10 Books That Make You Look Cool

This came in as a search engine query a week or so ago, and it made me laugh. And then I liked it as an idea and began to wonder what the properties of a ‘cool’ book would be. There are all sorts of definitions of ‘cool’ beyond ‘neat-o’ and ‘awesome’, wikipedia even offers a potted history of its incarnations across the globe, but for this list, I stuck with books I thought were timelessly sophisticated, innovative and authentic. And I tried to think which books would engender most respect in me, if I saw someone reading them in a café. This is only a bit of fun, though, not intended to be in anyway definitive, and indeed I could have come up with about ten lists, there are so many cool books. Frankly, I think it’s cool to see anyone reading in a public place, particularly if it’s a real book with a cover that will satisfy my curiosity!

 

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac and the Beat generation of writers epitomised cool in their era and produced work of sufficient quality to last the test of time. Kerouac’s genuine passion for creativity and innovation is what does it for me. I own a group biography that’s entitled The Typewriter Was Holy, which about sums it up. The group’s cult of drug use and the latent sexism was not cool, however, let us be clear on that point.

The Roads to Freedom trilogy by Sartre, or anything by Beauvoir (or Camus)

The Existentialists were the great proponents of cool in 20^th century Europe. No movement had as much influence or produced as many great works. I’m easy about throwing Camus in the heap with them, although not everyone is. Of course, it’s really cool if you know that Camus isn’t always considered an Existentialist. It’s even cooler if you know that The Roads to Freedom was intended to be a tetrology but Sartre never got around to writing the last book. But if you’re lugging Being and Nothingness about your person, you’re either trying too hard or an extremely assiduous philosophy student.

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Complex, demanding and absolutely enormous, this book has to represent a certain intense commitment to the purest spirit of the literary. I confess I began this one and didn’t finish it because I knew I was not in the right place to devote the sort of concentration and focus to it that it needs. One day I’ll get around to it. Though I doubt I’ll be caught reading it in public, as carrying that brick in a shoulder bag is a good way to acquire an osteopath. I’d probably add David Foster Wallace and his Infinite Jest in this same category.

Just about any ancient classic

These are read by so few people these days that to know about them and to enjoy them has to represent a real cherry-picker’s mentality to literature and a certain independence of spirit. Personally, I’d be more likely to strike up a conversation with someone reading one of the funner options, like Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or The Odyssey. For Plato’s Republic, see my thoughts on Being and Nothingness. And that will probably unleash a stream of comments telling me what an amazing hoot The Republic is.

Anything by Kafka

Why is Kafka cool? I have no idea, but he just is.

Poetry

I think it’s extremely cool to see anyone reading poetry. If pressed, I’d probably think it even cooler if the volume in question came from someone who’s really good but not particularly well known, like George Seferis or Anna Akhmatova. But hey, really, any poetry.

NYRB Classics

The NYRB editors really have their collective finger on the pulse of cool. The authors are just obscure enough, but the work often unjustly overlooked. Plus the design of those books is wonderful: understated, elegant, instantly recognisable.

The work of Zora Neale Hurston

I’d happily include Alice Walker and Nella Larssen along with Zora Neale, all of them women who overcame many cultural obstacles to produce wonderful writing that inspired others. To read them is to buy into that spirit at some level, I think.

The Walking Dead graphic novels

It’s what the teenagers consider cool reading these days. As regular visitors to this site will know, my son is not a reader. But he devours these and then passes them around his group of friends who are all equally keen. Zombies always have a certain counterculture cool about them, don’t you think? It seems, though, that Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation has overtaken Plath’s The Bell Jar as the adolescent depressive’s book of choice.

Anything by Virginia Woolf

And finally, that darling of the Modernists and Queen of Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf. Sophisticated, innovative, authentic, yes all these boxes can easily be ticked when it comes to Woolfie. And it’s a delight to think of this polite and terribly well-bred woman gender-bending and messing with the serious genre of biography and writing about politics and joyfully subverting conventional narrative. Very cool indeed.

‘The Greatest Feminist Novel of the Decade’

When I first started Mimi by Lucy Ellman, I was expecting something completely different. We’re in Manhatten on Christmas Eve, and noted plastic surgeon, Harrison Hanafan slips and falls on the icy sidewalk. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says the ‘wacko broad’ who picks him up off the floor and then miraculously summons a taxi to take him home. This is the unusual start of a very unusual love affair. It says so much on the back cover. But I was expecting… oh I don’t know, some sort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a charming screwball comedy with a slightly glamourous setting. And whilst it is a charming book, and it most certainly is screwball, the enormity of my misapprehensions about the novel meant I had to put it down for a couple of weeks until I’d had an expectation adjustment. The blurb suggests it’s for fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Ali Smith and Caitlin Moran. But these didn’t work for me at all. My pitch is that this is a cross between Frasier and François Rabelais: on the one hand, sophisticated wit and opera, on the other, wild exaggeration, farcical event, political messages, crazy word play and a lot of lists.

So you’ll have gathered that this is not your conventional act of storytelling, and maybe even that it’s a novel where the sentence is the source of pleasure, rather than the narrative arc. But to give you as much plot summary as you need, Harry Hanafan returns to his apartment to rest his sprained ankle and to care for a stray cat he’s picked up and named Bubbles while listening to classical music, chatting to his sculptor sister, Bee, on the phone (she’s currently in the UK as an artist in residence) and making some very entertaining lists. He’s just split up with a narcissistic horror named Gertrude, and he lists reasons why. But he’s prone to post break-up melancholy and he lists all the things that trigger it, including shrimp-eating contests, puppetry and the existence of Walmart.

Although Harry’s life looks good on the surface, it lacks meaning. But along comes Mimi, a 49-year-old force of nature (and indeed powered occasionally by pre-menopausal hot flushes), who is a poster girl for the matriarchy. To call Mimi a feminist is like calling Mozart a piano player. In no time at all she and Harry are in love, and she has converted him to a brand new ideology (he was a pushover) based on a rediscovery of all that was great about prehistory:

Everything was going swell, you know, matriarchy worked! Then men took over metalworking and used it to make more and more powerful weapons. And then they domesticated the horse….It’s not the horse’s fault but from then on it was just rape, rape, rape, war, war, war, capitalism, arrogance, slavery and wrecking the land. Everything became about men and their death wish.’

So now you may gather that subtlety is not the novel’s strong point. Or at least, not the point. No, this is a rampant celebration of women and, beneath a very witty prose surface, an utterly furious rant against some of the worst excesses of male behaviour. If you like your feminist novels to win you over gently, this is going to set your teeth on edge. But, and this is a big but, it is very, very amusing, and I have never known any other author milk so much comedy from the caps key and the exclamation mark. Nothing is quite real in this novel, there’s a cartoon buoyancy to the prose that even in the sad parts of the story can’t resist its innate jauntiness, and it’s real Marmite stuff. Readers are either going to love the voice or hate it, or possibly find it’s not enough to offset the bizarre events destined to make their political point with the delicacy of a sledgehammer. But as Lucy Ellman might say, the exaggeration WOULD BE THE POINT. And it is funny. And it is extremely well-written.

It’s been called the best feminist novel of the decade or the new millennium or something (the original quote proved impossible to track down, though much reference is made to it in the reviews already out there), which is of course a very dangerous thing to say about any book. And this made me think about other feminist novels I’ve read, and ponder the fact that it is not always the most reader-friendly of genres. Monique Wittig’s Les Guérilleres is the current title holder of Most Eccentric Novel Ever, about lesbian warriors torturing men and was notably thin on jokes; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is superb but depressed me for weeks afterwards, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is no cheerier, nor is The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Quite a few are a bit of a slog (poor Doris Lessing, her Golden Notebooks do spring to mind, rather). So Mimi represents something of a new direction in being a) full of comedy and b) not about women being unbearably oppressed and badly treated. The way it makes political points, however, is to put fish in a barrel and shoot them. Nothing to say this isn’t valid, but readers can be a contrary bunch who enjoy a good old wrestle with the issue first. Oh and before I forget, I must mention the most bonkers appendix, EVER, which takes up more than 50 pages and which I had no intention of reading. I mean, I like my experimental fiction, but when the story is over, it’s over.

So all in all, Mimi is one of those intriguing novels that is part genius and ingenious and part crazy and certifiable. At the level of the sentence, I enjoyed and admired it, and chortled a lot. When I took a few steps back and thought about the whole, I had my doubts. It will not appeal to everyone. But if you are interested in feminist matters, or like zany fiction, or are just curious about trying something a bit different, then it’s worth a go.

Quiet

It’s a pity that Susan Cain didn’t publish her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking about a decade ago; it might have saved me a lot of time and money in therapy. According to Cain (and I’ll back her up) the Western world is smitten by the Extrovert Ideal, the image of the gregarious, sunny, charismatic individual who works hard and plays hard and loves time in the spotlight of jolly, rambunctious company. By contrast, the introvert is the nerd, the wimp, the anorak, the shy person who barely speaks above a whisper and is despised for lack of social life. Cain’s book sets out to address this unjust hegemony, and to show via case studies and psychology experiments, how the introvert has different qualities whose absence we are beginning to miss quite acutely in our loudmouth culture.

Introversion is not about misanthropy, but about the different ways we soak up energy. Extroverts absorb the energy of a gathering; they need people around them to feel alive and vigorous. Introverts need time alone to generate energy, and when in company they expend it fast. This is because introverts process much more finely and extensively; the sort of mental multitasking required in group activities drains their natural powers, but they often emerge from such encounters having noticed more, felt more and deduced more than the extroverts. Indeed, a percentage of introverts are also ‘highly sensitive’ (I certainly am), which means they have even thinner boundaries than your average introvert, and cannot help but feel what other people feel, often to the detriment of their own sympathetic nervous systems. Introverts experience far more guilt when things go wrong and often cannot abide conflict, feeling that they have been unacceptably aggressed in the wake of others’ anger. They are more persistent and engaged in their studies and often very creative. They are far less motivated by the ‘buzz’ of reward. Because they listen well and nurture others they can make better leaders than the gung-ho, quick-witted action hero types. You just really, really mustn’t invite them to dinner parties, where they wilt and fade, and long to be somewhere else, alone.

I am an almost-off-the-scale highly sensitive, anxious introvert, and most of my life has been spent, as it were, on the edge of the playground, wondering why I cannot do the things ‘normal’ people do. Some examples:

The cinema is, for me, a form of torture with that ferocious surround sound and all those jump cuts designed to feel like a slap in the face. I emerge into daylight feeling like I’ve been beaten up.

My husband comes from a large and voluble family. Whenever there was a big gathering in his parents’ house, I would have to steel myself outside the dining room before walking into what felt like an avalanche of sound. There would come a point in every meal where several people were happily yelling at one another at once (his grandmother used to put up her hand when she wanted to say something) and I would realise that even my teeth hurt from the tension.

In the book, Cain describes an experiment intended to test guilt in small children; they are given a toy designed to break when they play with it, and an overseeing adult will monitor their reaction and say ‘Oh dear!’ When I read this, I was OUTRAGED. Someone call social services! I still bear the scars of those sorts of childhood mistakes.

When my son was little, I hated it when he was ill, because I would feel ill in sympathy, and this was additionally exhausting to staying up all night caring for him.

If you give me anyone, in face to face conversation for half an hour, I will be able to give you an x-ray of what that person is feeling, what their deepest wishes and fears are and (this seems to be a particular talent of mine) what they really do not wish to acknowledge about themselves. I don’t even want to know, but it’s not a choice.

The most fascinating chapter of Cain’s book for me was the one that described my life. It was about how far you can stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone, and her main example was a university professor, known for being an excellent speaker. He said he could pretend to be extroverted in the service of a greater ideal – his love of teaching. But when he was invited to come to lunch with the staff at a college who invited him to guest lecture, he preferred to hide in the bathroom. Even so, the professor paid a price for his excessive exertion by falling ill with pneumonia, and he now lives very quietly. Our personalities have some elasticity, and we can make deals with ourselves to act artificially on behalf of core personal projects. But we can only stretch so far, or else we become all limp and hopeless, like perished elastic. This, I know all too well; I’ve paid out all my possible extroversion up front, and now the quiet years commence.

I found Quiet to be a very engaging, easy read, packed full of information that was well organised and endlessly interesting. But I suppose I also had two main criticisms to make. The first was that, because Cain is concerned with improving the PR for introverts, she spends no time on the extent to which we are disadvantaged in our society, or how ill-equipped our culture is to provide us with what we need. I guess the critique is there by implication, and I can understand that she would wish to avoid the victim mentality, but it is so easy to victimise introverts. I don’t believe anything will change unless there is some realisation of just how wrong introverts can be made to feel. But just as in any disadvantaged binary opposition – men and women, the native and the foreigner also spring to mind – her book assumes that the goals and the ideals of extroversion are also those of the introvert. This is a book all about being ‘successful’, about the way introverts can head up companies, and become famous music journalists and top earning lawyers. And yet one of the greatest qualities in introverts, I feel, is their celebration of something so much quieter, calmer, and less needy. Very few of the great ‘successes’ in our society are people who have reached their position through passion alone. Most high achievers are damaged people, who are over-compensating or driven by forces they cannot control. They may well achieve, but they are rarely ordinarily happy. The current fascination with celebrity and success is part and parcel of the narcissistic culture we live in, a culture that privileges extroversion to the point of psychosis. Might not the real value of introverts be their ability to be happy with so very little, and the way it shows up the common grasping desire for too much?

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – In The Body or the Mind?

Is chronic fatigue syndrome a ‘real’ illness or is it the most recent incarnation of hysteria? Ever since chronic fatigue appeared on the scene, it has persistently been labelled a psychosomatic disease. This means that the medical establishment is not searching as actively as it might for a cure, and in any country where medical care is insurance based, there is very little attention or treatment available for what is a highly debilitating condition.

I fell ill in 1997 but wasn’t diagnosed until 2006. In part this was because I had a nasty suspicion it would be chronic fatigue but I’d heard too many cruel comments about other sufferers (particularly in a university setting) to be in any way comfortable with such a diagnosis myself. I can’t tell you how much I did not want to be lumped into that particular group, because it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before, or what kind of a person you are: it’s scary how willing people are to believe that you are ‘avoiding’ unpleasant situations, failing to show the proper moral backbone or downright malingering. By the time I was finally diagnosed, I’d been such a workaholic that the university was quite sympathetic. My family was a harder sell. When my husband rang up his mother to say I’d be taking time off work, she said ‘But isn’t this all in her mind?’ I had spent the past ten years trying to do work I loved and battle an illness that attacked every part of my body. You may imagine how I felt about the suggestion that I was simply neurotic.

But when it came to finding some treatment for myself, psychotherapy was one of the few possibilities. Oh I tried lots of alternative therapies, none of which got me anywhere, although they contained some of the secondary problems I was experiencing. But I knew stress and anxiety had had big roles to play in my falling ill and psychotherapy gave me the best chance of at least managing what I had and coming to terms with it. Without a place to make sense of what was happening to me, and a very sympathetic listener, I don’t know how I would have coped. If chronic fatigue has anything to do with depression, it’s because the illness is so overwhelming and so devastating that it knocks you for six. It has a tendency to attack driven, hardworking people who invest a lot emotionally in what they do, and who are very cut up when they can’t keep doing it. And as I remember all too well, to feel as ill as I did, with no prospect of anything at all that could be done about it, and this stretching out for months, years, into the future, is a pretty depressing prospect.

I’ve been reading Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic by Hillary Johnson, an American journalist who has researched the rise and spread of the illness in America in painstaking detail, and the medical establishment’s failure to take it seriously. Johnson identifies an outbreak that seems to have begun in 1985 in Nevada and then cropped up in Boston, California and New York. The majority of the early cases were middle-class, middle-aged women, and given that they displayed a perplexing array of symptoms and no obvious, simple bacteria offered an identifiable cause, the official decision was that it was all in their minds.

I’ll add another significant factor into this: chronic fatigue doesn’t kill enough people. You have to die to be taken seriously in medicine, and whilst CFS can reduce people to bed-ridden vegetables or just destroy their quality of life forever more, it isn’t enough compared to, for instance, the other illness that was hitting the headlines about the same time: AIDS. Johnson also reports how the government felt there was surprisingly little lobbying by the sufferers of the illness, which is the way that ‘new’ diseases call political attention to themselves, and eventually, research money. No one seemed able to put two and two together that CFS-ers were just too sick and too tired to organise a lobby. Plus, the celebrity cases were not keen to identify themselves with the illness. Johnson reckons that the register of sufferers included James Garner, Robert Wagner, Morgan Fairchild, Cher, David Puttnam, Kirstie Alley and Cathy Lee Crosby, but few spoke out publicly. Cher was reported as falling ill for more than three years after a flu-like virus and another patient declared “I’d like to be in the room when you tell Cher… that her illness is due to ‘unachievable ambitions and poor coping skills.’”

Like just about everything else, medicine responds to public outcry, and if there is insufficient public sympathy, then nothing happens. It also responds, probably most rapidly of all, to the pharmaceutical industry. If scientists develop a drug that works, then the illness can be verified. But to do that, doctors need a simple yes or no diagnostic test, and that has never been forthcoming – it’s a vicious circle. Many people are unconcerned because they think it’s not contagious, although this book argues otherwise, with evidence of many health care professionals falling ill after handling blood samples. And then medicine has a very poor record of giving credibility to illnesses that involve fatigue (a word I dislike as it is so feeble compared to what it wants to describe). Multiple sclerosis was for a long time considered a psychosomatic illness, as was lupus and the Epstein-Barr virus. Doctors are also prejudiced against nebulous, debilitating illnesses in white women with private means (actually, they’re not alone), without being able to see that only women with enough money and sense of entitlement ever make it through the professional contempt and lack of interest to reach a diagnosis in the first place.

So where are we now? This book was published in 1996, and not a great deal has changed, except perhaps public opinion is kinder to chronic fatigue sufferers, and more willing to concede that an illness is involved. There has been significant research into possible viral or retroviral roots to the illness without any conclusive breakthrough, and tens of millions of people are said to suffer with some version of it, men, women, children, regardless of social situation. A significant proportion of them make up the long-term unemployed and the chronically poor. Less than a fifth of cases ever recover, and ‘these patients inevitably describe a series of readjustments or realignments of goals and expectations that would have been unthinkable prior to the onset of their illness.’

I include myself in that category – I’m much better, and I do much, much less, after a long fight against my inclinations. My own experience suggests that it is a disease based in the endochrinal system – adrenal exhaustion triggers a severe immune system response (when you feel ill, that’s your immune system working to evacuate the perceived threat) and because the illness is so intense, the entire hormonal system is thrown out of balance. There is also a psychological component, bound up in the trauma for some of us of suffering the illness, and built into the body’s defense systems which seem then to be on a hair-trigger (as is often the case with other autoimmune illnesses like asthma and hayfever). But given that I’m a smart enough person and ten years in therapy didn’t cure me, I don’t think it’s entirely psychological. There is some biological component involved that has yet to be found. I think I’m one of the lucky ones – for the rest I fervently hope that some solution will be uncovered.