u/jsircy

Just completed two bestsellers this week: I Who Have Never Known Men and Theo of Golden. They’re Zoomer and Boomer darlings, respectively. Everyone I’ve known who has crushed hard on Theo has been over 60. Everyone I’ve known who has stanned for I Who Have Never has been under 30.

1.      ToG is about seeing a fictitious man “truly live” and then wishing that a man just like that would visit your town.

2.      IWHNKM is about what it’s like to have access to nothing modernity offers so when you finish reading the book, you can appreciate everything you take for granted (like TikTok?).

3.      ToG is castlebuilding at its most extreme. The title character is an octogenarian analog of the manic pixie dreamgirl. He listens! He loves art! He makes art! He SEES! In these troubled times, we seek a model for what it looks like to live, so thank you, Theo, for helping us learn to live and love again!

4.      IWHNKM is speculative fiction about a character writing speculative fiction. The narrator is a child born into a world where she will never have access to, much less experience, much of what we take for granted. So we see her as a nascent novelist: asking questions, writing stories, and exploring.

5.      Both books are episodic and essentially plotless. “Just like life!” = the generous reading.

6.      I wanted to kick Theo several times. There are at least two points in the book where his obliviousness is inexplicable given how preternaturally insightful he is the rest of the time. Then the ending gave the entire game away. Plus, his artistic medium is visual, and we don’t get to see any of the portraits he obsesses over or the landscapes we're told he rendered to worldwide acclaim.

7.      I had sympathy for the nameless narrator of IWHNKM but found her character inconsistent and disingenuous. However, the narrator is a more successful communicator than Theo. From the novel's final section: “I am writing [these words] for some unknown reader who will probably never come…But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them.”

8.      Does this mean that I (a Gen X / Millennium fencesitter) am at heart more sympathetic to the Zoomers than the Boomers? It is I Who Have Never Known Generational Affiliation.

Finished yesterday. Short and haunting. If you've read M. Houellebecq's Submission, it's a nice companion novel.

Published in 1981. Speculative fiction. Revolution has broken out in Apartheid South Africa. A husband, wife, and three kids retreat to the village of their black servant, who they call July. They are sympathetic with the aims of the revolution (at least they have told themselves they are), but the novel shows them gradually unraveling.

Some counterpoints with Submission:

1. The single narrator in Submission vs. the married couple in July's People. S's narrator has his scholarly interest, Huysmans, as a sparring partner, but the emotional stakes go way up when the sparring partner is your spouse and the recriminations of "We could've moved to Canada five years ago" or "Look what you've gotten us into" keep popping up.

2. The revolutionaries are not a monolith (who knows if the Muslims in Submission are all united? That's not the narrator's worry). The tribal chief in JP isn't on board with the revolutionaries because they're from different tribes/nations. In any case, the white couple is on the outs with the new regime, no matter who's in charge. Submission features the new authorities making the narrator a Godfather offer. No such offer will be coming the protagonists' way here.

3. JP seems like the kind of book that caught hell from both sides. It's not The Camp of the Saints by any means, but neither does it excoriate the whites S. Afrikaaners who are freaked out. Fun backstory here: Anne Tyler's wrote a glowing review of the book that's like, "every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible" and the leftist clapback was, "Oh, so you think the disintegration of apartheid is chilling, huh? You played yourself!" lol. I don't see MH's Submission getting the same kind of fire from both sides. Maybe I'm wrong.

The novel is only 170 pages. If you're an Audible member, the Nadia-May-read audiobook is a free add to your library.