Review by New York Times Review
TO AN INFLUENTIAL SEGMENT of the American electorate, the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House appeared biblically ordained. White evangelical Christians voted for Trump - a thrice-married adulterer who'd hardly set foot in a church - by an unprecedented margin of 80 percent, and his popularity among this constituency has remained high since he took office, the ensuing scandals and confusion understood by some at least to be all part of God's plan. As the press release for "Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite and the Countdown to Armageddon," one of several briskly selling new Christian exegeses of his presidency, puts it, "God raised up President Trump as a fearless leader to guide America and the free world through a series of major crises" and - here's the clincher - the "chaos enveloping the planet could paradoxically signal the beginning of the great end-times awakening that millions are praying for." For insight into America's eschatological mind-set, and into fundamentalist culture generally, there may be no more eloquent guide than Meghan O'Gieblyn, who was raised in the faith and then - painfully, reluctantly - abandoned it, though not before honing her considerable intellect on the finer points of church doctrine at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a deeply conservative college known among evangelicals, she notes, as "the West Point of Christian service." "Interior States" is O'Gieblyn's first book, a collection of essays, most first published in literary magazines such as Harper's and n+1, whose clever title denotes both the Midwest, where she grew up and still lives, and Christian America - places, one literal, the other figurative, that lie outside and often at odds with the country's mainstream. O'Gieblyn's father sold industrial lubricant, and the Rust Belt manufacturing towns where her family resided already seemed during her childhood in the 1990s, she writes, "mostly abandoned, covered, like Pompeii, in layers of ash." Saved at the age of 5, she was home-schooled until 10th grade. By age 8, she'd memorized statistics on ocean salinity, the better to "persuade unsaved kids that the earth couldn't possibly be more than 6,000 years old." As Y2K approached, her family braced for Armageddon, stockpiling shortwave radios, shotguns, drums of water and freeze-dried chicken - provisions meant to last until the Rapture. At Moody, she haunted Michigan Avenue on Friday nights, handing out leaflets next to chalk drawings outlining the steps to salvation. No wonder O'Gieblyn regards her childhood as "having occurred in a parallel dimension, one that occupies the same physical coordinates as secular reality but operates according to none of its rules or logic." And yet what she captures most vividly here is Christianity's indomitable reach - a parallel dimension, perhaps, but one whose fingerprints are discernible on nearly every aspect of national life. "Being a Christian," she writes, "required an interpretive vigilance, a willingness to harken to whispers." Thrillingly alive to big questions of meaning and belief, her essays are testaments to exquisite attentiveness, each painstakingly stitched and emitting a pleasing, old-fashioned whiffof starch. In "Sniffing Glue," an essay on Christian pop music, O'Gieblyn recalls her teenage amazement at discovering that talk of God was ubiquitous on MTV (a taboo diversion she only stumbled on at 13, in a hotel room in Moscow). In "Ghost in the Cloud," about the futurist Ray Kurzweil, she considers the eschatology at the frontiers of science - in discussions of "transhumanism," a term, she observes, that first appeared not in a tract on artificial intelligence but in an 1814 translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy." Then there is the presidential election. Many American fundamentalists, O'Gieblyn explains in "The End," believe that the Second Coming will be preceded by a period of tribulation, involving "pestilence, natural disasters and the rise of the Antichrist." During the 1930s, Mussolini was a favored candidate for the latter. Precisely how Trump fits the bill, O'Gieblyn doesn't say. But in "Exiled," a suggestive portrait of Vice President Mike Pence, she drops some tantalizing hints. She visits Pence's former congregation in Indianapolis, where the pastor is completing 18 months of sermons on exile, a recurring theme in the Bible. Pence, she notes, is partial to Old Testament narratives in his speeches; stories of the Israelites' long banishment in Babylon resonate with contemporary Christians "who saw themselves as a religious minority in a hostile pagan empire - a people who had long mistaken Washington, D.C., for Jerusalem." During the summer of 2016, while Pence was auditioning for the role of presidential running mate, his pastor dwelled on Daniel, an Israelite who stayed true to his faith while serving as chief adviser to the pagan tyrant Nebuchadnezzar - "an angry, irrational king," the pastor called him, likening Daniel's situation to that of "the vice presidency, if you will, of the country." "We now live in a world shaped by evangelicals' apocalyptic hopes, dreams and nightmares," O'Gieblyn quotes one scholar as saying. After reading her book, one could hardly disagree. "I imagined myself exiting a primitive cave and striding onto terra firma," she writes of the moment when she turned her back on religion. "But as it turns out, the material world is every bit as elusive as the superstitions I'd leftbehind." HEATHER HAVRILESKY is a different kind of apostate. An advice columnist for New York magazine and the author of a wry memoir about an unremarkable childhood, she declares herself in "What if This Were Enough?," her collection of essays, a defector from American culture - its "enforced cheer," its rampant materialism, its frenetic pace, its inauthenticity. Her dismay, to judge from her introduction - six pages in which she delivers her verdict in unvarnished terms, condemning our national "poison," "sickness," "lies," "delusions," "false narratives" and "shared hallucinations" - is considerable. Trump lurks unnamed between the lines. Havrilesky's grand pronouncements are so sweeping and so numerous - "our culture exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other," "our compassion for ourselves and for others remains underdeveloped," "our whole lives are passing us by, but we hardly notice" - they quickly cease to arouse strong feelings of assent or disagreement. Similarly, her counsel: "We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock," "we must believe in and embrace the conflicted nature of humankind," "shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now." She's banking on at least a few of these slogans resonating with every reader. But the self-help framework - the stentorian assertions of diagnosis and cure - does Havrilesky a disservice. She can be a warm and funny writer, a savvy close reader, idiosyncratic, urbane. Her advice column stands out not so much for its practical guidance but for the empathy in which she wraps her message of self-empowerment - and for its comic riffs ("If you want to find love, you can't try to seem cooler than you really are. Love doesn't honor that kind of marketing effort"). When Havrilesky ditches the forced affinity of "we" for the more modest claims of "I," she has some poignant things to say. She is good at wresting fresh nuance from familiar touchstones, and arranging them into incisive, opinionated narratives. "Haunted," an impassioned meditation on the novelist Shirley Jackson, pans out to incorporate the television shows "Girls," "Homeland" and "The Mindy Project" and the 7,200-word letter the victim of a 2015 sexual assault at Stanford wrote to her attacker ("a Jackson novel in miniature"). Women's lives, Havrilesky contends, still too often imitate the contours of horror fiction: emotional seduction followed by humiliation and betrayal. "Jackson's uncanny portraits of the fragmentation and collapse of the female psyche echo throughout contemporary culture," she observes, "from the casual derision we lavish on all things female or feminine to the so-called fairy-tale marriages we celebrate in the pages of magazines, the ones that are later revealed to be nightmares of verbal and physical abuse." After you've closed her book, however, it's the passing glimpses of her own life and relationships that continue to resonate. A bravura essay about the glorification of consumerism in "Mad Men" and in the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy opens with an anecdote about her father, a divorced economist who liked to quote Gordon Gekko, from "Wall Street," "in a tone that implied that the maxim 'Greed is good' was less a self-serving excuse than an expression of one of his core values." Like "Mad Men"'s Don Draper, Havrilesky's father was a serial dater (at one point juggling three women named Debbie) and amoral indulger, "beholden only to the laws of supply and demand." Twenty years later, his freewheeling ethic has found its pathological apotheosis in the fictional fantasy world of "Fifty Shades of Grey," where romantic fulfillment is just another kind of acquisition ("He is mine," the book's heroine repeatedly intones about her colossally wealthy husband, who surrounds her with highend goods), and in the flesh-and-blood form of Donald Trump. "Embedded in the orange-spray-tanned folds of his brow, we discover the hidden moral of this tale of luxurious excess and limitless power," Havrilesky writes. "There is no satisfaction in reckless, excessive accumulation. The more you have, the more you want." Several of this book's weirder, more original essays dwell on possessions - w hy do we seem never to have enough? "Stuffed" is a sharp-witted homage to the Japanese anticlutter prophet Marie Kondo, a revolutionary in the guise of storage-solution professional. In Havrilesky's view, what Kondo understands but never quite says is that our excess stuffis a sign not of prosperity but of impoverishment. Like our closets, our minds are filled with clutter, much of it imposed by constantly intruding digital devices. By stressing the intense feelings our objects provoke, Kondo invites us to consider whether our things ever really make us happy. Havrilesky's father intuited as much: When he died, of a heart attack at 56, he left, in addition to his fancy gear, a piece of paper taped to a bedroom mirror on which he'd written, "All of heaven is within you." Havrilesky shares with O'Gieblyn a moral skepticism about American culture, and an anxious yearning to resist its everpressing onslaught. O'Gieblyn puts it this way: "There are nights when I sit up in bed, awakened by the panic of some halfremembered thought, one of those foundational problems that gets lost in the wash of secondary concerns and emerges only when you are loose and unguarded to remind you, with a start, that you've forgotten the original question; that you're missing the point." EMILY EAKIN is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
From our attention-grabbing smartphone screens to the endless treadmill of social-media demands, modern life is filled with constant injunctions to find more, do better, and get ahead. But in this quick-witted collection of essays, advice columnist Havrilesky pointedly asks whether it is possible to be satisfied without having everything our world of excess offers us. Can we ever say, she wonders, that what we have is simply enough. While she deploys a light touch to address certain topics, such as her dread regarding a family trip to Disneyland, there is always a sharp edge to her observations. Even a seemingly positive aspect of modern culture, the foodie movement, withers into an exclusionary and ecologically damaging pretension under her gaze. From the troubling messages contained in such pop-culture vehicles as Fifty Shades of Grey and Entourage to the ramifications of Trump's election, Havrilesky clearly defines the moral morass that surrounds us. In contrast, she presents some more personal stories about love and loss that tantalizingly offer a glimpse into a more grounded way of life, leavening the dark atmosphere with humor and hope.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
These incisive essays by New York magazine columnist Havrilesky (How to Be a Person in the World), some previously published in shorter versions, invite readers into the contradictions of upper-middle-class American life. She's interested in "how we ingest and metabolize" the "broader poisons of our culture," yet cannot "figure out why we're sick." She relates these poisons-endemic distraction; determinedly amoral entertainment; the dominance of corporate culture, as represented by the ubiquity of Disney-with a combination of anger, dismay, and ambivalence. She calls out the hypocrisy of the "foodie movement," with its self-congratulatory "heroic sheen," for failing to prioritize making "healthy food more affordable to the poor." Her social criticism is keen, but her best writing is personal. There's a beautiful essay on being unable to extricate herself from a failing relationship, because "I was more at home with longing." Her goal is to encourage readers to ask of themselves, as she asks herself amid Disneyland's overcontrolled banality, "How did we get here? Who stood back and let this happen to our world?" She wants Americans to "wake up to the unbelievable gift of being alive," even though it means facing anomie, despair, and all the scary emotions that are easier avoided. It's a message she relates with insight, wit, and terrific prose. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A New York magazine columnist examines our current culture, which "exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other."In her latest collection of essays, Havrilesky (How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, 2016, etc.) questions the way in which our society has shaped individuals who too often look to others for self-definition, who develop an identity based on the financial means with which they can purchase experiences, and who take to the digital sphere to create new exacerbations of old cultural tropes. " What should I be doing right now?" is a question that feels more urgent than ever," writes the author. "Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members." In fact, the world Havrilesky describes is systematically injured by new developments in the digital and communication realms, making even the smallest interaction unnatural, the vaguest thought superfluous, and the idea of ambition old-fashioned. Throughout these essays, some of which were previously published in different forms, the author looks at a variety of cultural reference points, including the BuzzFeed phenomenon, the hegemony of Hollywood films, and foodie culture, to provide a crucial analytical perspective on human interactions and on the future. "The past is reduced to a slide show," she writes. "The future is a YouTube video that won't load. And the present is a jumble of jaunty yellow buttons blurting omg' and awww' and tl;dr.' What else can we do but click through?" Though there seems to be no escape from the world Havrilesky paints for her readers, she makes a point of offering a line of inquiry through which they can develop their own perspectives on society today, carving out their own space in the process.A fun, often insightful read for digital fatalists. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
