But the problem with my whole trip down memory lane was that much of what humorists were doing in those days was complaining about the kinds of things people are still very worried about today: a near-total distrust in institutional norms, class warfare, US imperialism, intergenerational warfare, and despair over climate change. Every white-knuckle, life-or-death, high-stakes current event shows up again and again in these books, except when it does, the author then says something to the effect of “they’ve gotta be kidding me!” and at the time it was all a barrel of laughs to read. I remember that being the case, even if — tragically — there’s not enough nostalgia power in the world to get me back into that headspace.
In short, I was reading brightly-colored, 20-year-old books with smirking boomers on the covers, but the topics they covered were relevant, which means it’s like you’re going back and watching the beginning of a movie with an unexpectedly tragic twist ending. For all the “humor” I got out of the experience, I may as well have been back on Twitter, reading about people getting fired from the Trump White House.
While working on this review of Tiffany Watt Smith’s lively little book about the “ethically ambiguous” emotion of schadenfreude — taking pleasure in the humiliations and failures of other people — a message popped up on my newsfeed about Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account to send hundreds of emails about government business last year. Given her father’s tirades about Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email and cries of “Lock her up,” this felt like divine retribution. The burst of what Watt Smith calls “malevolent joy” and the “flick of spite” I felt upon reading this bulletin is a perfect example of what “Schadenfreude” is about.
Was my reaction “swirled through with shame” and dampened by concern about a lack of compassion? Nope. Is it evidence of a moral failing? According to Watt Smith, nope again. It’s a natural, even healthy response, fueled by what she describes as the satisfaction of seeing superior or smug people get their comeuppance when their hypocrisy is exposed. She argues that schadenfreude is a common, “cherished communal ritual” that can make you feel better about yourself not just by cutting others down to size but by recognizing that no one is flawless.
The frame narrative here occurs in the NAS, or North American States — a grim Trumpian future dictatorship that shuns individuality and creativity and promotes mediocrity, conformity, sexism, racism, and violence. But we spend only 45 pages there before Adriane is thrust back — in punishment for her mildly provocative high-school valedictorian speech — to the autumn of 1959 where she is compelled to assume the identity of “Mary Ellen Enright” at a state college in Wisconsin.
Like a clean, precise log-splitting ax swing, that simple premise exposes a world of ideas and questions.
As the book gathers itself toward its conclusion, the crises that strike the family are all too non-virtual. Their machines cannot help them. We can play out multiple scenarios, dream multiple fantasies, write multiple stories in our heads, but in the end we have only one — complicated, imperfect, hard-to-face — reality.
There is something pareidolic about the writing process. The author reaches, with language, toward a reader who may or may not be there. Motoya’s book beguiles with its reversals: the bodybuilder’s husband may be unobservant to the point of eeriness, but, as it turns out, she is the shape-shifter, the trickster.