Seize The Day, by Saul Bellow
First off, I must admit that this wasn't a book that I'd have picked out for myself just from the back jacket blurb, unless I was in the mood for a flaxseed-on-raw-carrot-sticks-sandwich type of book, which is what I'd consider this book to be. My first reaction to this book was that people who liked it were likely "... privileged people who can relate to the fact that this is a man who fails and doesn't confront his failing tendencies and keeps on failing". If you think this offensive, or even just kind of shallow, I may be pleased to direct you to the Amazon.com reviews, which are much more charitable in their views.
But I don't think my view is entirely uncharitable (maybe a bit), because this book is about failure, and emotional irresolution.
Seize The Day, by this Saul Bellow fellow who won the Nobel Prize for Literature (FOR SERIOUS?), is a book that follows the day of all-American "Tommy" Wilhelm (aka the more Jewish Wilhelm Adler) as he goes through his day, attempting to seek some signs of affection from his father without going into an anxiety attack, attempting to plead with his estranged wife for freedom so she wouldn't take the last of his money to pay for his children, which he then hands over to a certain Dr. Tamkin, that he's got a fairly good idea is a conman, to invest in lard futures. Yes, lard futures. If I could tell him of the fat-free revolution that would be taking place in 20, 30 years I would, but alas, he is a fictional character and I am merely an irate reader.
The book centers on Tommy's anxieties and such for the first 80 or so pages; I think the best writing comes when you as a reader are entirely draw into how much shame and anger and helplessness that Tommy feels as an adult man at his father's complete lack of regard for his son; how his father makes his son feel as if his son's failures were nothing but a burden to him in his old age. Dialogue is Bellow's strong point; the book dragged through about 30 pages of Tommy reflecting on his failure to become an actor in minute detail from the way the "casting agent" twitched down to the exact partial-truth-and-lies that he told his family to move to Hollywood to try and make it. I have to give Bellows credit for having the sheer will to write thirty pages outlining in excruciating detail the process with which a person fails. The details really do capture well how one makes bad decisions, rationalizes them, and continues making them, and to have been able to keep up this sort of detailed writing for 117 pages while making some sort of narrative sense is an achievement, I think.
Saul Bellow is supposed to be funny on some level, and his character Dr. Tamkin is supposed to be funny with his pop-psych-philosophy, silly phrases, and blatant (or not-so-blatant) conning of those around him. I think there's supposed to be some sort of irony in the fact that the only person with a strong grasp of the truth - or the person who tells Tommy to stop worrying and just "Seize the Day" is a conman, but I found this portrayal kind of tired and grotesque. I found Dr. Tamkin's humour not quite dark enough to be black humour, not quite absurd enough to be absurd humour, and just not quite clever enough to interest me. Others may differ. Some people find bad poetry in a book about failure funny.
Actually, putting it that way, it does sound kind of funny. But it isn't.
In short, this book is a mediation on the anxieties of failure, without any conclusion (Wikipedia lies when it says that Tommy has a reckoning and finally accepts the "burden of self"), because to have achieved any conclusion would've defeated the purpose of a book on failure, though some may argue that this is so much more than that and is about the basic needs of the human condition or something.
Perhaps for people who were born privileged enough that they were expected to succeed from day one in life, but not for others. So forgive me if I don't find this particularly impressive nor convincing. Or perhaps it was ground-breaking for its time (1956), but I think these ideas have thoroughly percolated through our culture now - that we're all failures in someway and that it's OK because we're all worthy as humans or something - and I think that others have said it better, and in more entertaining ways. Fight Club comes to mind, is 100x more relevant, and stars Brad Pitt - and how could anyone resist Brad Pitt?
In conclusion: I don't think it makes the top 100, nor the top 1000, though maybe the top 10,000 if you were going for the Historical Completion in Literature Award, because apparently Bellow is quite influential on modern literature. However, as a book that is at 117 pages for the Penguin edition which reads somewhat like your friend's mid-life crisis memoir, this book is an easy way to pad out your top-1000 list for this round, and isn't so terrible in any way to make you want to claw your eyes out. You have been warned.
And I am now ready for my next dosage of literature!
But I don't think my view is entirely uncharitable (maybe a bit), because this book is about failure, and emotional irresolution.
Seize The Day, by this Saul Bellow fellow who won the Nobel Prize for Literature (FOR SERIOUS?), is a book that follows the day of all-American "Tommy" Wilhelm (aka the more Jewish Wilhelm Adler) as he goes through his day, attempting to seek some signs of affection from his father without going into an anxiety attack, attempting to plead with his estranged wife for freedom so she wouldn't take the last of his money to pay for his children, which he then hands over to a certain Dr. Tamkin, that he's got a fairly good idea is a conman, to invest in lard futures. Yes, lard futures. If I could tell him of the fat-free revolution that would be taking place in 20, 30 years I would, but alas, he is a fictional character and I am merely an irate reader.
The book centers on Tommy's anxieties and such for the first 80 or so pages; I think the best writing comes when you as a reader are entirely draw into how much shame and anger and helplessness that Tommy feels as an adult man at his father's complete lack of regard for his son; how his father makes his son feel as if his son's failures were nothing but a burden to him in his old age. Dialogue is Bellow's strong point; the book dragged through about 30 pages of Tommy reflecting on his failure to become an actor in minute detail from the way the "casting agent" twitched down to the exact partial-truth-and-lies that he told his family to move to Hollywood to try and make it. I have to give Bellows credit for having the sheer will to write thirty pages outlining in excruciating detail the process with which a person fails. The details really do capture well how one makes bad decisions, rationalizes them, and continues making them, and to have been able to keep up this sort of detailed writing for 117 pages while making some sort of narrative sense is an achievement, I think.
Saul Bellow is supposed to be funny on some level, and his character Dr. Tamkin is supposed to be funny with his pop-psych-philosophy, silly phrases, and blatant (or not-so-blatant) conning of those around him. I think there's supposed to be some sort of irony in the fact that the only person with a strong grasp of the truth - or the person who tells Tommy to stop worrying and just "Seize the Day" is a conman, but I found this portrayal kind of tired and grotesque. I found Dr. Tamkin's humour not quite dark enough to be black humour, not quite absurd enough to be absurd humour, and just not quite clever enough to interest me. Others may differ. Some people find bad poetry in a book about failure funny.
Actually, putting it that way, it does sound kind of funny. But it isn't.
In short, this book is a mediation on the anxieties of failure, without any conclusion (Wikipedia lies when it says that Tommy has a reckoning and finally accepts the "burden of self"), because to have achieved any conclusion would've defeated the purpose of a book on failure, though some may argue that this is so much more than that and is about the basic needs of the human condition or something.
Perhaps for people who were born privileged enough that they were expected to succeed from day one in life, but not for others. So forgive me if I don't find this particularly impressive nor convincing. Or perhaps it was ground-breaking for its time (1956), but I think these ideas have thoroughly percolated through our culture now - that we're all failures in someway and that it's OK because we're all worthy as humans or something - and I think that others have said it better, and in more entertaining ways. Fight Club comes to mind, is 100x more relevant, and stars Brad Pitt - and how could anyone resist Brad Pitt?
In conclusion: I don't think it makes the top 100, nor the top 1000, though maybe the top 10,000 if you were going for the Historical Completion in Literature Award, because apparently Bellow is quite influential on modern literature. However, as a book that is at 117 pages for the Penguin edition which reads somewhat like your friend's mid-life crisis memoir, this book is an easy way to pad out your top-1000 list for this round, and isn't so terrible in any way to make you want to claw your eyes out. You have been warned.
And I am now ready for my next dosage of literature!