Two Girls, Together

When I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh I had a theory that it was about doppelgängers—two different young women who don’t like each other but cannot part, who disagree about how to live but are both similarly miserable. I thought maybe the narrative would eventually reveal that one of the women was making up the other one, but it never did. None of the reviews I read mentioned my doppelgänger theory either. Nor on Goodreads that I saw. However, on Goodreads, someone compared this book to You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman, saying it was like a kinder and more thoughtful version of Moshfegh’s book, so of course I wanted to read it. And to my surprise, this book is ACTUALLY about doppelgängers. Specifically, it starts out being about a woman named A whose roommate B wants to make herself over in A’s image, until she can impersonate her and—A fears—steal her boyfriend, C, and maybe her life. Why does no one have names in these books and also, how creepy.

Too bad the book moves at a snail’s pace and is dead boring for the first half. I was extremely concerned about details like what town they could live where it would be safe to walk along the highway but would have a publisher big enough to employ a full-time proofreader (A’s job). By the time I realized the book isn’t realism (HALFWAY! I admit I am a little slow but so is this book!) I was sick of the whole thing and did not care anymore, which is too bad because it got a little more interesting from there, in the sense that a cult started creeping in from the margins and eventually A joined it, found another doppelgänger and…actually, that’s most of what happened. It was a pretty boring book and I think that Goodreads reviewer was confused, because it was also not particularly kind. Oh and there was a side plotline about someone stealing a lot of veal and becoming famous for it and if anyone has figured out what that all meant, please message me immediately.

The novel was also fiercely derivative. It reminded me at various points of at least Generation X, White Noise, and the original “I don’t have an eating disorder, I’m just an intellectual” novel The Edible Woman, plus Kleeman just straight-up stole the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons to make her own Kandy Kat cartoons. The difference is that all the originals here are pretty funny and I did not find the first half of this book funny at all. I did eventually start laughing very late in the game—this is the rare book that gets better as it goes—but it was a very long slog and not enough payoff for me. (The ending of the book is actually quite dark, but…darkly funny? I think?)

I think that this was supposed to be some sort of…savage satire of consumer culture, and/or the vacuity of expecting a man to be one’s whole world (there’s always at least one thing I like in a book, and in this one it was the alien precision with which Kleeman writes about kissing and sex). Unrelated but I don’t know why all these contemporary novels are set in some vague time period that is not exactly revealed but is clearly 30ish years ago where everyone watches DVDs and can’t google and uses their phones only for talking. I have READ ALL THE BOOKS ABOUT THE 1990s THAT I NEED (or at least the vast majority), they were WRITTEN IN THE 1990s. Also also, all the referent books I name above were so good, no one needs to redo them.

I ALSO also think I may have gotten too grumpy too early while reading this book and it might be better than I’m giving it credit for but there’s nothing we can do about that now.

So I have gone back to Moshfegh, who is boring too but more elegant and funnier about it (I read a bunch of other stuff in between—I do realize there’s more than just these two authors, promise). This time I’m reading Death in Her Hands, which is about an elderly widow who is walking her dog when she comes across a handwritten note in the woods that alludes to a murder. At first I thought this was so completely different from My Year of R&R and then gradually it dawned on my it’s exactly the same structure—a woman alone, in a self-imposed isolation (she has moved to a cabin in the woods after her husband’s death) in a moment of heightened emotions reflects deeply on the situation at hand and in doing so unspools her whole life and all her thoughts about it. I’m less than halfway through it so a big cast of characters e and a lot of interesting events could yet spring up, but somehow I doubt it. I’ll keep you posted.

Dinnertime Chaos

MS (eats, touches ear) Oh, I had a grain of rice in my ear!
RR: How did you date?
MS (discards grain of rice, returns to meal, eats)
RR: Seriously, did this stuff used to happen to you when we were dating, and you just didn’t mention it, just tucked the rice into a napkin or something?
MS: I don’t remember, maybe.
(later in the meal, dessert)
RR: One of these is a clementine and one is a small orange.
MS (generously, knowing RR’s preferences) I will eat the orange.
RR: Great. (peels clementine, begins eating, carries on complex conversation about something unrelated to citrus)
MS (struggles to peel orange, eventually stabs it, squirts everyone with juice)
RR: How’s it going over there?
MS: Great, I’m definitely going to eat this orange.
RR: Well, we’re both already wearing it. (conversation continues, eventually Mark gets some orange into his mouth) How is it?
MS: Terrible. What a sh*t piece of fruit. (somehow knocks his chopsticks off his bowl with a clatter to end the scene/meal)