Recommend: No
There are lots of moments in life that build to nothing. The countless aggregate hours spent on a bus to and from work are terrifying. All that time accreting into a dumpster pile of experience. This book was made to be consumed in these monotonous stretches of life.
There’s not really a plot on show. A woman in her late twenties tries to find a job, goes on a lot of Tinder dates and thinks about her ex-boyfriend. It’s all written in a detached, exasperated tone. There are sixty pages. Most pages are a paragraph long. Most paragraphs are clinging to a thread, sentences spilling out barely connected.
This is the new modern genre: ramble-core.
My phone keeps accidently calling people. I don’t have any friends but it keeps calling my mother or the woman I did babysitting for two months ago. I am supposed to be meeting someone but my grandmother is dying. I’m walking around in the dark in a suburb very far from house eating $1.62 worth of ham from a plastic bag. I can’t remember what my skills are. My mother messages me to say that my grandmother is about to die, and then that she has died. I started typing out a message and my phone accidently calls her. My mother says, ‘I can’t talk right now, I’m too upset, I just can’t, I’ll talk to you in a few days.’ My phone accidently calls her again, two more times. Summer is over and I didn’t have fun.
This is a ‘relatable’ book. It stumbles over itself. It is not unpleasant to read and at the same time there is nothing memorable on show. Books that are successful with this tone (eg. My Year of Rest and Relaxation) maintain a coherent plot and effectively build tension through repetition and/or juxtaposition. There’s no underlying darkness like you’d find in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. More of a self-involved depression.
The most concerning aspect to this book is that the protagonist is younger than me. I am ageing out of ramble-core.
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