‘Let’s face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful,” writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object’s long history. Not all sitting, of course. For people who use wheelchairs, they’re an elegant and crucial technology. And sitting itself is not the culprit; any unchanging, repetitive motion or posture fails to give the body the variation it needs. But Cranz, writing primarily for an audience of ambulatory readers in industrialised and therefore sedentary societies, is one of many researchers who have been saying for decades that chairs are a major cause of pain and disability.
But Frank isn’t the victim in this story because he’s going to be losing his job. Unlike the entitled woman ignoring safety signals, Frank’s reaction was measured. Frank was smart. He knew technology. Frank was rational and understood the folly of the woman’s rage. He knew he needed to retrain, adapt, and evolve. But for some unspoken reason, he was still driving a bus. Frank’s voice should be the one we elevate to escape the binary debate. Unfortunately, the woman’s hollowed cries have drowned him out.
Hession’s narrative is cheerful and funny. But it is also a meditation on loneliness, fear, and what we fill our lives up with to compensate for them. In more than one way, it is a coming-of-age story for the already aged. It is a reminder that we are scared children, grasping at the answers, often confused about what we should clutch to and what we should throw ourselves at.
Héctor Tobar’s latest novel is much more serious than its jaunty title suggests. It is a curious club sandwich of fact, fiction, speculation and ham, describing the wanderings and writings of a real person, Joe Sanderson, who is anything but a road bum. (Even if he were, he wouldn’t be the last, and his greatness is debatable.) But as a committed and self-conscious adventurer and romantic voyeur in search of the ragged and the rudimentary — a figure to whom I easily relate — he is absolutely of his time.
Up there with bad betrayals, which are all bad,
the worst to the self, I left mine with the elegant hotel