Writing a woman character who enjoys a life of pleasure “without ruination,” says Gilbert, is what first drew her to Vivian’s story. “I wanted to talk about how you can survive your own consequences, because I think there’s a generalization in classical literature that women’s consequences cannot be survived,” Gilbert says.
We joke briefly about being thrown under the wheels of a train à la Anna Karenina, or shunted off to a convent for bad behavior. “I think there’s a story that runs in our own lives, which is like, it’s OK to have a certain season of your life when you’re young and and where you’re sexual,” she says, “but then you had really better settle down into a heteronormative, monogamous relationship.”
“I didn’t want that to be the ending of the story, either, because I think that most of the sexual lives of most of the women I know are just more complicated than that,” she adds.
In her popular novel, Convenience Store Woman, Japanese author Sayaka Murata tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a worker at an unnamed convenience store who is struggling to find a place in a traditional society due to her status as an unmarried 36-year-old with a blue-collar job.
However, the true star of the unorthodox character’s story is her workplace, described as a tiny ecosystem, aimed not only at providing consumers nourishment, but also infusing their lives with new sources of joy.
Big Sky is laced with Atkinson’s sharp, dry humour, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny, even when the themes are as dark as child abuse and sex trafficking.
Time is running out with respect to many of these environmental threats, and as we in the late-twentieth century witness the frightening portents of the beginning of the end of industrial civilization, we are still groping for the answers to many difficult questions about what life after industrialism will be like and how we will adapt to it. As an art critic in the 1990s, I am no longer interested in writing art reviews, or catalogue essays. Rather, I am concerned with understanding our cultural myths and how they evolved; how artists are now addressing the changes that must be implemented in our consciousness and our society.
Happily, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World suggests a cure of sorts to our postmodern predicament. Newport approaches his topic with an unapologetically aggressive and practical method that is sure to strike many as drastic. This is exactly what drew me in about this book: it pulls no punches, insisting on radical behavioral changes if we are to have any chance of re-establishing an intentional approach to our digital lives. “In my experience,” writes Newport, “gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well — the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started.” A 30-day “digital declutter,” where we impose severe restrictions on the technology we use, is ground zero for the battle. The first part of the book sets up the problem and walks us through this detox process; the second half suggests what we should do with our new minimalist selves.