All in all, who isn't a brick in the wall?: "Kylie Wears Balmain" by Sarah Resnick

The Pushcart Anthology has a funny quirk I've noticed over the years. As the editors lay out the contents, which alter between fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, only the fiction entries are specifically called out as fiction at the beginning. For example, the story I'm reviewing now has the title of the story on the first line, then "fiction by Sarah Resnick" on the second line, and finally the journal in which the story first appeared (n+1 in this case) on the third line. I can see why they don't specifically say that poetry is poetry. Poetry is set off typographically (so much that one college professor of mine said that the best way to tell if something is a poem is that "the lines don't go all the way to to end"), so it's easy to know when you're reading a poem. But nowadays, creative non-fiction tends to sound a lot like first-person fiction. So it's easy to get confused sometimes about what you're reading. Pushcart ONLY calls out the fiction as fiction. It's as if the non-fiction were the default, the assumed form, and fiction were the oddball that needs labelled. I doubt this would have been true fifty years ago in a literary anthology.

I bring this up because Resnick's "Kylie Wears Balmain" sounded a lot like to me like creative non-fiction, like a memoir. I had to keep going back to the beginning to be sure that what I was reading was actually a short story.

My difficulty being able to tell fiction (something that didn't happen) from non-fiction (something that really happened) turned out to be totally appropriate to the themes of Resnick's excellent story. In "Kylie," a woman (called "the woman" throughout) takes a job writing for a celebrity tabloid. She's tired of being poor and living in a crappy place, and she is already working two jobs. The magazine (called "The Magazine" throughout) offers good pay and a lot of nice perks, including great catered dinners for staff.

Immediately after taking the job, she has doubts about what she is doing. She went to school to do serious writing, but The Magazine is everything that's wrong with America: "fashion knock-offs, 'diets that work,' stratified wealth, divorce, couture latex, infidelity, single moms, countouring, God, fame, infamy."

She assuages the guilt in two ways. (Well, three, I guess. Guilt also goes down easy with a fancy catered dinner.) First, she tells herself she is just there to "check the facts." Although her friends chide her that a magazine like The Magazine doesn't contain any facts, there are actually a dizzying number of facts for The Woman to check up on. And unlike every serious journalism enterprise in America, The Magazine actually still employs enough fact-checkers to get its stories right. Reason being, The Magazine can lose the good will of its sources if it does something like misprint the age of a celebrity. So there are stakes for the magazine, and those stakes mean it's important to get the facts right. The facts might be about the most insipid things, but they're still technically facts.

The second way The Woman comes to terms with her job is that everyone else working as a fact-checker at The Magazine is a lot like her. They're all artists of various sorts: poets, novelists, the editors of a literary magazine who get no money printing literature, so they do this job to pay for the other one. There's even a Democratic candidate for city office working there. The Magazine is, without meaning to be, "a benevolent sponsor of the city's high-minded literary and arts communities."

It's easy to scoff, but what if this were how the next great American novel came to be? 

The Woman has come face-to-face with a reality almost everyone in the arts faces eventually: art doesn't pay. So she has to take a job in the world, and in her case, there's an extra perversity to it. As an artist, she's beholden to critique everything that The Magazine tries to push on people. But as a fact checker, she's forced to help protect The Magazine's ability to uphold the culture she should be deconstructing.

To add insult to injury, every day she checks facts about "artists" of a sort who are making money--scads of money--by being artists, which has to make The Woman question what is wrong with her and whether something was very wrong with her calculations of value in the first place.

Ultimately, The Woman is spared from having to go through an enlightenment that would allow her to walk out of the job, because the job walks out on her. Like all American consumer culture, it eventually consumes itself. The Magazine ends up broke, partly through bad business practices, and partly because the market has changed: celebrities no longer need to work with tabloids to stay relevant, because they can simply build their own brand through social media.

The Magazine's staff dinners get progressively more and more parsimonious, until finally, they consist of nothing more than a nutrition bar The Magazine is hawking on behalf of a celebrity publicist. When The Woman learns she's been fired, she takes one last nutrition bar and continues reading The Magazine on the way out. Far from finding a way to live without the worst of American capitalism, she has become content to drain every last drop she can from it.

I find this story "relatable," as they say

I never intended to end up in the job I'm in. If you'd told me in 1997 as I was getting out of the Marine Corps and headed off to college that I'd be where I am, I'd have laughed at you. But having no money when everyone else you know does has a way of changing your mind about things. I didn't want to be a burden on other people, and I hoped that maybe I'd even be able to help others if I got a job. So I gave in to the system, as the system expresses itself through market forces in the labor market.

That job has enabled me to support a family and also to help several people outside my family. It is enabling me to pursue writing as a passion. Like "The Woman" from "Kylie," I work with a lot of people who didn't dream of being where they are now, people who use their day jobs to try to follow what they really want to be doing on the side.

I don't think there's a solution to getting out of this situation. Any job you get is going to at least be supported by the worst of American capitalism, even if it doesn't directly feed into it. You might be a massage therapist (the job I dream of doing when I try to think of a job with no social downside), but all of your clients are going to be people who make money off the worst of American capitalism, unless you intend to specify "no robber barons" in your marketing. If the American economy went south, your job as a massage therapist would take a hit, too. If your ability to do your job depends on the health of another industry, then you are a part of that industry, no matter what you may think.

Anyone with a bank account can't really claim they don't support American capitalism, including its military adventuring side.

You could, I suppose, try to take extreme measures: move to the woods in Alaska, somewhere where you are allowed to just claim a piece of land and not pay for it. Use only what your hands can make, eat only what you can grow, gather, or catch. But what good is this? For one thing, if everyone did that, the wilds would soon disappear, making it impossible for anyone else to live that life. Secondly, I'd die in about twelve hours of that kind of life. I know no survival skills that don't pertain to civilized life. Finally, the biggest benefit from this kind of life would be a reduction in your consumption and footprint on the environment. But if that's your goal, the hard truth is that nothing you do to reduce your consumption will be as effective as suicide.

Is there any hope, then, for someone who wants to live a life that isn't co-opted? I think there is, and it lies in refusing to give in to the lies around us even while we are forced to give some level of support to those lies. The Woman, having helped fact-check a story on the short-lived romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, wonders whether they were ever really in love or if it was a con cooked up by their respective PR teams. She decides that it is "of little consequence as far as fact-checking is concerned."

"What matters, for her purposes, is that even if Taylor and Tom were not truly in love, they had still performed love for the cameras. Love or no love, there remains the fact of the performance. And in the fact of the performance, there is something one can call "truth," i.e., the performance happened. 

If there is a fiction in the story, it does not originate in The Magazine."

The Woman is lost at this point. And here we return to the difficult distinction between fiction and non-fiction with which we began, a distinction becoming all the more difficult every day as journalism struggles to keep up with the age in which we now live. 

The job of people is to know better and hope for better even while we work in a world in which better does not yet exist. It is to be "in but not of the world," as my Christian friends would have it. The Woman convinces herself that the lies she supports aren't lies because they contain so many facts. It's easier to believe this than to accept what the job really is. I propose that the superior route is to remember you are supporting a lie, even if you don't see much choice and this realization makes you unhappy.

The person who knows she is working for something other than the ideal can still push back, can still have small ways of influencing society. She joins an organization of people with no name, an international conspiracy fighting an ongoing guerrilla war for truth and a better way to live.

We will often fail to resist when we should. We will acquiesce when we shouldn't. But we mustn't content ourselves forever with living off the scraps the world throws us. I conclude with another Christian reference, this time, the words of C.S. Lewis:

Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government.