Customer Reviews

Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This series of connected essays purports to support a thesis, that for middleaged baby boomer (American, of a certain income level - let's face it) folks - the "We" of the title - real estate, specifically the house, is now in the place once reserved for sex. All the passion "we" brought to sex and love, now "we" bring to the desire for the right house. It's a glib and silly assertion, made all the more so by the annoying "We." Speak for yourself! I kept wanting to shriek.

Dr. Garber is an able writer, her eyes and ears are peeled for symbols and signs, and she can discuss her various themes wonderfully coherently, even elegantly. But she is not making sense when she attempts to pathologize (for example) communities' attempts to standardize exterior paint colors. For heaven's sakes, it's been done in Scandinavian and European countries (now democracies) for generations, with no measurable loss of the citizenry's psychic well-being.

She indulges in generalization which grate. Dr. Garber asserts that today's glossy,over-the-top shelter magazines such as Architectural Digest are today's pornography. She lists wording that anthropomorphizes real estate, as supporting evidence. This high-minded thought is evidently unknown to pornographers, who would appear to be doing a good business despite their continuing exclusion of real estate from their products. Again, one wishes that she could have personalized her assertions.

I think that a more honest subtitle for this book would have "Why I Love Houses." Were Dr. Garber to have simply written of her own passionate flights of fancy and considerable obsessions and attachments, rather than attempting to universalize them, I think she would have had a better treatise.

This is a fascinating concept, and a marketable one as well, in light of America's current infatuation with the Edifice Complex. Considering the author's scholarly credentials, SEX AND REAL ESTATE should have been a absorbing book. "Should have" is the pivotal phrase here. No question that Garber's body of knowledge is vast--she hops all over the map with only the most tenuous connection to her thesis. Maybe she merely was showing off how much smarter she is than the average reader. While I have no doubt but that this fact is true, the book still quickly descends into boring psychobabble. Anyone seeking enlightenment is bound to be disappointed.

This book is so bad, it deserves less than one star. I'm surely not alone in wondering why the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Harvard has stooped to publishing this kind of nonsense. Garber obviously thinks she's being hip in discussing "grabby" topics like "sexy" real estate, but the result is simply embarrassing and puerile--a new intellectual low for cultural studies, which in most quarters is already straining for credibility.

Okay, I read all the other views, but I sell Real Estate, and lots of it - I can tell you that she nails the emotions many people attach to their homes. If you make your living selling homes you will find this book helpful, especially if you've had a run of nut case buyers!

Don't excoriate Garber for the title of this book; authors typically don't choose the title or write jacket copy. It is true that the book has little to do with sex. It should probably be titled "Miscellaneous thoughts on American houses". If you're about to buy, remodel, or sell a house, this book will make a nice comforting read in the tub. It is sort of like watching Jerry Springer or Oprah and realizing that there are plenty of people whose lives are even more messed up than one's own. Skip the book if you're not about to engage in a huge real estate transaction of some sort.

While I sympathise with the earnest souls who criticised Garber for failing to look at homelessness, disability and the spread of AIDS in this book, I also wonder if their senses of humour have died. Yes, the book is frothy, but it's funny, too - the stories are hilarious even if they do deal with the baser, greedier side of middle-class and middle-aged aspirations. And in chronicling those ugly yearnings to excel, Garber shows us - without labouring it - where the greed that generates a refusal to spend tax dollars on the poor has its home.

Meanwhile, the humourless get what they deserve with earnest but boneheaded stuff like Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.

For those interested in the difference between house and home, this IS the book. Not only is it an intense review of the comparison of house and home, but it tackles the topic of the contemporary obsession with the past and instant tradition. References a lot of literary texts as well as psycho-analytical studies and "Emily Post" style writings.

As an experienced real estate broker who has watched many souls fall in and out of love with their houses, myelf included, I congratulate Professor Garber for digging more deeply into our national passtime, our passion and now, our only pension fund. No other serious scholar has bothered. How can this be? Just as "Freakonomics" unpacked our secret, self-defeating relationships with money, Garber reveals our profound need for house-love in its many forms. Home buying and home making are deliciously Erotic fantasies in the most classical, general sense of Eros, of course, but I'd like to add, before you sign a title document, committing yourself to buying that darling cottage or marring that darling guy, take a look at this witty, scholarly book.

After quickly exhausting the cultural significance of Jello-O boxes in her previous book, SYMPTOMS OF CULTURE, Marjorie Garber has now produced little more than a book for realtors. The result is banal and rather stupid--anything but revelatory. But perhaps the reader below doesn't take the criticism far enough: this book has really nothing to say about the scandalous cost of real estate in most major U.S. cities, the large number of people who are homeless, and the millions of folks who are gouged every month by unscrupulous landlords (how sexual is that, Professor Garber?). Until recently, cultural critics expressed nominal interest in improving our society. Nowadays, concerned only about their fat publishing advances, all they seem able to do is exhibit nauseating complicity with society's ugliest elements.