This is the novel of the year that I referred to earlier. It’s very, very good, my friends. You need to read it.

I Want You To Be Happy is a novel about modern dating. I’m very grateful to Calder that he didn’t make it about dating apps. It would be very easy, but a total cop-out, to make it about the apps. Apps are nothing. It’s our understanding of the purpose of dating that is creating Mariana-Trench-like depths of unhappiness. People in their 20s and 30s are unhappy in their personal lives because their understanding of what those lives are supposed to be about is completely messed up.

In the novel, Chuck, a 35-year-old copywriter in London, breaks off a 12-year engagement to his fiancée because it is getting in the way of his freedom. Because freedom is the most important thing, right? Once the fiancée is gone, Chuck is free to drink himself into a stupor, take drugs, have bad sex with random strangers, and sabotage his career because making an effort at a job seems pointless.

Chuck meets Joey, a 23-year-old barista who sees in him a hope finally of attaching herself to somebody older, wealthier, and more stable. Joey wants to bake cookies for a husband in a house they share, and not to be passed down from one indifferent dude to another. But Joey knows she can’t say that. She knows that after months of servicing Chuck sexually and putting up with his drunken outbursts, she has to pretend that, of course, they don’t have a relationship. Because a relationship is a status conferred upon you for good behavior at some far away point in the future. Then, after a 12-year engagement, you can be discarded in favor of a newer, shinier, still hopeful woman.

The setup where a relationship is not a relationship and people pretend that what they want is not attachment, devotion, and family, but “to have a good time” with a succession of random people who can’t lay any claim to them isn’t making anybody happy. Chuck and Joey keep insisting that they are having a very good time, but their lives look exceptionally miserable.

The writing is simple and unpretentious, which is done on purpose to highlight that Joey and Chuck are pretentious wannabe writers. They cling on to a fantasy of artistic relevance because that’s the only thing that excuses their aimless lives.

This is a very un-diverse novel that sticks to the point without meandering in unnecessary directions. The solution to the problem is not stated in the book, but it is so obvious that stating it feels superfluous. We must stop pretending that the goal of life is loosely defined fun. Instead, we should stop being shy about saying honestly that the most important life goal between the ages of 20 and 30 is to find a husband or a wife and start a family. Instead of the current bizarre situation where people who are pursuing that goal are shamed and humiliated by those who aren’t to the detriment of the entire society, we should have an exact opposite situation. Joey shouldn’t feel embarrassed for expecting attachment and commitment. It’s Chuck who is the weirdo in the situation. The shame should be his. I Want You To Be Happy makes this case very clearly.

In positive news:

1. I’m at home.
2. The cat sitter managed to keep the cat alive. The poor animal really missed me and is now glued to me in a really desperate way.
3. I discovered a new novel that will not only be the book of the year but probably of the entire decade. The author is British, so nobody will have to wait for a translation. I will not reveal the title until I finish reading, which will be soon because I haven’t been able to tear myself away from this book for hours. Free up some time because sensationally good reading is coming your way.

I know somebody whose name is Waldemar. He’s Polish. Every time he introduces himself, people crack a joke about Voldemort. Every time. And every single person who does that looks extremely proud of themselves. “See here? I came up with something really witty.” I am very empathetically challenged, but I wonder, do they honestly, not realize that he’s been hearing this same joke daily for many, many years? Because when I first heard his name, my first thought was, that poor dude, I can only imagine the tedium of all the Voldemort jokes.

I was asked in the Q&A what I think about Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey. I’m not going to watch the film, and not for any political reason. The reason why I’m not going to watch is that, as invariably happens with Hollywood movies, the film is going to try to deliver some message. The entire three-hour-long experience is going to be about hammering home that message in an insistent and clumsy way. Of course, the message is going to be some shade of leftwing, but it’s not the point. I wouldn’t watch it with a rightwing message either. I simply don’t want to be preached at in entertainment. I understand that the majority of viewers want one simple, understandable, relatable lesson. But I don’t, which is why I almost never go to the movies.

Another issue is that the acting is going to be invariably bad. The breakdown in America is that TV actors are phenomenal, while movie actors are not actors at all. They’re pretty, plastic mannequins who are entirely interchangeable and always very boring. It’s as if, in order to get cast, they all slept with the same old necrophile who wanted people to resemble fresh, painted corpses.

So there won’t be an interesting, nuanced story that will give me something to think about, and there will be no acting worthy of the name. Instead, there will be a lot of very expensive special effects and all sorts of technological innovations that will be utterly divorced from the actual story. It wasn’t always like this, but in the past 20-25 centuries, this became almost every Hollywood movie. I sometimes go just for the special effects, like in Dune. But special effects are interesting in sci-fi, not in Greek mythology.

None of what I say is prescriptive. I have very specific watching requirements because I read so much, and taking time away from my reading has to be justified. If people enjoyed the movie, it’s great. I’m happy for them.

The most brilliant advert at the arrivals of the St Louis Lambert Airport:

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a witty advertisement.

It’s likely to work, too. An airport is a typical liminal space from which you can gather big realizations about the rest of your life.

An art gallery employee in Naples, Florida, spoiled my experience by asking where I’m from and, when I said that I’m from Ukraine, responding that he is from Russia. I can’t remotely understand people who think that this is important and laudable information to share at this historical juncture. I wasn’t asking him. He could have kept it to himself.

I never know if they are really this clueless or are putting it on.

Stupid fucks.

Self-awareness is truly the rarest of gifts. I somehow managed to miss that I have extremely conservative sensibilities when the evidence was plentiful. If I like a vacation spot, I will continue going to it and enacting the exact same routine there forever and ever. If in a new area I find a restaurant that I like, it will not even occur to me to check out other options. I will continue coming to the place that I liked first. I keep going to all the same conferences.

I like change at work because it entertains me, so maybe that obscured my conservative tendencies from me. But in everything else, I am a stay-the-course kind of person.

The funny thing is that I loved being department chair. I was massively into it. Enjoyed it all the time. And now I really love not being department chair. Every day of not being one is profoundly enjoyable. Based on my attitude, one would think that I hated it, but that’s not true.

Our vacation is ending tomorrow. We’ve been here since July 5, and I’ve read 6 books in this time. I have also been informed by my child that food and good don’t rhyme. Overall, these are excellent vacation results.

Tomorrow, as usual, we’ll experience the culmination of the vacation which is an obligatory visit to Naples, Florida. I love it like a Muslim loves going to Mecca. I can’t fully explain why, but I achieve great inner peace there.

Good news, my friends! Joyce Maynard has published a new novel, and it’s her best one yet. If you’re new around here, enter the words “Joyce Maynard” into the search box to find out all of the hilarious things I had to say about this writer in the past. To cut a very long story short, I think she’s gifted, but unfortunately she went woke several years ago and started publishing unhinged anti-Trumpian rants instead of novels.

In an excellent turn of events, though, Maynard found a way to break out of her sad ideological capture. She set her new novel titled In Wonderland in 1986, back when Maynard was much younger, had very conservative sensibilities, and was into babies, homemaking, and family life. Her gift immediately came back once she started writing about things she cares about and understands instead of politics which confuses her.

In Wonderland is a Bildungsroman. We all know that I avoid them because I’ve read way too many novels in this genre and can’t take them anymore, but Maynard’s coming-of-age novel is actually pretty great. The plot is great, even though it’s not particularly fresh. A fourteen-year-old girl from a dysfunctional, poor family comes to spend the summer with the family of rich acquaintances who are also dysfunctional but in a different way. The story is never boring, the characters are layered and convincing, and there is an important lesson in the novel. Teenagers need attentive, involved parents who remember that they are still children and do not try to treat them like friend substitutes. They also need some sort of an interest, a job, a sport, a very energy-consuming hobby to occupy them, or they’re going to get into utterly unnecessary trouble. The novel is set in 1986, but today it’s worse because trouble awaits a teenager on every device. Obviously, teenagers don’t need their parents to hover. But they most certainly do not need to be left completely to their own devices, especially on devices.

I’m making this novel sound preachy and boring, but I promise it’s not. It’s lots of fun to read. And it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. Descriptions of the summer of 1986 at a beach lake country house in Maine are so vivid that reading feels like going on vacation there. There are family mysteries, infidelity, dysfunction, and less than 0.04% of wokeness in the novel.

A perfect vacation read, highly recommended.