TL;DR version of this review:
First half is slow and meandering. Get your highlighter out, but be prepared to feel lost and to wonder if there's a book here. Second half is focused and well written, says some things that are brave for a liberal feminist, but that you've heard before, all the usual suspects presented in the now well-known "subvert the dominant narrative / intellectual dark web" style: Trump, campus SJWism, rape culture, toxic masculinity vs. femininity, social media, helicopter parents, race, gender, and transgender, and so on. Good as far as it goes. But author's conclusion—and only real innovation—is to suggest that if you're troubled by the culture right now, as she until recently has been, it's because you think you're still relevant, as she until recently did—until she woke up and realized that she wasn't, because as tends to happen, she got old. Humf.
You want to cheer for the author, you're ready to cheer for the author, but you never quite get there. And in the end, if you're like me, you roll your eyes on the last page and wish she'd left it out.
Extended review:
So, I bought this last night. And I posted a first version of my review when halfway through the book, wondering—justifiably—if there *was* a book there at all.
Despite such a question, I gave it four stars at the halfway point, even though as I pointed out, for the first half of the book, we seemed to have just been meandering through the author's life—largely as a way to compare American culture in the past (particularly as it relates to gender relations, but also around social politics more generally) with what seems to be a fundamentally broken American culture in the present.
In my review, I said of the first half that:
"I, like many, many others, am waiting with baited breath for someone to write The Definitive Incisive, Highly Personal Book on Our Collective Cultural Insanity at This Moment... Unfortunately, I don't think this book is it... I'm halfway through the damned thing and I still don't actually know exactly what what its argument is, or why it's titled what it is. As far as I can tell, I'm just accompanying the author on an extended stream-of-consciousness tour of her life and opinions, past as compared to present... a decent number of insights and in bricolage form an astute (qua all of us, as a society) if impressionistic reading of the culture and its trajectory over the last half century... incisive one-offs and head-nodding points worthy of highlighting, combined with the general rapturous feeling that perhaps, just perhaps, sane people, including sane feminists, are still out there... [yet there is] no clear thesis or argument, at least by the halfway point... no well-articulated structure that I can find... unclear whether the title is referencing or implying something specific, or just a catch-all meant literally..."
All of that still largely stands as a summary of the book's first half. Insightful, essentially random social criticism from Gen X "sensible feminist / quasi-Riot-Grrrl" perspective. Readers should know before they buy that if they pick up this book, for the first full half of it they're going to ride along in the author's passenger seat as she drives around her neighborhood toward no immediately obvious destination, reminiscing about this and that thing out the window, offering an assortment observations on how so very many things in social life and cultural politcs have changed, and probably not for the better, and how much nuance and complexity has been lost (she risks, at times, mistaking "melange" for "nuance").
But now I've finished the book and come back to update my review. And to remove a star, sadly.
First, the good. I wrote the first version of my review after reading the first five (of eight) chapters, all of which meandered, both in terms of subject matter and formally as well. Having now finished the book, I know that chapter six is by far the strongest, and that when placed next to it, chapters five (just before) and seven (just after) are also play well. So, in retrospect these three chapters are the core of the book:
Ch. 5: What Hath One Lecture Wrought!: Trouble on Campus
Ch. 6: On the Right Side of Things (Until I wasn't)
Ch. 7: We're Not Joking: Humor, in Memoriam
And as you finally arrive at and read them, the entire book begins to coalesce just a bit. Sadly, you have to read more than half of the manuscript to get to the meat, but it is there.
Early on, the author says that she doesn't know what genre the book actually is, but having finished it, I do. It's a memoir. And the three chapters above that are the core of the book cover the author's time from college through the election of Donald Trump and the author's divorce through the years that followed, including time spent in a newly (re?)discovered teaching career and at a college reunion.
Unfortunately, the arrival of stronger writing in those three chapters paradoxically pulls back the curtain just a bit. Whereas for the first half of the book, as a reader you're mesmerized just a bit by insightful comparisons and things-said-out-loud that you didn't realize you were thinking until you read them, once the author settles down into something that feels more like reading and less like wandering, you realize this is largely just another rumination on the election of Trump, along with its antecedents and the author's reaction afterward.
Not that she does a bad job of this—as I say, the second half is far stronger as written prose, in my opinion, and more engaging. Unfortunately, it's also just more diet soda and low-calorie salad for the aforementioned anyone(s) still looking for The Definitive Incisive, Highly Personal Book on Our Collective Cultural Insanity at This Moment.
The author scores points for being willing to publicly write a great number of things that need to be said. For example:
That Ta-Nehsi Coates isn't necessarily the genius that he's made out to be, and worse is frankly treated like the magical negro by today's left intelligentsia. That much of today's "highly legible liberalism" is in fact "the intellectual version of a cheap high" for human-contact-starved folks in the age of social media. That sadly it's probably a law of social physics that "the more honest you are about what you think, the more you have to sit in solitude with your own thoughts" because if there's one thing that's unacceptable in our culture, it's telling the actual truth(s), and thus that "the culture is effectively mentally ill, or at least notably unwell" and that "there's never been a civilization as emotionally needy as this one" in which we've spent so much time lying to others in hopes of ensuring that in exchange they will continue to lie right back to us.
If that's as far as we'd gone, I'd have left my review at four stars, saying that the first half of the book was good but just a bit flawed because it didn't seem to be about anything in particular, though it was interesting and peppered with insight, and that the second half of the book was good but just a bit flawed because though it was focused and well-written, it was by now just a bit trite, only seeming to be brave at times because it was written by a liberal, rather than by a conservative or by the "intellectual dark web" folks (whom she renames "Free Speech YouTube") from whom we've been hearing such things for several years now. Despite those flaws, it was engaging and well written.
But Chapter 8, the final chapter—oh, Chapter 8. It's titled "What's the Problem?" and it's in this chapter that for whatever reason the author walks back everything she's done, interestingly if imperfectly, in the preceding pages.
What *is* the problem? The author says that the problem is her. Indeed, the problem is us. Anyone who's bothered by any of this stuff. There is no problem with the culture, she decides. The problem is that people who have a problem with it are just, well, let's be blunt—old. Has-beens. Needing to get out of the way and let the young people do their work. Confused because we are so many anachronistic curiosities yelling at smart young folk to get off our lawns. We just don't understand because the world has passed us by.
It's rather the longest shaggy dog story I've ever read. Seven chapters of interesting, if flawed, insightful stuff about problems in the culture, particularly in comparison to where we were as a culture not so long ago. Then, one final chapter of "NOT! We're just old, yo, and that's why we don't get it and why we think all this outdated stuff!"
She concludes, in part, that:
"Every day becomes yesterday before you know it... but there are always tomorrow's problems to look forward to... The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing, despite all the evidence to the contrary, in the exquisite lie of our own relevance."
Sorry, but what faux-philosophical claptrap. No. Some things are right, and some things are wrong. Sometimes it's possible to make a reasoned judgment that a society is worse off during one period and better off during another. Twenty-somethings do not hold a monopoly on wisdom. In fact, as she suggests in earlier pages, they may not have all that much of it in many cases. After a very reasonable, four-starish discussion of the troubles out there for seven chapters, we conclude with this? "Oh, turns out I just wasn't relevant any longer but didn't realize it. NVM."
Sadly, not buying it—it's a cop-out.
Without the final chapter, four stars-ish.
With it, two-and-a-half to three-stars-ish.
Probably most useful as a "legitimate" text attempting to subvert the dominant narrative—one that can be deployed in cultural studies classes on modern campuses where assigning texts by Jordan Peterson or the like will probably cause a riot. This book is essentially a way to get those discussions in by the back door, since it's written by a woman and a feminist, published by a major house, and also because it lacks the courage of its convictions, walking back and/or backing away from its controversial assertions in the end.
Worth a read as far as it goes, but don't expect it to set your world on fire.
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