Book-It '10! Book #76
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.
Title: How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis
Details: Copyright 2010, Metropolitan Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "We all relish a good scandal-the larger the figure (governor, judge) and more shocking the particulars (diapers, cigars)-the better. But why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring every lurid detail?
With “pointed daggers of prose” (The New Yorker), Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare the American psyche: what we desire, what we punish, and what we disavow. She delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases: a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a venomous whistleblower, and an over-imaginative memoirist. The motifs are classic-revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness-though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception-the necessary ingredients-are our collective plight. In How to Become a Scandal, bad behavior is the entry point for a brilliant cultural romp as well as an anti-civics lesson. “Shove your rules,” says scandal, and no doubt every upright citizen, deep within, cheers the transgression-as long as it’s someone else’s head on the block."
Why I Wanted to Read It: It got a decent review in (I think) TIME magazine and I enjoy sociology and pop culture analysis.
How I Liked It: The premise of a book dissecting the role and anatomy of scandal in our modern age is fascinating. What the author delivered is almost unbearably disappointing.
Her prose is somewhat eerily smug, a trait apparently characteristic of her style (I have never read any of her other books). Easing past that point, she does a fairly decent job with the first two case studies (yes, she breaks it into four case studies; it makes for a very short, very brief read) although the psychology with which she is using to analyze them comes from Sigmund Freud and her connections are at times laughably preposterous (finding astronaut Lisa Novak in diapers on her infamous 900 mile journey we find hilarious due to our ingrained shame issues about our bodies; disgraced judge Sol Wachtler inventing the persona of a middle-aged housewife to stalk his mistress and her lover is systematic of his repressed feminine and/or homosexual urges).
The book starts to fall apart during the third case study largely because unlike the other three offered, it does not revolve around a particular event (generally point of apprehension by police and/or the media). She details the life of Linda Tripp but offers no real particulars and spends a significant portion of the chapter debating Tripp's physical unpleasantness (and her subsequent cosmetic surgery).
The author veers the book slightly more on track in the four case study although her tangents and personality inflict too much of the writing. It's slightly more understandable she feel more kinship with James Frey, a fellow writer, but her explanations and excuses for him get increasingly tiresome (and repetitive).
The author offers a few tiny nuggets of wisdom (in a book that should have been stocked with them), largely in the epilogue. She considers what makes a scandal (and what doesn't), cultural ties, and shifting social mores. The book would have been immensely better had she stayed on those terms.
Even if she had written the book this subject deserves, the author's style too frequently reads like trash dolled up in five dollar words. Too many of the points she makes (or tries to make) could come from the keyboards of frequent Yahoo News and/or YouTube commenters, only cleaned up grammatically, punctuated properly, and flipped in obscure synonym. What few excellent and intriguing points there are to be had in the book (what makes a scandal fifty years ago? What's scandalous today that wasn't fifty years ago?) are almost lost altogether in the smug, self-indulgence that is her writing.
In her acknowledgments, she thanks a friend that "convinced me to return to this book, which I'd put aside in frustration, half finished, for years" (pg 207). The book has the undeniable feel of the slap-dash; a project the author wanted desperately to be free of doing. We can only hope a more enthusiastic, dedicated, and less personality-driven author takes up this subject and writes the book this should have been.
Notable: The book opens with the author having lunch with a governor who would eventually be disgraced. He is attempting to convince her that all men seek out prostitutes. The scandal that brought said-governor down (prostitution) is detailed along with the author's note that "the late night comedians had a field day ('To be fair, he did bring prostitution to its knees-- one girl at a time'" (pg 5).
It probably speaks of my devotion as a fangirl that I know exactly where or rather, who that quote comes from.
Title: How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis
Details: Copyright 2010, Metropolitan Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "We all relish a good scandal-the larger the figure (governor, judge) and more shocking the particulars (diapers, cigars)-the better. But why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring every lurid detail?
With “pointed daggers of prose” (The New Yorker), Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare the American psyche: what we desire, what we punish, and what we disavow. She delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases: a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a venomous whistleblower, and an over-imaginative memoirist. The motifs are classic-revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness-though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception-the necessary ingredients-are our collective plight. In How to Become a Scandal, bad behavior is the entry point for a brilliant cultural romp as well as an anti-civics lesson. “Shove your rules,” says scandal, and no doubt every upright citizen, deep within, cheers the transgression-as long as it’s someone else’s head on the block."
Why I Wanted to Read It: It got a decent review in (I think) TIME magazine and I enjoy sociology and pop culture analysis.
How I Liked It: The premise of a book dissecting the role and anatomy of scandal in our modern age is fascinating. What the author delivered is almost unbearably disappointing.
Her prose is somewhat eerily smug, a trait apparently characteristic of her style (I have never read any of her other books). Easing past that point, she does a fairly decent job with the first two case studies (yes, she breaks it into four case studies; it makes for a very short, very brief read) although the psychology with which she is using to analyze them comes from Sigmund Freud and her connections are at times laughably preposterous (finding astronaut Lisa Novak in diapers on her infamous 900 mile journey we find hilarious due to our ingrained shame issues about our bodies; disgraced judge Sol Wachtler inventing the persona of a middle-aged housewife to stalk his mistress and her lover is systematic of his repressed feminine and/or homosexual urges).
The book starts to fall apart during the third case study largely because unlike the other three offered, it does not revolve around a particular event (generally point of apprehension by police and/or the media). She details the life of Linda Tripp but offers no real particulars and spends a significant portion of the chapter debating Tripp's physical unpleasantness (and her subsequent cosmetic surgery).
The author veers the book slightly more on track in the four case study although her tangents and personality inflict too much of the writing. It's slightly more understandable she feel more kinship with James Frey, a fellow writer, but her explanations and excuses for him get increasingly tiresome (and repetitive).
The author offers a few tiny nuggets of wisdom (in a book that should have been stocked with them), largely in the epilogue. She considers what makes a scandal (and what doesn't), cultural ties, and shifting social mores. The book would have been immensely better had she stayed on those terms.
Even if she had written the book this subject deserves, the author's style too frequently reads like trash dolled up in five dollar words. Too many of the points she makes (or tries to make) could come from the keyboards of frequent Yahoo News and/or YouTube commenters, only cleaned up grammatically, punctuated properly, and flipped in obscure synonym. What few excellent and intriguing points there are to be had in the book (what makes a scandal fifty years ago? What's scandalous today that wasn't fifty years ago?) are almost lost altogether in the smug, self-indulgence that is her writing.
In her acknowledgments, she thanks a friend that "convinced me to return to this book, which I'd put aside in frustration, half finished, for years" (pg 207). The book has the undeniable feel of the slap-dash; a project the author wanted desperately to be free of doing. We can only hope a more enthusiastic, dedicated, and less personality-driven author takes up this subject and writes the book this should have been.
Notable: The book opens with the author having lunch with a governor who would eventually be disgraced. He is attempting to convince her that all men seek out prostitutes. The scandal that brought said-governor down (prostitution) is detailed along with the author's note that "the late night comedians had a field day ('To be fair, he did bring prostitution to its knees-- one girl at a time'" (pg 5).
It probably speaks of my devotion as a fangirl that I know exactly where or rather, who that quote comes from.