicholas Delbanco, Jim Harrison and one bafflingly gratuitous mention of Heidi Julavits - seem intended to remind the author that he's in good company. And Zeke's pompous and overfamiliar declarations about the nature of American unhappiness serve only to foreground the book's essential frivolity: "Everywhere I go, I can see it, such unhappiness, such an overwhelming need to be drugged and distracted, lest a moment of silent, melancholy self-reflection pierce our fragile hearts!" Of course Zeke is a figure of fun - his pontifications, along with much of this novel, are intended to be taken as ironically as Zeke's Miller High Life. I fear, however, that Bakopoulos is asking too much of his readers: that we are supposed to keep one eyebrow arched for the duration, and exit winking. There is only so much we can read this way before we are overwhelmed by the desire to drop the pretense. In the end, I find myself charmed by this writer, or at least by some plausible iteration of him. There's enough originality and earnestness here, and in his previous book, to suggest the possibility of great future success. This isn't it, though: not quite, not yet. 'Everywhere I go, I can see it, such unhappiness, such an overwhelming need to be drugged and distracted.' J. Robert Lennon is the author, most recently, of the novel "Castle" and the story collection "Pieces for the Left Hand."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 12, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

No 33-year-old should know this much loss. Zeke Pappas married in college, then lost his young wife. His brother died in Iraq, and a short while after, the brother's wife and her mother died, leaving him as the provider for his brother's elementary-school-aged twin daughters. So much loss might cloud a life, but not Zeke's. He and his nieces have a symbiotic relationship to supply stability and love. As the 2008 election and financial crisis approach, the funding landscape narrows for the Great Midwestern Humanities Institute, which Zeke directs. His oral history project, the Inventory of American Unhappiness, red-flags federal interest. A subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security charged with suppressing public cynicism begins investigating Zeke's work. Bakopoulos trades in anxiety, but his novel resists feeling stifling. Zeke Pappas is a sad man. He is also a good man navigating loss with hope. He fights what seems like an imminent unmooring and maintains a steadfast fidelity to what matters most, notably his nieces.--Parsons, Blai. Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Bakopoulos's wan second novel (after Please Don't Come Back from the Moon), Zeke Pappas, the director of a humanities institute in Wisconsin, is conducting an epic survey of American unhappiness, a project he considers his life's work. Misery is a hobby of this self-regarding misanthrope, whose interest in others' sadness can verge on fetishism ("Show me a sad woman, and I will fall in love"). As if to oblige his brooding, fate afflicts him with a relentless barrage of personal tragedies. Zeke, who is already a borderline alcoholic widower caring for his two orphaned nieces, learns that his mother is dying of cancer and that she plans to deny him custody of the girls unless he gets married before she dies. His candidates are a barista, his assistant, his neighbor, and, naturally, Sofia Coppola-though, really, any female will do. Zeke, unfortunately, comes off as more odious than endearing, glib and pompous for all of his slapstick moping, and lacking the depth of character needed to reveal him as anything other than an unpleasant schmuck, which is especially unfortunate considering Bakopoulos's wit and breezy prose. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

It is 2008 in Madison, WI, and detached, cerebral Zeke Pappas, age 34, is desperate to find a wife. He coolly narrates his dis-astrous attempts to woo and propose to three women and even manages to contact and possibly alienate Sofia Coppola, his fourth and very distant marriage prospect. Yet dwindling romantic opportunities cannot deter Pappas from his obsessive pursuit of "The Inventory of American Unhappiness," a project sponsored by the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative, the agency Pappas ultimately leads into federal audit and investigation. While the delusional Pappas's odyssey through one personal tragedy after another is sometimes funny, his circumstances remain overwhelmingly sad. Yet his optimism, affirmed in the book's conclusion, suggests that hope always transcends misfortune. VERDICT The narrator of Bakopoulos's second novel (after Please Don't Come Back from the Moon) is neither wholly likable nor easily disdained, and his dogged persistence provides a credible, humane antidote to the postconsumerist wasteland in which he lives and works. Bakopoulos writes with great heart and a cold eye, and his limpid, ironic prose will appeal to those who like the early work of Martin Amis, especially The Rachel Papers.-John G. Mathews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Novels about downward spirals and crack-ups are generally gloomy affairs, but here's one that shimmers with mischief and offbeat charm.Like his fine debut Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (2005), this author's second novel acknowledges life's dark side. Narrator Zeke Pappas is working on a bizarre oral-history project called An Inventory of American Unhappiness. It's an example of cart before the horse; first comes the conclusion ("This is America. Everybody is unhappy."), then the fieldwork (500+ interviews), evidently a case of projection. The 33-year-old Zeke is director of a non-profit created to promote the Midwest's cultural self-esteem. It's based in Madison, Wis., and is dependent on federal dollars; but now, in 2008, the cupboard is bare. Zeke's personal life is topsy-turvy. His father died right after 9/11; his brother Cougar enlisted, only to die in Iraq; Cougar's fiance Melody died driving drunk, leaving behind twin daughters. And what of his wife's death? This is mentioned in passing, a teaser, part of that mischief; the full story emerges slowly. The silver lining is that Melody's adorable 7-year-olds now live with Zeke, balm for a lonely widower who drinks too much. Zeke's raising them, helped by his mother, when his world is rocked again by the news that she's dying of lung cancer. There's a will. Zeke must marry to retain custody of the girls (more mischief). With his professional life falling apart (sinister federal bureaucrats are auditing him), Zeke must find a mate, fast. What about Minn, the sexy Starbucks barista? Or Elizabeth, his single parent neighbor? Or even Lara, his last employee? With impressive sleight-of-hand, Bakopoulos combines tragedy and farce (a naked Lara threatens to Taser Zeke after he invades her home); the backdrop is "this dreadful reign of George W. Bush." Through it all, Zeke makes for a good companion, alternately clueless (about his mother) and perceptive (about our "self-referential" Facebook culture).A dark entertainment infused by a bluesy yearning for a better America.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Zeke Pappas is off to the Rotary Club luncheon. Nine years ago, in the summer of 1999, I was hired to be the director of the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative (GMHI), a federally funded program designed "to foster a greater sense of community, increase public literacy, and strengthen levels of civic engagement in the American heartland." The program was typical of the projects launched at the end of that optimistic and high-rolling decade, as its founders believed it could cease or at least slow the brain drain that was occurring in that region of the country, both the crumbling Rust Belt and the blighted Grain Belt. I was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and I still live there, a city full of transplants where everybody's optimism about the heartland seems to outpace the reality of our condition: we are dying.People have been leaving the Midwest for decades and they still are many decades later and nobody is particularly surprised. From the streets of Cleveland and Detroit and Gary, to the fertile fields of Wisconsin and Iowa and southern Indiana, the young people flee. They go south and west, to the newly cosmopolitan and sprawling cities like Atlanta and Orlando and Salt Lake; they deal with the heat--it's worth it to them. I can imagine them sweating, those exiles, in newly purchased summer suits of linen and seersucker, in dresses that bare their still pale and overly broad shoulders. Some of the exiles head west to the great mountains and the deserts and the outdoorsy, freestyling existence that such places as Boulder and Bozeman and Tucson seem to promise. They go to sunny and arid places with high-tech corridors and solar energy projects. Some go directly to the coasts: to San Francisco or New York, those hubs of artistry and commerce with their diverse and teeming neighborhoods, the magnetic bustle of business and action, the sounds of foreign music and unknown spices wafting out of the windows and into the sky and streets. They do not stay here in the Midwest with its sagging and empty auto plants, steel factories running at half power, and farms plagued by unprofitable hogs, underpriced grain, silos in sore need of repair.The founders of the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative included a gaggle of congressional leaders, led by Wisconsin Republican Quince Leatherberry, an anti-immigration conservative from the state's wealthy Fifth District, who, despite his constant sermons on self-reliance and hard work, has never held a job outside of Capitol Hill and has lived, largely, on the fat of his father's land. Leatherberry, an unlikely ally for public humanities funding, was joined by H.　M. Logan, a business leader and the chair of GMHI, as well as an odd alliance of advocates, vigorously paid lobbyists, and oft-bewildered but generous businessmen who believed that in order to slow our regional brain drain, young Midwesterners simply needed to know the hallowed heritage of their homeland, to read the rich literature of their own region, and to understand the blessed uniqueness of their landscape and culture. Then they might stay!It was also believed, by the founders, that the study of the humanities, in the broader sense, might enlighten the work force of the Midwest, ignite a wildfire of innovation and experimentation in the private sector, from automotives to agriculture, economic combustion engines fueled by the bright minds of Michigan and Wisconsin and Iowa and Minnesota and Ohio and Nebraska, digesting and ruminating upon the works of our own undervalued sons and daughters: Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. If only the music of our own famous musicians and composers--John Alden Carpenter, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan--were lodged forever in our internal melodies; if only we allowed the images of John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood to enliven our vision of place; if only we realized that we share the prairie with the same lines, light, and landscapes that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright and moved Aldo Leopold--if only, if only, then our engineers in Detroit and our productivity managers in Cleveland and our logistics coordinators in South Bend would discover new ideas and revolutionary technologies.It was, as Representative Leatherberry said, "a real win-win.""Oh, the humanities!" once exclaimed benefactor Howard Morgan Logan, after a particularly rousing Governor's Lecture in the Humanities by the visiting critic Stanley Fish. Logan, a retired oil man and closeted homosexual originally from Kenosha, turned to a harrumphing Congressman Leatherberry and whispered, tears in his eyes, "Oh, life!"I was barely twenty-four the year I took this job, armed with a self-designed bachelor's degree in "The Narrative Text and Social Movements" from the University of Michigan, and I believed in many things, including the noble and mind-boggling mission of the GMHI: To encourage and advance civic engagement, commercial initiative, economic development, and regional pride in the American Midwest through the study and promotion of the humanities disciplines. I was charismatic then, I worked out every day, and my eyes shone with the sort of confidence I think we all gleaned from our silver-haired president in that decade: no conflict too deep to resolve, no domestic issue too muddy to clarify, no potential lover too distant or risky to bed, no humanities discipline too abstract to define. In fact, I'd been the one who'd written the successful vision statement that had landed us ten million dollars in federal money--an earmark added to a domestic spending bill sponsored, for some unknown reason, by Representative Leatherberry, which, he claimed on the House floor, would somehow help the United States clamp down on illegal immigrants. And so the newly incorporated board of GMHI, chaired by H.　M. Logan and supported by letters of proclamation from the governors of thirteen Midwestern states, chose Madison, Wisconsin, as the project's headquarters, appointed me as the executive director, and then pretty much left me alone except for twice-a-year meetings that very few board members ever attended. I'd been working part-time at a small, erudite independent bookstore near campus, where H.　M. Logan was a loyal customer and, to all appearances, had no small crush on me. The job was mine, most likely, for no reason other than this: he wanted to spend more time with me.Today, nearly a decade later, the economy is in shambles, the nation is at war, and my own job is precariously perched on a list of the luxuries we can no longer afford. I am sitting at a banquet table in the corner of a reception room at the Marriott on the far west side of the city, picking at a rubbery piece of pork loin smothered in a raspberry barbecue sauce. The West Side Rotarians are about to commence their weekly meeting, and I am, courtesy of H.　M. Logan, guest speaker, an honor I accepted because it is widely known that Rotarians are often insurance brokers and lawyers and bankers and have the ability to be philanthropists. The GMHI is now in dire need of philanthropy.The club's president calls the meeting to order with a gavel. All of the Rotarians stand at once. There is a short prayer, led by a man in a blue suit with neatly parted white hair. Just as I manage to mumble my "Amen," the crowd turns abruptly to the left, where a large American flag stands on a raised platform on a golden pole. The Rotarians begin to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, something I have not done since sixth grade. For a moment, I place my left hand over my right breast, but by the time the crowd is pledging to the republic for which it stands, I have the correct hand in the correct position, and I am hoping nobody noticed my very unpatriotic faux pas. At "justice for all," I sit down, but when I realize everyone else has remained standing, I get back to my feet.Logan looks over at me and gives me a thin-lipped, embarrassed smile. Even after all these years, he is still a bit smitten by me, even if I can't quite say a convincing Pledge of Allegiance; he confesses secrets to me that he can't tell to any of his other friends. I am an avowed liberal, and, as a dedicated neo-con, H.　M. believes that I have lax moral standards of some sort, but the truth of the matter is that I do not condone married men, with four children and nine grandchildren, hiring high-priced male prostitutes (for instance), as H.　M. does when he is in Washington, DC.H.　M. smiles and nods in my direction as I hear the club president say something about a song book, and then the Rotary Club of Madison's West Side begins to sing "America the Beautiful," not in the lilting, halfhearted, heads-down manner of schoolchildren, but in a bellowing chorus dominated by forceful tenors and hearty basses. There are women in the audience, but you cannot hear them singing and I think some of them are simply mouthing the words.The singing is what truly flusters me, I suppose: So much earnestness! So much blessed assurance! This sort of social confidence, the sort of bravado that allows men in suits to sing in public, always makes me squirm. Even after 9/11, when earnestness seemed to be appropriate and easy, I still felt uncomfortable, almost disheartened, anytime members of Congress and other power brokers began singing patriotic hymns at public events. There are many of us who love our country, who have spent decades examining its complex woes and its noble ways, and simply cannot bring ourselves to be the sort of highly visible cheerleaders our media demand. The spirit of critical inquiry and constant reflection is too bright within us. I wonder how many capable, smart, and worthy public servants might shy away from office simply because they are not comfortable with such outward displays of emotional patriotism.This particular afternoon, however, I have at least one red, white, and blue ace up my sleeve, a patriotic credential that is legitimate, that is the opposite of the empty gestures so often trotted out for the sake of media events. My brother, Cougar, was killed while serving overseas in Iraq. I mention this at the beginning of my talk. I say, "It does my heart good to hear such patriotic voices this afternoon. I can't hear those words without thinking of my brother, whom everybody called Cougar and who died while serving our nation in Iraq."This generates some polite applause and the collective gasp of concern that always accompanies this announcement. I feel a little guilty using my dead brother like this, but I do not think Cougar would mind if he were alive. I was a generous and warm-hearted older brother who had helped him in many ways over the years. We grew distant and our relationship contentious before he died, but I like to believe that if his spirit has any sort of eternal state, he would say, to whatever angelic neighbors he has on his lonely cloud, that I was a good brother.Thus, I stop short of mentioning that his final e-mail message to me informed me that I was being "a self-righteous, conceited, washed-up, elitist, cowardly little puss." This characterization was in response to a picture of me that our mother had just sent him. I was marching up State Street in an antiwar protest, shouting and holding a sign that said, "Regime change begins at home." I was also wearing a T-shirt that sported the Canadian maple leaf, which I insisted, vainly to my mother, was not intended as any sort of statement or symbol. (Like many of my peers, I have a drawer full of T-shirts that mean nothing: Drink Orange Crush. Be a Pepper. Do the Dew.)"Why did you send that e-mail to Cougar?" I'd asked her. This was before he was dead, when the war was still new and people like me believed we could end it with T-shirt slogans and halfhearted chanting. "Why on earth?""How can you hate your own country?" my mother had sobbed."I don't," I said. "I swear."Despite the sympathy card I play early in my speech, in short, my talk to the Madison West Side Rotary Club does not go well: whatever is on the minds of these upright citizens gathered before me, it is not the public humanities--that much is certain. Once I notice this, I'm flustered and have a difficult time making my main points, and several of the suited men in the audience start to fiddle with their BlackBerries, as if urgent, potentially million-dollar e-mails are attempting to vibrate their way into consciousness. Even a rather zippy little joke about whether Brett Favre would make a comeback attempt falls flat, and so about ten minutes into my prepared remarks, I pause and say, "Well, I am sure that many of you have specific questions about the work that we do, so maybe I'll stop there and take a few. Anybody?" Did you have anything to do with the funding of Mapplethorpe and that cross in urine? Do you fund religious organizations, or is there a bias against Christianity in the work you do? Do you fund individuals? I am working on a history of my grandfather's company, a shipping outfit that once graced the shores of Lake Superior. Would you be interested in funding that? For instance.And then, this, from a gray-haired, pocket-eyed man at the far back table: Why didn't you sing with more conviction? Where was your gusto? I watched you singing; your singing was pathetic. I left the podium. Exactly! Where is my gusto? Excerpted from My American Unhappiness by Dean Bakopoulos All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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