Disclaimer: Carrie Carolyn Coco is not a novel. It’s a piece of investigative journalism in the true-crime genre. All quotes in the post below are from interviews Gerard conducted with actual people.
Sarah Gerard’s search for an alternative explanation of Carolyn Bush’s murder was unsuccessful. However, in the process of investigating her acquaintance’s death, she conducted many interviews with people in Bush’s circle of friends. These are self-identified “far-left Socialists” who talk like a parody of a clueless wokester but do it in complete seriousness. One, for example, introduces herself as “a poet and performance artist, an ethnobotanic literary critic.” Yes, that’s all one person. If you are curious what an ethnobotanic literary critic is, apparently it’s somebody who says things like the following:
“It was an early draft of trying to pull together my understanding of Blackness and femininity, and the parallels with plant life, and how that resource is not valued.”
She was working as a flower courier then, “bringing the dying carcasses of floral material from human to human in acts of celebration.” Humans raise these beings only to kill them. She felt compelled to write about that, and about “that trans-moment of turning myself into an extremely delicate version of myself in order to rage, fully grieve.”
I swear to God this is not a parody. These people really are like that.
Carolyn’s friends mourn her death by engaging in narcissistic displays of their extreme woundedness and exhibitionist analyses of every shade of their flamboyant emotions regarding her death. They believe that every emotion deserves to be exhaustively and repetitively verbalized and assign earth-shattering importance to their constantly shifting moods.
Gerard shares the political views of the people she writes about and routinely regales readers with such pearls of lefty wisdom as
Racism is woven into the fabric of our culture
and
Our culture, for some reason that I still can’t explain, seems to hate anyone who isn’t a man
and
There’s a lot of misogyny in Southern culture
and
I think it’s something about our culture.
Yes, Gerard really likes the word “culture.”
Gerard wanted to preserve the memory of Carolyn by telling about her life and the art she created. But she did the dead woman no favors because Bush’s art consisted of her producing the following kind of writing:
It was like parataxis, and the chance operation of parataxis, the accumulative algebra of parataxis, its absolute certainty, which is felt precisely as a continuity of emptiness.
In case you don’t get art, this is supposed to be “an extended prose poem blending memoir and criticism.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Philistine!
Gerard is not lacking in talent and, thankfully, her own text is not filled with “the accumulative algebra of parataxis.” She’s good at making her characters come alive on the page and show us vividly how they conduct their squalid woke lives dedicated to the following kind of projects:
Let’s sustain our practice and come together to create a space where we work, create, discuss, read, or write. One that is ours for collaboration, action, or exegesis.
It is impossible not to feel pity for these confused young people who come from wealthy yet broken homes and who lead lives of such extraordinary narcissism that any possibility of a normal human contact among them is out of the question. They take copious amounts of drugs, practice witchcraft, busily swap “partners” (which is their word of choice for sexual partners), talk up a storm about how they are victimized by the racist-sexist culture, and treat each other like absolute garbage. Some of them will come to their senses before it becomes too late, find normal jobs, get married, and move to the suburbs. Those they leave behind will become more and more eccentric and will be ever understand why their former comrades keep betraying them.
I highly recommend the book because it’s important to know this subculture, and Gerard writes so well that the book goes down a treat. It’s very depressing in spite of the funny bits about ethnobotanic whatevers and parataxical parataxis but people like theS are about to put a president into the White House and it’s useful to understand how they think.
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