The book isn't good, but come on, be nice: "The Absolved" by Matthew Binder

In November, I offered up some thoughts on a developing writer who wrote an opinion piece I mostly disagreed with. I can't call what I wrote a defense of his opinions expressed in Quillette, but maybe it was something of a defense of Matthew Binder, the person who wrote them, and his right not to be attacked personally for expressing an opinion.

To briefly review, Binder had a dream to write a novel, so he interrupted his life to travel and write one. He then moved to New York to try and break into the literary world, where he faced rejection for about two years before finding a publisher. His book  The Absolved dropped on December 4th.

In Quillette, he attempted to offer "a glimpse inside the ideological monoculture of literary New York." He did not quite outright say that a monocultural literary establishment kept him out because it was unwilling to accept political views divergent from liberal ones, and he didn't quite outright say that being a white man was a big obstacle to getting published, but he strongly implied both. He offered one anecdote to back up the second claim: He thought, based on conversations with an acquisitions agent, that he had landed a deal. But the agent got an email from his boss that the company wasn't "taking on unknown white guys this year." Binder claimed that he saw this email and those were the words in it.

Quite a few outlets caught wind of the story and unleashed a fury of scorn at Binder. None was tougher on Binder's article than this scorching attack from Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette. I call it an attack on Binder's piece, but it was really an attack on Binder himself. The title called Binder a "terrible novelist," and then the opening paragraph goes like this:

Every so often on this here internet, we get a hate read that is so perfect, that so aptly encapsulates a particular form of douchebaggery that we all must collectively gasp at it's (sic) awfulness and revel in the general repulsiveness of the arrogant human being so lacking in self-awareness that they actually thought it would be a good idea to write such a thing. Today, I bring you such a hate read -- Matthew Binder's A Glimpse Into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York.

It got worse from there, and it never stopped being personal. There were a few moments when Pennacchia eased off how much she found Binder personally repugnant to refute points in what he wrote. She pointed out that it has always been difficult to get published, not just lately. She quoted from the novel, a passage which, I fully agreed, did not portend a great work. But she also just made a lot of ad hominem attacks, many of which were based on assumptions. She assumed, for example, that when he was asked to leave a party for expressing a differing opinion, that he was being obnoxious and grating, although it's equally possible the other party took offense without good reason. Pennacchia wasn't there, so she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Soon after this happened, I wrote the post that argued that while he didn't make as strong an argument as he thought, and the novel didn't seem as promising as he thought, the way he was being attacked was unreasonable. Instead of calmly pointing out the weaknesses in his post, people made it about him. He's a terrible person. He's an entitled, pompous white man with more self-confidence than talent. They also assumed his novel was terrible, and this was why he had such a hard time getting published.

The sample passage from Binder's book didn't give me a lot of hope it would be great, but I decided, mostly to get a little more perspective on an incident I found interesting, to read the novel and see. I was sort of hoping that somehow, the novel might be really good, and then my argument would look a lot stronger.

I regret to report my findings

The novel is not good. I could just leave it at that, and I'm tempted to. I don't really want to spend time pointing out flaws in someone else's book. There's really only a point to that exercise when the book in question has sold well, and I'm offering an opinion on why the book's popularity isn't deserved. It's no fun to pick at another author who's struggling to get somewhere just like I am. It's also a real chore to go into why something is bad, because it makes you linger a long time in a work you don't enjoy. But I can't pretend to be honest as an observer of literary culture or as a critic without putting a period on this whole Quillette hubbub by reviewing the book.

What is right about it

There's a good premise to the whole thing.

 66 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano was already looking ahead to a world in which automation and technology had robbed most people of the dignity that comes from meaningful employment. In Vonnegut's world, the majority of Americans without real employment were put into a TVA-like jobs program in which thirty men would sweep a single street for a day. Everyone was guaranteed a basic living, but only the elite technicians who could fix the machines really had a meaningful and abundant life. The restless masses, dubbed the "Reeks and Wrecks," eventually plotted a Luddite revolution. Dr. Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, starts off happy with society as it is, but gradually sympathizes with the Reeks and Wrecks and eventually joins the "Ghost Shirt Society" to fight the machines. But the revolution goes horribly wrong, and eventually everyone decides to go back to living meekly with the machines.

Binder offered what could have been an updating of Vonnegut's story. In 2036, most Americans have been put out of work by machines, and only a technical elite still have jobs. Instead of being on a jobs program, though, many Americans become "absolved," hence the title of the book, and no longer have to work. They have a guaranteed universal income and universal health care. They can do whatever they want with their time (except, for some reason, travel abroad). But naturally, the absolved aren't happy. They're listless and untethered. There is an undercurrent of Luddites who'd like to smash the machines and take us back to 1960 or 1860 or 60 B.C. Into this backdrop comes a presidential candidate who is, shall we say, a lot like a politician we're all familiar with today. He's stirring up the Luddite degenerates and railing against the current president, who wants to keep the status quo of socialized everything.

The Absolved's protagonist, Dr. Henri (does he have a last name?), is sort of like Vonnegut's Proteus: he starts off mostly happy with the status quo and then gradually becomes less so.

So it's an interesting premise. Every since The Atlantic ran "A World Without Work" a few years ago, I've worried about this very future. There's a lot of rich ore to mine there.

But inept writing means the promise of the premise is never realized

We never get anywhere near mining all that the story could offer. There are six weaknesses I can point to that kill any chance of this story having any kind of impact:

1) Voice: Henri's voice is relentlessly pompous. He comes off exactly like a mediocre intellect trying to sound smart. His narrative and even his dialogue are both weighed down with far more long adjective and adverbs than are necessary, and the sentence structure is convoluted. The nouns sometimes feel like they were the first choice that came up in a synonym search. Dozens of sentences labor under the weight of excess prepositional phrases when there was a more direct way to get the thought across. Examples:

• "While confident I will never fall in love with Taylor--for she is merely a dalliance, a charming and exquisite distraction from the everydayness of my regular life, an embodiment of amorous passion...
• "I've always found that a post-dinner amble never fails to help me work through and resolve the thousand small vexations that plague me."
• "Not unlike Davie Bowie of Paul McCartney, I had an almost mystifying gift for melody."
• "All around the mother are men and women in swimwear who witness this spectacle with shocked and grievous expressions. The rendering is so disproportionate and overly simplistic that I am made disturbed." (I am made disturbed?) 
• "After further coaxing, she tells a long and harrowing tale of misfortune and grief straight from Charles Dickens."

There are many, many more like this. It's an outdated way of speaking and even writing now. No man has conversed like this since the 50s. You could make the argument that Henri, as an "anti-hero," should actually sound pompous and long-winded. That might make some sense (although it would still be painful to read), except that EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN THE NOVEL SPEAKS WITH THE SAME VOICE. Examples:

• "You're the one who's inspired millions of people to cast off all they know in favor of our glorious past!" (The guard at the jail who guards Henri)
• "...told her yes, and she said that some people develop a nihilist philosophy because they dislike the world around them but don't know how to go about transforming it." (Henri's SIX-YEAR OLD SON, who apparently is not thought unusual at all for talking like this)
• "...these generals and kings that you so highly esteem carried on in the most monstrous of ways!" (Henri's father)
• "Perhaps you would prefer the world to stand still? To make its inhabitants immutable?" (Henri's friend)
• "You never can tell the time or place when love will make itself known." (Henri's boss)
• "Henri's abject failure to summon even one convincing dramatic depiction of hay-fever left his audience cold. Not even with the aid of snorting black pepper did he conjure up anything more than a couple of trifling sniffles and a runny nose..." (Henri's wife)
• "Karl, it's okay, I'm dying for my country. It's a good death. Remember, America is a bastion of goodness in a world gone mad." (The fucking immigrant who dies in a story told by a guy Henri knows at the bar, meaning that's Henri's inane manner of speech maintained through the filter of two other people.)

The end result is that I'm left thinking everyone in the novel speaks like a annoying grad student because that's the only register the author has, not because it's an artistic choice. 

2) Cliches: 

• "The room gets so quiet that I swear I can hear my own heartbeat." 
• "Looking not like a woman but a vision of Aphrodite herself."
• "Hair as black as a raven's wing..."
• "...bloom like a desert rose..."
• "...as dry as the Sahara Desert..."

3) Show don't tell:

Granted, any rule can be broken, but you need a good reason to break it. In The Absolved, we get a lot of descriptions where you just have to take the author's word for it, because you're not going to see it for yourself. 

• "I'm not sure how, but I won Taylor's affections, evinced by her allowing me to rush her off to bed that very night." (It would have been much more convincing and told us a lot more about their relationship to see what it was he had that won her over.)
• "In today's society where many people feel more intimately connected to their VR-life than to their real life, VR sex is a far more flagrant offense..." (Could we not be given a chance to see a scene rendered in which people are really preferring their VR lives? Could we not get a much better chance to see the world of the future from that than simply being told about it?)
• "Our increasingly technological advances have driven greater and greater inequality." (A lot of the details of the world of The Absolved aren't shown us ever. So we never really get to consider the themes of the book, because we really don't know the world we've visited. We're just told, "It's like this.")
• "When compelled by a powerful emotion, there's not another person alive capable of such a demonstration of charisma and persuasion." (Much better to show us that person being charismatic and persuasive, no?)

4) A lack of focus on what matters:

This novel's promise depends on being able to paint realistically a future without meaningful work for most people. But it digresses for most of the novel into Henri's very uninteresting marital troubles and his not terribly profound thoughts on women. ("It's true--once a woman depends on a man for her sexual pleasure, she gives herself to him entirely.") He can't decide if he's a family man or if family life bores him so much he just wants to run off with the young woman he got to sleep with him without knowing why. It's fine to have a novel be about more than one thing, but Binder is clearly outmatched and not up for the challenge of writing convincingly about love. Every woman in the novel is a bitch. Henri's wife is a neurotic, relentless nagging bitch, his boss is a selfish bitch, his mistress turns out to be a bitch after first seeming like a cool chick who was DTF, the bartender is a bitch who first seemed like a righteous broad. 

After first cramming so many facts (but not showing! Never showing!) about the year 2036 into the beginning that even the narrator has to apologize for digressing, we lose track of what's special about 2036 for a long, long time. 

Most of what ends up being there shows little thought and doesn't tell us more than what any wag at any bar could tell us: lack of physical labor makes you less of a man and unhappy; people need work to feel happy; nothing is free, and healthcare and basic income for all will eventually become untenable; socialism is bad and will make it so we aren't allowed to smoke and we have to kill anyone who is too expensive to keep alive; Christianity is treated like a backwards religion but Islam gets a pass; political correctness has run amok.

It's a thin story papering over hack political philosophy coupled with amateur economics. ("Rich people can only buy so many consumer goods, and when they run out of things to buy, they simply save their wealth, essentially removing that money from circulation.") Everything in the story feels like the writer knew, based on his political beliefs, what needed to happen, and then just moved some characters around and had stuff happen until he got that ending. We don't learn anything from the novel, because the author didn't learn anything from it, either. 

5) Errata:

I had errors in my own book (and every blog post I ever put out), so it's a little hypocritical of me to complain about typographical or syntax errors. I get that with a smaller press, you may not be able to hire a pro editor. But there were a lot of errors I found, and I wasn't even looking that hard. From mixing up "affected" and "effected" to sentences that obviously don't read right if you read them out loud to comma splices to misuse of reflexive pronouns, there were a lot of things that weakened the ethos of the book even more than just the amateurish composition. Most of the main story is told in the present tense, with earlier information in past or past perfect, but there are occasions where there are slip-ups, and the past tense makes it into the main narrative. The president's nickname is "bien hecho," said to be Spanish for "do-gooder," but I believe that means "well done," and the word he was looking for was one word, "bienhechor." 

6) No moral center and no identifiable theme

I think the author is something of a libertarian, but didn't want to be seen as one. The only mention of Rand in the novel is to make fun of her. I think Binder didn't want to push his political views down our throats too much, which is a good instinct. But it ended up that it's not really clear what the theme of the book is. If Henri doesn't have the right ideas, and his wife doesn't, and Serena doesn't, and the president doesn't, and the socialists don't, and the rebellion doesn't, then who does? The closest we get to someone with an answer is the old lady who believes in God and it comforts her after her husband dies. That's not really a theme worth writing about. By the end, Henri has thrown out a lot of ideas, some of which I think the reader is meant to take seriously and some of which I think we're meant to see as bunk from an unreliable narrator. But nothing emerges as the real winner. 

I thought in chapter 39 that we were getting close to a theme, when Henri tells us that, "Once a man has acquired the taste for tackling difficult things, he no longer has the inclination for matters of ease." That seemed like it might be Henri's awakening. But then two chapters later, he is expounding some long-winded and incredibly stupid theory on how men and women love differently, and in chapter 47, Henri has gone full-reversal on what he said in chapter 39. He now advises: "If it's the truth you want to stand before you, you must never be for or against anything. The struggle between for and against is our fatal flaw!" It's an outburst coming from nowhere and not really meaning anything, although maybe it does foreshadow what Henri will ultimately do (thirty minutes after deciding he will do the opposite thing). 

Ok, so the book was bad, but that's still not a reason to be mean

I feel pretty bad about this review, because I think Binder's been through enough. He wrote about what he experienced when trying to get his book published. His facts were not all correct. One anecdote about a guy saying he didn't want new white guys that year doesn't show that all of New York's writing establishment is anti-male or anti-white or anti-white male. But telling your story isn't always just about the hard facts. It can be about what your experience felt like to you. And just because he isn't mostly right doesn't mean he's all wrong. Publishing (and art in general) is fairly liberal. Pennacchia acknowledged this even while beating Binder with a club made of snark. The literary world can be closed off to ideas that aren't in its wheelhouse. I have never been anywhere at any writing gathering where anyone admitted to being a conservative.

There's strict logic, and there's the logic that happens to you when you're trying to do something you desperately want to do. Writers all over the world get upset and start looking for answers when they can't publish the work they put so much of themselves into. Against everything we were taught as kids, sometimes there can be some wisdom to making excuses rather than saying your failures are because you're bad. If you admit it's because you're bad, you might give up. If you make excuses, you might keep going. Binder did that. I've done it, too. And look what it did for him-- at the end of a long road, he got his novel published. It's selling okay. It's got a few good reviews--just not from me.

Eventually, Binder won't have to make excuses. But he's going to remember how he was treated during this, and that's going to make him a lot less receptive to what the people who attacked him have to say.

Those who saw the flaws in his argument could have just calmly pointed out those flaws. When you're right, you can afford to be calm, almost bored. They could have, like I did, read the story and shown how maybe the flaws of the book itself had something to do with the difficulty of getting it published. They could have restrained themselves to the facts at hand, instead of making it all about Binder's aggrieved white maleness. But they didn't. They made it a snark free-for-all against Binder. For all I know, Binder spends his free time building solar panels for orphans in Angola. So I'm going to keep my thoughts about his writing and his work separate.

I like snark. It has a place, but that place isn't against people who are just frustrated like we've all been or we all are now. Snark is for the powerful. They are supposed to be the butt of our jokes, not some poor dude with such a tender heart he gave up his day job to write a novel because of Anthony Bourdain.

The novel is pretty bad. It reminded me a lot of the film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It has the same strange misogyny and the same buoyant belief in its own value, in spite of obvious flaws. I like how James Franco's The Disaster Artist chose to treat Wiseau. They saw his self-confidence and desire to tell his story against all common sense as something to celebrate. They noted how remarkable it is that we were still talking about his move years after he made it. And here I am, now, at the end of a very long post talking about Binder's book. To quote Binder's Henri, making art requires ego. I don't understand why we are surprised Binder had enough ego to think the fault wasn't his own. I very much doubt any criticism I or anyone else could raise against the book will change his mind about the merits of his work. And I wouldn't want it any other way.