Meetup with an Old Friend
Daniel LaPointe
As regards artistic expression, there are two types of people: producers and consumers. Zach is very, very much a consumer of books – sort of like how Justin Trout is very, very much a consumer of pizza.1 When a producer such as myself comes into contact with such a being, there’s apt to be a bit of awkwardness.
Z: So, Dan, have you finished reading The Brothers Karamazov?
D: You know, I recently learned it’s pronounced “ker-AM-uh-zov,” not “CARE-uh-MOTZ-ov.” Jordan Peterson says “ker-AM-uh-zov.”
Z: Yeah, but what does he know?
D: Well, he’s been to Russia before. That was where they put him into the medically induced coma to fix the benzo addiction.
Z: Huh, maybe he picked it up when he was over there.
D: Yeah, maybe.
[Enough of the tomfoolery. Zach, over the pad Thai, cuts to the chase.]
Z: Ok, but did you actually finish the book?
D: Nah, I haven’t thought about that book in years. I read through the Grand Inquisitor passage and stopped. It’s funny you bring it up today. James was also talking about it. We were going over some of the different characters and scenes. I was surprised by how much of it I remembered. Fyodor being obnoxious to Father Zossima and embarrassing the liberal Miusov. Katerina being way too good for Dmitri. Ivan writing that bullshit essay about the church and the state just because he could. Dmitri punching the butler (I think his name was Gregory?) and making his nose bleed. Smerdyakov “hoarding impressions.” Katerina and that slutty girl (I don’t remember her name) ambushing Alyosha to talk about Dmitri. Fyodor having an interest in this same girl. Alyosha’s girlfriend and a chapter titled “Another Reputation Ruined.” Some guy crumpling up money from Alyosha because he had too much pride to accept a gift. A kid’s dad being dragged by his beard onto the street and beaten up. Ivan’s thought experiment with the dogs eating kids. Huh, now that I think about it, these are some really vivid characters and scenes…
[And now the coup de grace, the purpose of Zach’s initial question come round at last.]
Z: Well, I finished it recently.
D: Yeah? How was it?
Z: You know Dan, I didn’t like that one quite as much.
And that was the extent of Zach’s literary analysis. Shortly afterwards he brought up Moby Dick as a contrast and said he found that book to be “quite good.”2
Granted, the above dialogue isn’t exactly how the interaction played out – the free association of scenes from the novel having been lifted from an earlier conversation with James – but it would have been pretty clear to onlookers which person was more poised to actually make commentary on the book. Later on, then, when the two of us were putzing aimlessly around the Square, myself being under the influence of two Insomnia cookies, I hazarded the following criticism:
“You know, Zach, for someone who talks a lot of shit about finishing big books, you don’t have all that much to say about them.”
To my surprise, Zach immediately accepted this as a valid criticism. I then said:
“And as regards Moby Dick, if you were to add up all the times I’ve gone in and reread certain passages, the total number of pages read would exceed the length of the book.”
In retrospect, this is a somewhat interesting argument.3 But Zach wasn’t buying it. And he was right not to. The most charitable defense of my not finishing novels takes on a different form. The argument is along the following lines:
“It’s 2023. The amount of information we have at our disposal is truly bottomless. As far as classic novels go, sensibly navigating this heap requires going in, nabbing the “big idea,” and getting out as quickly as possible.
“The literary masterpiece, then, is seen as a sort of raw ore in need of refinement. The book is not so much a worthwhile thing in itself as it is a pointer to some lumpy, Platonic mass which the author has happened across and would like to alert the reader to. Some readers catch on to the lumpy mass quickly. Others need to read the whole book. Regardless, one can put the book down once the mass has been located.”
I put forward this argument to Zach, in a much less coherent form, when we were rounding that bend one traverses when walking from the Science Center to the Square.4 He shot it down quickly.
“You can’t know you’ve gotten the “vibe” of a book if you haven’t finished it yet. You literally don’t even know how it ends.”
And I suppose he was right. Kind of obvious, really, when you hear it phrased so bluntly.5 Perhaps that makes me a Smerdyakov, then – some egotistical, impression-hoarding degenerate getting into shooting matches with a man whose intellectual superiority he truly can’t even wrap his head around.6
I then countered with something more consensus-oriented:
“Look, we’re living through the Age of the Smartphone. People’s attention spans are in serious decline. Some folks, I find, have responded to this by swinging too far in the opposite direction. They force themselves to finish books just to say they can. I don’t want to be one of those people, you know? I want to have a reason to get to the end of the book. It should be about the journey, not the destination.”
Zach was content with this. What followed was a dropping of the topic and an eventual move to, of all things, the bizarrely low percentage of Harvard students who know what a tapir is.
This discussion, and our ensuing search for the boundary between common knowledge and trivia, will perhaps be the subject of a later write-up.
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Notes:
1. I suppose we’ve given up on appealing to the masses at this point. Anyhow, Justin Trout is a man who, per numerous friend group anecdotes, has a deep-seated, primal desire to intake food. It was Aristotle who explained gravity by saying that a stone “wants” to fall. Similarly, a Chicago deep dish pizza “wants” to end up in Justin Trout’s stomach. ↩
2. From there it was onto, you guessed it, Infinite Jest.a ↩
a. I had to tell Zach to stop after he had mentioned finishing both The Pale King and The Broom of the System. The only leg-up I had on him, apparently, was having read DFW’s “E Unibus Pluram” essay. Upon learning Zach hadn’t read the essay, I pitched it to him with a passable summary of the New Sincerity and DFW’s analysis of advertisements. I then noted a passing similarity between DFW and Bo Burnham,i running into a wall, however, upon learning that Zach had never seen Inside. ↩
i. Since we’re talking DFW, we might as well go down another layer. The proposed equivalence class David Foster Wallace and entertainer Bo Burnham belong to has the following identifying characteristics. A member of this equivalence class is a white man who:
- Possesses a startlingly crisp working memory and a near encyclopedic knowledge of the world which is effortlessly deployed in his work
- Masters ironic modes of expression
- Rises to the top of the pack and acquires universal acclaim by giving the critics exactly what they want, i.e., an unimpeachable taste and intellect
- Attempts to transcend these breadwinning ironic modes with moments of sincerity, but errs on the side of continued critical esteem, i.e., never being seen as simple
- Struggles with poor mental health as a result of this shuffle
- Embraces a martyr complex and a Christ-like appearance by age 30
3. The genealogy of this idea is perhaps even more interesting. In the fall of 2017, I worked at an information center for hikers in the Adirondacks. My manager thought the popular challenge to hike all 46 of the Adirondack high peaks was a tad silly. “Why torture yourself on Allen when you can keep re-hiking Algonquin?” he figured. To counter accusations he was not a serious hiker, he would state that, while not having hiked all 46 high peaks, he had hiked high peaks on at least 46 separate occasions. In fact, he had completed over 100 such summits. I would like to think that an abstracted, nonverbal “essence” of this argument was stored in my brain only to be repurposed (years later) when speaking with Zach. ↩
4. This is that sharp corner where the pavement turns to brick and you have to look out for bikers. A stone’s throw from our freshman dorm Stoughton, depending on your athleticism. 42°22'32.91"N, 71° 7'4.07"W for the Google Earth enjoyers. ↩
5. To be fair, I do have a rough idea of what happens by the end of the book, having read the summary on Wikipedia. But that’s a far cry from seeing firsthand how it happens. ↩
6. Or at least the version of Smerdyakov who appears in that one scene with Ivan in the kitchen. ↩