I’m interested in the phenomenon of “the wife of a genius”. It’s a curious life strategy that is enlightening to observe. I thought that reading a biography of George Orwell’s wife by Anna Funder would be a valuable contribution to my collection of such stories but it turned out that Funder isn’t much interested in Orwell or his wife. She’s interested in talking about her own victimhood.

Funder shares that she always admired Orwell (which is hard to believe because Funder is very left-wing) but then she discovered that he was an “arsehole” to his wife and that admiration waned. It’s easy to judge Orwell’s imperfect private life. It’s harder to ask oneself what does it say about Funder’s character that she endlessly complains in the book about her husband not doing enough housework and stifling her literary genius or that her 9-year-old son is forced to condemn men for doing bad things to women to please mommy.

Orwell at least left great art to compensate for his personal shortcomings. Funder will not, and that’s not because she does too many dishes.

“I would have achieved so much if I didn’t have to do all the housework” is a statement akin to the ones endlessly issued by academics who are convinced they would have published a lot if only they had time. In reality, people use housework (or the academic daily minutiae) to hide from the realization that they have no capacity to achieve, publish, etc. And it should be fine. It’s only their over-inflated ego that makes them unhappy with what they have.

It’s almost embarrassing to see a woman complain that the unequal distribution of housework in her family stifles her intellectual gifts. What kind of an intellect is incapable of figuring out a comfortable domestic arrangement? Funder shares stories of her female friends, “powerful journalists” and “eminent historians”, who engage in feats of passive aggressive pouting against their family members who don’t do as much as they expect around the house. These are women my age and older, and it’s extraordinary to me that they have lived for 50+ years and still haven’t figured out how not to turn every load of laundry into the Battle of Austerlitz.

As a woman of an intellectual profession, I love folding laundry, a fascinating pastime I discovered in my mid-thirties by absolute accident.* I cook everything from scratch, and I love “soul-sapping grocery runs” that so frustrate Funder. I find all of these activities to be extremely restful. But if I didn’t, I would have found a way to solve this extraordinarily minuscule problem without having to write 500-page rants about it.

* I grew up in a strange family and had to learn many things in adulthood that people usually know by kindergarten.

In 1990, N was 14, there was a very steep inflation, and individual commerce was finally legal. N sold potatoes and newspapers outside of subway stations but how to preserve the earnings when there’s no banking system and hyperinflation is raging?

N bought a bunch of bottles of port with his earnings and hid them in his room. They never lost value, and because he was 14, he had no temptation to drink them.

Holidays, free speech and makeup. In that order.

For tomorrow, my weather app put, in the space usually reserved for “sunny, windy, or cloudy”, the word “dreary.”

So I picked up Emma Cline’s earlier novel, The Girls. And what do you think?

It’s a Bildungsroman.

Every writer nowadays tries to squeeze out a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel). And we all know how fed up I am with the genre, having read more than a fair share of them for my doctoral dissertation. I didn’t think anybody could surprise me with their Bildungsroman. But Emma Cline did.

Cline writes about the discovery of womanhood by a 14-year-old girl, and it’s so spot-on that it’s kind of scary. She shows what it’s like to grow up with a mother who can only teach you to be every man’s second or third choice. And the crooked path by which female sexuality is formed. The confused and hungry appraisal of different ways of being a woman.

Evie, the main character of The Girls, grows up observing her parents’ broken marriage, the mother pathetically trying to appease yet another gross, married boyfriend. The father running after secretaries decades younger than himself. There’s money, comfort, yet everything is so tawdry and humiliating, especially if you are a woman.

A girl like Evie is the perfect victim for a cult. Today, she’d be preyed on by OnlyFans or hormone peddlers. But the novel is set in 1969, so Evie ends up in the Manson cult. This is another topic I normally don’t like because I disagree that Manson should have been convicted for “the girls'” crimes.

Cline, however, is way too young to buy into the mythology of the hippie era. She wants to show what makes an adolescent want to debase and destroy herself. The Manson cult is only one of the many ways that this self-demolition can occur.

Referring to mass migration as “an invasion” is as stupid as calling January 6 “an insurrection.”

People are being extraordinary drama queens. “Life-saving COVID vaccines”, “sleepwalking into WW3.” Gushing excitedly like 14-year-old swifties. “I feel unsafe”, “our democracy is at risk”, “this is fascism”, “books are banned”.

People truly need some actual hardship in their lives to gain perspective.

Remember, this can all be fixed with a simple executive order that bans accepting immigration applications from people who are in the US illegally. In normal countries, people apply to immigrate through embassies. And these spectacles of abjection are avoided.

We are being duped into believing that this is an intractable, extremely complex issue.

It isn’t.

Men and men, and women are women. Women can have some male subjectivity traits but never a fully male subjectivity. The subjectivity is grounded in our biological reality. And that’s a good thing.

What you can change is the personality traits you don’t like. Shyness is a good example.

Also, everything has a positive and a negative side. For example, female subjectivity is rooted in the need for safety. This makes women more careful drivers. This makes them engage in violent situations a lot less than men. As a result, women in developed countries live longer than men. But on the negative side, the need for safety generates high anxiety.

Or take the female tendency that we recently discussed to see oneself through the eyes of others, often utterly imaginary others. It’s anxiety-producing but at the same time it gives you a much better social life and support network than men are usually able to create.

Thank you for a great Anonymous Question. I love them with a fiery passion.

I have found my favorite book of the year, my friends. I always find it in January and then spend the rest of the year moping that nothing measures up.

Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a bloody masterpiece. I read it in one day, a pretty busy day with no time to read but I made time for this “hit you in the face and leave you hemorrhaging on the sidewalk” kind of book.

You, folks, know what type of stuff gets to me. Gritty realism, the cleanest possible writing. By that I obviously don’t mean lack of swear words. I mean the kind of writing that Strunk and White will read for eternity after they die and go to heaven.

“Arkady, I beg you, don’t speak beautifully,” says a character of Turgenyev’s Sons and Fathers to his verbally incontinent friend. That’s what I often want to say to writers. Stop trying to show how clever you are. Stop trying to be cute or teach me a lesson. Tell me a story, that’s all I want.

In The Guest, Cline tells a story that grips you and cracks you like a walnut. The main character is an unsuccessful, washed-out 22-year-old prostitute Alex. Reviewers complain that Alex is tawdry, unattractive and self-defeating. As if a 22-year-old prostitute could be anything else. Alex is one of those people who are so chaotic in their minds that they warp reality around them. I don’t mean “crazy” or “mentally ill.” Alex is a healthy young woman. But she tarnishes everything she touches because that’s who she is.

I wonder if everybody knows, at least at some level, what it feels to have a disordered mind that turns everything around you to chaos. Or do most people honestly not know what makes the dregs of society what they are?

Cline does know. Her understanding of the people who are inexorably drawn to the bottom is superb. She’s been criticized for not depicting Alex as a victim of “systemic injustices”. But Cline creates literature, not didactic woke tracts. Alex is neither a pure, unfairly persecuted victim nor a terrible villain. She evokes compassion but also a desire to pity her from very far away.

There’s not a trace of wokeness in this book even though Cline is a Californian Millennial with an MFA. She drives a stake through the heart of the rich elites and shows what the world with only the very wealthy and the absolute rejects looks like. Cline writes like it’s 1991 and nobody heard of woke precepts outside of a few campuses. This is yet another thing that makes the novel so narcotic. Reading The Guest is like taking a vacation to a planet where wokeness doesn’t exist. It’s so unusual to read a book where an author talks honestly about how things are that one feels kind of overwhelmed.

OK, if I haven’t persuaded you to give the novel a try, nothing will. But I’m telling you. It’s extraordinary.

Hey, folks, I’m not hopeless. I understand cultural codes.

Rumor has it that there’s a fourth-grader who likes Klara. In the sense that he LIKES likes her, got it? All I managed to wrangle out about him is the opinion of Klara’s best friend that he’s sassy.

I knew immediately what it means. The boy is African American. Mind you, it’s not me calling him sassy. I’ve never seen the kid. It’s what another black child says about him.

Klara immediately subjected the boy to a spelling competition, and he’s a fine speller, so it’s all working out fine.

But am I good, or am I very good?