Posted On: Tuesday - April 23rd 2024 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Political Correctness Books
(Continued from the basic book review.)
I wrote in our general review of Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania that the post would have been too long were all the criticisms I have to have been mixed in. (That sounds ominous!). This post has some relatively minor criticism of the book, but the next part will be a criticism of the opinions of the author. That I feel the need to write the 2nd part is a real shame, considering what I thought about her 5 days ago, before I picked up and read Mania. I will address the comprehensive comment by E.H. Hail under the basic review, as I write more tommorrow.
Here is some minor criticism involving this book. Firstly, I used the word "section" in the review to describe each alt-year (one of them a period) portion of the writing for a reason. Within each of those 8 - there's also something very interesting at the end - there are chapters, labeled as such, Chapter 1, etc. Well, that's downright confusing, as, while I was flipping to find my place I wondered "Wait, I've already read Chapter 2. Why is Chapter 1 over here?" Yes, I've heard of bookmarks! How about label them by alt-months within each alt-year to help with the chronology, or label them "Alt-'14 - Chapter 1", or at least at the top of each page, have the alt-year next to each chapter heading page?
OK, that's a really small thing, so let me get to the content of the story. That section [1972 - 2010] with all the background of character Pearson Converse's life has a long sad story of her being brought up by serious Jehovah's Witnesses. (I guess there aren't too many unserious ones.) This seems very important to the story, as it goes on for a while.
I had to go check the internet about "Lionel Shriver Jehovah's Witnesses" and came out with nothing in the author's background. However, she WAS brought up in a religious family, as her Dad was a Presbyterian minister who by one point become president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York. OK, fine, but I cannot see that childhood resembling the life of a JW child the way it was described in this novel. Has she written about anything like this in other novels or in her Spectator articles? Perhaps the author had friends who told her about this upbringing and the other side of the story of these folks that appear regularly on porches around the nation.**
The problem I have with this is that it never ended up having anything to do with the rest of the story. I can imagine it COULD have, in 2 ways: 1) IIRC, this writer did compare the Mental Parity movement to a religion, maybe later on in the story. However, I'd thought she would connect that up with the story of her JW upbringing from that 2nd section. 2) As Pearson Converse suffered more and more troubles when she stood out as the movement got worse, she mentioned that during trying times like this, one seems to go back to depend on one's family. - back to her roots. Yet, the character does nothing of the sort.
Was the only reason for this whole part of the story that Mrs. Shriver could use with the great joke about her having escaped her family to her friend's family, seeing this as "The Witness Protection Program"?
Next, I think any reviewer or reader would tell you that the author's 2 or 3 page section in which she (Pearson Converse, but really Lionel Shriver) tells the story of the cancelling of all movies, TV shows, and books that have any mention or display of stupidity versus intelligence is too much. Yeah, I know she was having fun with this. She may have had too many good examples in her head, Gilligan v the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Maxwell Smart, etc, to pass up. She's old enough to go back a long ways with this too! Regarding Maxwell Smart for example, part of her point is to show that even arguments to the effect of "the idea is to show that even stupid people can do a great job" and such would not fly. This does relate to the modern "Tom Sawyer has the word "nigger", but he's one of the good guys. I was just pointing that out." Nope, too bad. Logic does not count with these kind of people. Though this went on too long, that was a good point to make.
I will add another small point, this one involving the writer's possible cluelessness about real-world household finances. In the Peak Stupidity review of The Motion of the Body Through Space (para 13) it seems that the writer went one way with the free-spending yuppie couple. With both out of jobs due to (yes) Wokeness, she painted too rosy a picture of their financial state, though, granted, neither of us about their 401-k's and debt, because, well, they're characters in a novel!
In this book, at one point only Pearson, the college English Instructor, has lost her job. Wade still has his tree business. Pearson doesn't think they will be able to afford the mortgage on the house. Let me tell you, tree guys can make LOT of money. He can make a mortgage payment with one tree. The loss of the adjunct faculty money is, what, $30,000 a year before taxes? (Wade can take cash. I sure would!) The picture of their family finances is wrong in the other direction here.
Here's one more very small point on grammar [Added, 4/25] only to included because the story involves the decline of literacy. Within the conversation (page 200), Pearson the character and Lionel the writer say "Of course I'm not okay. That's like asking someone who's jumped off a forty-story building if they're okay." Excuse me?! This is not the modern gender-bending pronoun stupidity but just the old lower-stupidity level feminist pronound stupidity. Still...
Finally, the reader of Lionel Shriver's novels or previous Peak Stupidity reviews of the same will know one particular element of her writing that is a bit off. She likes to use conversation between the characters to tell the story much of the time. That's fine in and of itself. However, these conversations, as I've written before, simply don't sound realistic, as high-level grammar and fancy words are used by most people in the conversation. I know, the narrator character in her novels is usually in a literary field, which is Mrs. Shriver's keeping it real (writing on what she knows). No matter how highfalutin, the characters in her novels and the characters in her life may be though, sorry, people simply don't talk like that in conversation. They don't talk with words from an Atlantic article. This is something one can get used to.
OK, I'll get to what I really wanted to write tomorrow.
* ... that is, along with writing you back there too. I wanted to get going on this post first.
** I'm pretty sure I mentioned the following somewhere, but this is kind of funny, so ... We had (usually) the same 2 nice black ladies come to the house for a period of 4-5 years, I think. Because I'd not early on treated them nicely but firmly with "We're just not agonna join. Sorry.", we were on the hook, or maybe we had them on the hook, but definitely not intentionally.
1) This one time I heard the knock and saw the silhouette of the 2 hefty ladies through the window blinds. With the lighting the way it was, I knew they could peer in and see someone moving easily, so I had to do an Army Basic Training style belly crawl below the window line around to another room. "Don't move! We gotta stay here for 5 minutes!"
2) This time I saw the maroon-colored American sedan parked in front of our house from a block and a half away while riding my bicycle home. I diverted to a cross street and got out the (see?) handy mobile phone. I called the wife to tell her to stay put until I told her the coast was clear. I had to get to a vantage point far enough to where I could get out of view in case they left in my direction.
Perhaps I should have been more forthright ... ;-}
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[UPDATED 04/24:] Added paragraph on the pop culture cancellation section. I'll add one more very small thing when I get the book back in my hands.
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Comments:
stretch23
Tuesday - April 30th 2024 8:24AM MST
PS I'm reading it right now and I'm having the same impression about her strengths as a novelist. I don't remember such bad dialog in the Mandibles as exists here. Really, really bad violation of "show don't tell." Very awkward and unrealistic scenes. The best prose in the book is the set piece on growing up as a Witness. Subtle, psychologically insightful exploration of adolescent feelings about family embarrassment and the need to blend in to regular society. However, as you mention, it contributes nothing to the plot other than establishing the source of her "contrarian" thinking, and completely disproportionate to its purpose. I think she went on at such length only because it's what she is best at.
Moderator
Thursday - April 25th 2024 11:14AM MST
PS: Jerry Jeff Walker, ahh, well why didncha' say so? ;-}
That's a different story. I like what I've heard from Jerry Jeff. I will go listen to that one on youtube pretty soon.
I appreciate the suggestions on the non-fiction and fiction book, Tarheel, the one of each).
That's a different story. I like what I've heard from Jerry Jeff. I will go listen to that one on youtube pretty soon.
I appreciate the suggestions on the non-fiction and fiction book, Tarheel, the one of each).
70sTarheel
Thursday - April 25th 2024 10:30AM MST
PS
"Trashy Women" was an early 90s country novelty song. The hook is "I like my women just a little on the trashy side." Jerry Jeff Walker wrote it.
"Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction" is Shriver's collection of essays. I liked about half of them. IMO her best novel is "Big Brother" which is based on her older brother and not Orwellian. The ending will piss you off.
"Trashy Women" was an early 90s country novelty song. The hook is "I like my women just a little on the trashy side." Jerry Jeff Walker wrote it.
"Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction" is Shriver's collection of essays. I liked about half of them. IMO her best novel is "Big Brother" which is based on her older brother and not Orwellian. The ending will piss you off.
Moderator
Thursday - April 25th 2024 5:56AM MST
PS: Tarheel, no I did not know that line or song from Confederate Railroad, or the band for that matter. Modern country?
Yes, I was going to put somewhere in that first review post that our commenter 70sTarheel grew up in the same location, Gastonia, NC.
How do you like the rest of Lionel Shriver's novels that you've read. (Or, is there any nonfiction, books, that is? I was under the impression that there's not.)
Yes, I was going to put somewhere in that first review post that our commenter 70sTarheel grew up in the same location, Gastonia, NC.
How do you like the rest of Lionel Shriver's novels that you've read. (Or, is there any nonfiction, books, that is? I was under the impression that there's not.)
Moderator
Thursday - April 25th 2024 5:55AM MST
PS: J1234, I (barely) remember "Good Times". I guess it was someone morally decent, as these 3(?) kids, which included the famous "Dynomite!" JJ Walker, had a Dad... who actually lived with them and all. Then, you can show the upper-middle-class Cosby intact family, but that doesn't mean the black world will change for the better - just gives some White people a wrong perspective.
Back to "Good Time", yes, it was too blackety-black. I think people watched simply to see JJ say "Dynomite! at least once per show, that's all
;-}
Back to "Good Time", yes, it was too blackety-black. I think people watched simply to see JJ say "Dynomite! at least once per show, that's all
;-}
70sTarheel
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 3:33PM MST
PS There is a "New Yorker" article from a few years ago that explains a little about the change. "Lionel Shriver is Looking for Trouble": "The family moved to Atlanta when Shriver was fifteen, and she entered her new high school as Lionel. βI just liked the sound of it,β she said. βIt was kind of arbitrary and out of the air.β
She and I both spent our earliest years in Gastonia. I'm a year older. Presbys move their clerics around, so she wasn't there long. I didn't know her.
I have read most of her other books, including the collection of essays. Her political opinions are varied and make her hard to pigeonhole.
She's certainly not a little on the trashy side. I used that description inre to MTG in an earlier post. You seemed to take mild umbrage. Of course it's from the Confederate Railroad song.
She and I both spent our earliest years in Gastonia. I'm a year older. Presbys move their clerics around, so she wasn't there long. I didn't know her.
I have read most of her other books, including the collection of essays. Her political opinions are varied and make her hard to pigeonhole.
She's certainly not a little on the trashy side. I used that description inre to MTG in an earlier post. You seemed to take mild umbrage. Of course it's from the Confederate Railroad song.
J1234
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 3:11PM MST
PS-
Thanks for the correction! Yeah, sorry...that was The Jeffersons. I liked Sanford and Son a lot better than the Jeffersons, which is probably why I transferred Lionel to that show.
The absolute worst black sitcom of that era was Good Times. JJ Walker was alright, but I remember the writing involved a lot of black-centric social commentary that usually elicited loud hootin' n' hollerin' from the (apparently) mostly black studio audience.
Thanks for the correction! Yeah, sorry...that was The Jeffersons. I liked Sanford and Son a lot better than the Jeffersons, which is probably why I transferred Lionel to that show.
The absolute worst black sitcom of that era was Good Times. JJ Walker was alright, but I remember the writing involved a lot of black-centric social commentary that usually elicited loud hootin' n' hollerin' from the (apparently) mostly black studio audience.
Moderator
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 2:10PM MST
PS: The deal with that confusion between the 2 1970s black sitcoms is not so much that Obama confused his black sitcom wives, meaning he's not so authentically black. It also kind of hints that he was never authentically American. OTOH, I guess I could have made this mistake ...
Moderator
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 2:09PM MST
PS: Lamont Sanford, J1234. "It's the big one. I'm comin' to meet you, Wheezy!" ... wait. channeling an ex-President here ... who happens to be part of the current post I'm writing.
J1234
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 1:51PM MST
PS-
E.H. Hail said: "As for the name 'Pearson Converse,' and the significance of her daughters...there are other possible directions to go with the names, but I'll leave it there, and I haven't even read the book."
Interesting htoughts on these names throughout your comment, E.H. I agree that the names are intended to have an impact, or at least significance. However, without having read the book, I find them (at least on the surface) to be rather distracting. At first glance, I thought that Pearson Converse sounded like a black guy's name, no doubt because of the Converse basketball shoe connection. In my mind, that has a sort of parallel with the author's male sounding name, "Lionel", which always makes me think of Fred Sanford's son...or Lionel Richie (I'm afraid the model trains are a distant third.)
Ah...the good old days of "PC". Actually, I DO remember "PC" kind of fondly (in a backwards sort of way.) I believe the term was introduced by the left and was genuinely thought (by them) to be something that would catch on, both in usage and practice. Within just a few years, however, "political correctness" was used only in the pejorative, and therefore represented a monumental public relations failure on the part of the left. And you gotta love when that happens.
As to the Moderator's observation about the Presbyterians, yeah, not very much like JW's. I will say, however, that by the time I left the Presbyterian Church (PC!!!) it was similar to the Jehovah's Witnesses in that it also bore very little resemblance to traditional Christianity. To me, the denomination is the symbol of the corruption of mainstream Protestantism, which involved the church seeking worldly validation through Marxist influence and social justice.
E.H. Hail said: "As for the name 'Pearson Converse,' and the significance of her daughters...there are other possible directions to go with the names, but I'll leave it there, and I haven't even read the book."
Interesting htoughts on these names throughout your comment, E.H. I agree that the names are intended to have an impact, or at least significance. However, without having read the book, I find them (at least on the surface) to be rather distracting. At first glance, I thought that Pearson Converse sounded like a black guy's name, no doubt because of the Converse basketball shoe connection. In my mind, that has a sort of parallel with the author's male sounding name, "Lionel", which always makes me think of Fred Sanford's son...or Lionel Richie (I'm afraid the model trains are a distant third.)
Ah...the good old days of "PC". Actually, I DO remember "PC" kind of fondly (in a backwards sort of way.) I believe the term was introduced by the left and was genuinely thought (by them) to be something that would catch on, both in usage and practice. Within just a few years, however, "political correctness" was used only in the pejorative, and therefore represented a monumental public relations failure on the part of the left. And you gotta love when that happens.
As to the Moderator's observation about the Presbyterians, yeah, not very much like JW's. I will say, however, that by the time I left the Presbyterian Church (PC!!!) it was similar to the Jehovah's Witnesses in that it also bore very little resemblance to traditional Christianity. To me, the denomination is the symbol of the corruption of mainstream Protestantism, which involved the church seeking worldly validation through Marxist influence and social justice.
Moderator
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 6:14AM MST
PS: I didn't know that, Alarmist. I think the term "cell phone", though used by most people here, doesn't have much real meaning to people when taken literally. Yeah, I mean they use "cell" towers, but that's not meaningful unless you are an electronics/rf guy in the business.
I just meant it really came in handy that time. Otherwise, my wife would have had to stay talking to these ladies and I would have had to sit there and wait 5-10 minutes for the car to leave!
I just meant it really came in handy that time. Otherwise, my wife would have had to stay talking to these ladies and I would have had to sit there and wait 5-10 minutes for the car to leave!
Moderator
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 6:10AM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, in the story of her upbringing, there is some small explanation of the given name Pearson, but I don't have the book on me right now (rats, meant to bring it). However, the character seemed pleased with that name, and there was some small part in which the family was going to call her something else, but she resisted. This sounds like the author's own experience but backwards. She picked a normally-male name for herself.
Lionel Shriver includes lots of her own experience, which is good except that she spent so much time in Brooklyn, NYC, and she can't seem to lose some of the stupid political attitudes, as much as she's tried. Well, more on that ...
The history of Wokeness as you have it here would make a good post.
Lionel Shriver includes lots of her own experience, which is good except that she spent so much time in Brooklyn, NYC, and she can't seem to lose some of the stupid political attitudes, as much as she's tried. Well, more on that ...
The history of Wokeness as you have it here would make a good post.
The Alarmist
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 2:21AM MST
PS
Interesting, what Americans call 'cell phones' are called 'handies' by Germans and 'mobiles' by Brits, so what is meant by 'handy mobile' ?
Interesting, what Americans call 'cell phones' are called 'handies' by Germans and 'mobiles' by Brits, so what is meant by 'handy mobile' ?
E.H. Hail
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 12:47AM MST
PS
"Seldom is a book as funny, important and timely...I was laughing out loud at the same time as my blood was running cold." -- John Cleese (today in his 85th year), in review of MANIA, April 2024.
"Seldom is a book as funny, important and timely...I was laughing out loud at the same time as my blood was running cold." -- John Cleese (today in his 85th year), in review of MANIA, April 2024.
E.H. Hail
Wednesday - April 24th 2024 12:45AM MST
PS
Pearson Converse.
I'm trying to imagine what the name means, in Shakespearean naming-tradition of "poetic name-to-character loose inspiration."
Apparently the character is a female, as you say, but we wouldn't guess it from the name (much like "Lionel"). "Pearson," the name itself, actually signals male-status (it has the name "son" in it, for one thing; and "Peer" is a male given-name in Scandinavia, possibly derived from "Peter," in turn derived from "Rock" by suggestion of Jesus ca. 30 AD).
One obvious interpretation of the name is right there in the initials: "P.C."
As has previously been commented on here at Peak Stupidity, the "P.C." term has been almost-entirely displaced by the term Wokeness. The latter White-Man's-grammar-bending term comes from some form of silly Black slang; it violently intruded into the language in the mid-2010s, and consolidated its gains in the late-2010s. (Steve Sailer began using the term ironically some time about 2016.)
"Wokeness" itself, the term, in the 2020s became more often used by the Right than the Left. The Left introduced it and adopted it in the late 2010s and was content to use it in annus terribilis 2020, the year of the Corona-Juntas and their Lockdowns; the year of the Historic Murder of George Floyd. But either way, it displaced the now-unused term "P.C." political correcntess.
Lionel Shriver may be consciously using the character whose initials are "P. C." as a constant "call-back" to the pre-Wokeness era, of the 1990s or so. And maybe therefore also as a call-back to the foundational-epochs of the Wokeness Juggernaut that now controls the society.
The term "political correctness," roughly similar to what Wokeness now is, was current some thirty years ago in the early 1990s. I don't think the term (as used now) dates much earlier than around 1988/89, but I could be wrong. But "P.C." was, of course, a huge deal in the 1990s. Conservatives mocked it, but the mockers of that earlier time did not "have the last laugh."
My view is that the key decade for the development of "P.C." or "Wokeness" is the 1970s --- the anti-White, pro-"Migrant"/"Refugee" (immigrant moral-superiority doctrine), pro-Black (Subsaharan-African moral-superiority doctrine), anti-male, pro-feminism (the endless promotion of women in all roles as major civilizational goal; and feminizing of institutions, cf. Corona-Panic of early 2020s), anti-family, anti-heterosexual, evangelically pro-LGBTQIAX+, anti-Christian Wokeness -- the origin of this set of interlocking ideologies in the West really dates to the 1970s, after some exuberant experimentation and water-testing in previous decades.
What we got by the 2010s and now in the 2020s can be traced in pretty direct-line from the 1970s, and we are still stuck in it. (It's therefore pretty symbolically appropriate to have Joe Biden president, who has been a Washington power-player since entering the U.S. Senate in January 1973.) But it took people a long while, a long "lag time," to recognize what was going on. There is no reason the same phenomena as we have with Wokeness could not be named-and-shamed in the 1990s already, but most people didn't want to do so, or couldn't "see it," yet.
On the 1970s connection, Lionel Shriver chooses to put Pearson Converse's birth-year at 1972--- right during the consolidation-period of Wokeness, as I see it.
As for the name "Pearson Converse," and the significance of her daughters, "Darwin," "Zanzibar," and "Lucy," there are other possible directions to go with the names, but I'll leave it there, and I haven't even read the book.
Pearson Converse.
I'm trying to imagine what the name means, in Shakespearean naming-tradition of "poetic name-to-character loose inspiration."
Apparently the character is a female, as you say, but we wouldn't guess it from the name (much like "Lionel"). "Pearson," the name itself, actually signals male-status (it has the name "son" in it, for one thing; and "Peer" is a male given-name in Scandinavia, possibly derived from "Peter," in turn derived from "Rock" by suggestion of Jesus ca. 30 AD).
One obvious interpretation of the name is right there in the initials: "P.C."
As has previously been commented on here at Peak Stupidity, the "P.C." term has been almost-entirely displaced by the term Wokeness. The latter White-Man's-grammar-bending term comes from some form of silly Black slang; it violently intruded into the language in the mid-2010s, and consolidated its gains in the late-2010s. (Steve Sailer began using the term ironically some time about 2016.)
"Wokeness" itself, the term, in the 2020s became more often used by the Right than the Left. The Left introduced it and adopted it in the late 2010s and was content to use it in annus terribilis 2020, the year of the Corona-Juntas and their Lockdowns; the year of the Historic Murder of George Floyd. But either way, it displaced the now-unused term "P.C." political correcntess.
Lionel Shriver may be consciously using the character whose initials are "P. C." as a constant "call-back" to the pre-Wokeness era, of the 1990s or so. And maybe therefore also as a call-back to the foundational-epochs of the Wokeness Juggernaut that now controls the society.
The term "political correctness," roughly similar to what Wokeness now is, was current some thirty years ago in the early 1990s. I don't think the term (as used now) dates much earlier than around 1988/89, but I could be wrong. But "P.C." was, of course, a huge deal in the 1990s. Conservatives mocked it, but the mockers of that earlier time did not "have the last laugh."
My view is that the key decade for the development of "P.C." or "Wokeness" is the 1970s --- the anti-White, pro-"Migrant"/"Refugee" (immigrant moral-superiority doctrine), pro-Black (Subsaharan-African moral-superiority doctrine), anti-male, pro-feminism (the endless promotion of women in all roles as major civilizational goal; and feminizing of institutions, cf. Corona-Panic of early 2020s), anti-family, anti-heterosexual, evangelically pro-LGBTQIAX+, anti-Christian Wokeness -- the origin of this set of interlocking ideologies in the West really dates to the 1970s, after some exuberant experimentation and water-testing in previous decades.
What we got by the 2010s and now in the 2020s can be traced in pretty direct-line from the 1970s, and we are still stuck in it. (It's therefore pretty symbolically appropriate to have Joe Biden president, who has been a Washington power-player since entering the U.S. Senate in January 1973.) But it took people a long while, a long "lag time," to recognize what was going on. There is no reason the same phenomena as we have with Wokeness could not be named-and-shamed in the 1990s already, but most people didn't want to do so, or couldn't "see it," yet.
On the 1970s connection, Lionel Shriver chooses to put Pearson Converse's birth-year at 1972--- right during the consolidation-period of Wokeness, as I see it.
As for the name "Pearson Converse," and the significance of her daughters, "Darwin," "Zanzibar," and "Lucy," there are other possible directions to go with the names, but I'll leave it there, and I haven't even read the book.
I still have that last post coming, so don't read any additional posts (just the 1 coming) with this cover on top until you've completely finished it. It will be a spoiler, but to make my point, it HAS to be.