For Bob Cox
It has to start somewhere, this business of being an intellectual. Chances are, it doesn’t start well. Your early efforts are bound be misdirected, a source of subsequent embarrassment. Maybe Dead Poets Society made you want to be a writer or a professor. Maybe you read Lolita because of the Police song. Maybe you wrote poems about walking alone through dark valleys or drew pictures of your reflection in cracked mirrors. Maybe you quoted T.S. Eliot at Starbucks, hoping to be overheard. But of course you hadn’t measured out your life in coffee spoons, since you were still in the middle of puberty, had never encountered the utensils in question, and had only drunk your first real cup of coffee the week before.
As a teenager, I lined the cinderblock shelves in my bedroom with novels by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell. These were my gateway books, my entry into the heady life of the intellectual I hoped I was on the brink of becoming: They raised big questions about existence. They made me laugh at the absurdity of the adult rules I was being taught to follow. And they promised to lead me somewhere else, somewhere better than the Blockbuster Video, the Danbury Fair Mall, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Windmill Diner, all the cul-de-sacs of my social life in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In high school, I read them zealously and talked about them with anyone who seemed game—seeking like-minded readers, hoping to find my people. In college, where I hoped such people would be in great abundance, I discovered my mistake. Quizzical looks and sarcastic quips from peers and professors made me question whether these authors merited my reverence. Though I held out for a little while, I eventually replaced them with a different set of names: Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, etc. I’m not sure I could have said what made these new authors better. Had I been asked, I probably would have talked about maturity or complexity or impersonality. I doubt I could have passed a blind taste test, but at least I knew which names I was supposed to drop in conversation. Now, as an English professor, I find myself teaching my students the same preferences that I learned in college. Indeed, I have assigned almost none of the books I loved when I was an aspiring intellectual.
Though I’ve mostly put them out of my mind, I haven’t, it turns out, put these books out of my mother’s basement, which is where they are, crammed into boxes, taking up too much space. “Can you please do something about them?” she has asked me on several occasions. But what exactly should I do? I don’t want to give them away, but I also don’t want to display them on my shelves, a tension which suggests something about the weird place they occupy in my life. Recently I’ve begun to wonder whether pretending these authors never played a formative role in my intellectual development has actually succeeded in erasing their influence over me. And what about all the other nerdy kids like me? Did they read the same books, and do they now have the same ambivalent feelings about them? How might these books, even after being boxed away, have continued to shape their thoughts, commitments and desires?
In search of answers, I posted a tweet asking people if they had once been fans of what I called “the white male middlebrow canon (Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Hesse, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Tolkien, Wolfe, etc.).” My post elicited a thousand likes and hundreds of comments. Some people were offended by what they read as my snobbery. Many more, however, happily informed me I had identified their early tastes with perfect precision. Some suggested edits, like removing Tolkien, and adding names I hadn’t thought to include, such as Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Robert Anton Wilson, Tom Robbins, Aldous Huxley and Harlan Ellison. Whether or not they agreed with me about the particular authors I had listed, they all seemed to recognize the subculture I was talking about.
It’s not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller’s Catch-22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse’s novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, “literary gateway drugs” and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher.
●
Following up on my tweet, I sent out a survey consisting of thirteen questions, including:
“When and how were you exposed to these authors?”
“Did these authors help shape your identity or your sense of your self? How?”
“Did you stop reading these authors at a certain point in your life? Why?”
“Do you think reading these authors at a fairly early age shaped your subsequent intellectual development in any way? How?”
I received 38 responses, the majority from men. One of the first things that struck me in the answers was how serendipitous the discovery of these books seemed to be. While one respondent suggests they were “in the air,” others credit happenstance: an eccentric teacher, a desire to impress a crush, a random thrift-store find. “It started with a bio of Jim Morrison that said Kerouac was an influence.” Kerouac led to others. In my case, I remember my older sister mentioning that her high school English teacher had told a student in her class that his fiction read like Kurt Vonnegut’s. This was the highest praise I could imagine: being compared to an author with a peculiar name whom I’d never heard of! It wasn’t long before I tracked down Slaughterhouse-Five.
It’s worth noting that most of us were reading these books in the pre-internet era. This made finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, more chancy. That’s why one survey respondent describes the books I listed as part of “the same sort of secret canon that weird music and midnight movies were,” and observes that he found them through the “punk rock community, zines, etc.” Finding interesting books that spoke to your particular needs often meant following a breadcrumb trail of seemingly haphazard allusions. When your hunt was successful, it didn’t feel like a foregone conclusion. Even if you were discovering exactly the same books as thousands of other teenagers across the county, participating in a youth trend precisely indexed to your demographic, you might not know it.
For many of us, the initial encounter with the gateway books was a lonely one. This wasn’t just because nobody we knew seemed to be reading them, but also because loneliness was what motivated the search in the first place. I was told I was a loser with no friends on what felt like a daily basis during middle school, which made me desperate for anything that could recast my social ineptitude as courageous nonconformity. When you are surrounded by effortlessly popular kids who smirk at your every misstep, it’s hard to overstate how intensely validating it can be to read The Catcher in the Rye and think: at least I am not a phony. Writes one survey respondent, “Teendom is terrible. Made more terrible by a sense of alienation, social isolation. These books were a quiet counterculture for me, accessible on a shelf.” Remarks another, “Being nerdy/unpopular as a girl meant being a loner. Books supplied me with the conversations, exchange of ideas and secrets, interpersonal experiences, approval I couldn’t get elsewhere.” Many of the gateway books offer reassurance to their misfit readers by celebrating antisocial behavior, whether it’s Yossarian’s flouting of military protocols in Catch-22, Dean Moriarty’s unthinking neglect of his wife and kids in On the Road or Hunter Thompson’s inability to feign sobriety long enough to check into a hotel room in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don’t think many of us aspired to be misanthropes at this level, but when you find yourself unable to adhere to the myriad rules that govern social existence, you will likely thrill to the suggestion that it’s the rules, not you, that are the problem.
These books didn’t just soothe our loneliness; they promised to bring us into some as-yet vaguely conceived, glamorous avant-garde community, a higher echelon of thought and feeling. This is why it was easy to transition from fantasy novels such as The Lord of the Rings to the gateway books. Both invite the socially awkward teenager to imagine that he will one day be called away from the pedestrian world of his unimaginative peers and invited into some cadre of visionary companions who experience life at a higher pitch. Hesse’s Demian makes this promise explicitly. Its protagonist Emil Sinclair, from an unremarkable middle-class German family, spends his childhood reeling between worldly temptations and glimpses of a higher wisdom before being initiated by his enigmatic friend Demian into “the mystery of those who bore ‘the sign.’” The eclectic community of mystics, artists and thinkers he joins, overseen by Mother Eve (Demian’s mother), a woman with both maternal and erotic allure, is, Emil explains, “probably justly considered by the world as peculiar—yes, mad even, and dangerous. For we were awake, or were waking, and our endeavor was to be more and more completely awake, whereas the others strove to be happy, attaching themselves to the herd.” Though Kerouac called Hesse an “old fart” and “old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late,” Emil’s declaration anticipates the more famous one made by On the Road’s Sal Paradise several decades later: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
That Demian’s Emil lusts after Mother Eve is telling. The typical reader of the gateway books is, after all, likely a sexually frustrated male adolescent. If he is like several respondents to my survey, he hopes that his newfound literary tastes will make him cool, with coolness connoting sexual attractiveness. And yet these books do not posit traditional romantic love as the key to happiness, celebrating instead the joys of male camaraderie. On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas all redirect libidinal urges toward a utopia centered around male bonding, with women functioning either as a distraction or threat. Perhaps this adolescent reader, bitter over his failures with girls, feels consoled, even affirmed. Or perhaps, like a couple survey respondents, he is emboldened by the discovery in books of a desire that he has been afraid to acknowledge. While others may regard Yossarian’s profession of love for the chaplain in the opening sentence of Catch-22 as merely a bizarre joke, to him it is a private revelation. Even Hesse foregrounds the intimacy between Emil and Demian, while characterizing the quasi-Oedipal desire Mother Eve elicits as secondary, a means of inspiring the protagonist’s participation in her cult’s project of remaking the world.
●
But what kind of world do these books point readers toward? While the objects of their satire are often specific—the military, the mental health industry, the nuclear family, the U.S. government—their irreverence is easy to repurpose as a contempt for institutions in general and the “school to college to career mindset” in particular. One survey respondent who wanted “freedom to move, to travel, to live off very little,” observes that she used the books she read as a “road map,” and ended up “squatting in an abandoned building in NYC,” a lifestyle, she wryly notes, she thought “terribly romantic.” Most, however, suggest results less concrete. Kerouac made one reader “want to see more, feel more, try more.” Another respondent was inspired by his reading to “be boldly against the grain; imaginative, embrace and pursue passions.” A third reports he “was influenced to SEE the world. Not just in travel but in simply seeing and being a part of IT, whatever it was.” The latter’s inability to specify the thing that he wanted to be a part of is telling. Where, after all, can a typical American high schooler go to find the freedom, the late-night orgy of people and possibilities, of sensations, visions and intimacies, that he knows must exist somewhere?
Imagine a Gen X teenager. He gets up every day at dawn, his clock radio waking him with the smarmy voices of unhappy, middle-aged DJs playing the same classic rock hits they always play. He goes to a big ugly concrete building that looks like a prison made of life-size gray Lego blocks and tries to stay awake while his teachers lecture about topics that don’t interest him. He moves from one fluorescent lit room to another when directed by the sound of bells. After school, he works a shift at the supermarket deli, trying not to look at his watch every three minutes. He goes home, maybe does his homework or puts it off. Over dinner he deflects questions from his mother about his day. He calls a friend to complain about school, then studies until bedtime. Just before falling asleep, he reads a novel that tells him another life is possible. The next day, he wakes up and does it all again.
The problem isn’t just high school. He considers the lives of his parents, teachers and friends’ parents, fearing the boring empty future that awaits him: a series of tasks that start over as soon as they are completed, of rooms with different arrangements of furniture, of conversations about other conversations. After finishing On the Road, he vows to be more daring, to experience things more intensely. But he doesn’t know how. Maybe he gets drunk or tries drugs. But this provides only a temporary escape from the routine that seems to stretch endlessly into the future. The books he’s reading give him hope not because they open a doorway he can walk through but because they make him believe that a door might open at any moment, or at least one day in the future. Somehow this makes everything bearable.
The gateway books work by means of their contradictions. The reckless behavior they depict serves, ironically, as a comfort food for unhappy adolescents. Their authors exude apparently grown-up modes of cynicism that appeal to young readers who want to feel sophisticated. They romanticize alienation while offering imaginary companionship. They beckon readers to join a community of like-minded intellectuals by appealing to their sense of apartness. They envision a different world from the one their readers were likely to inhabit, but offer no concrete means of creating that world. Sometimes they present dissatisfaction as existential, a tragic feature of the human condition, other times as the result of particular social arrangements. But the individual, stylistic revolt against the current order they champion yields no blueprint for remaking that order. The first readers who encountered them during the 1960s, intoxicated by the dream of impending revolution, may not have noticed this limitation. But for the next generation—my generation—reading the literary remnants of a bygone era, handed to us by our wistfully subdued parents and teachers, meant feeding off political hopes that had already expired, taking whatever sustenance we could from an unfulfilled promise.
The gateway books work until they stop working. Youthful resistance to the demands of adult life frequently turns out to be short-lived. What follows in the wake of adolescent nonconformity may seem like surrender, or it may seem like maturity. Part of this process, for me and others, was confronting and accepting the critical establishment’s judgment of the books we once loved as sophomoric rather than truly artful. At some point, the very qualities that we had found so tantalizing—the romanticization of excess, the default cynicism toward all accepted values and notions of decency, the rage, the celebration of irresponsible behavior, the dogmatic defense of individual freedom, the indecorous stylistic hijinks, the gleeful irreverence, and the breathlessly rhapsodic, free-associative prose—all become tiresome, untenable as a model for how to be a human in the world. “When I first encountered [these books],” remarks one survey respondent, “they felt very adult. I now think they perhaps belong to a category of books for adults that you have to first encounter when you’re young or you will never fully appreciate them.” Notes another, “You can only have your coming-of-age experience once, and maybe they aren’t as magical as they once were … Salinger and the Beats are both best read at a certain ‘young person moving into the absurd adult world’ phase of life.”
●
Several respondents to my survey offer political grounds for their disenchantment with the gateway books. Some now find their libertarian, individualistic values objectionable. Others point to their misogyny and racism, while expressing amazement that so many of the authors they read in high school were white men. According to one, “They have a special appeal for guys who like to use women for sex, or who wish they could.” Notes a female respondent, “The majority of these writers are angry white guys and the people who tend to recommend them are angry white guys.” Observes another, “Sexism, racism, cultural appropriation seem very glaring in many of these writers now.” Returning to the gateway books as an adult and encountering the sheer ubiquity of racist stereotypes, misogynistic images and homophobic tropes—from the Beats’ fetishization of black culture, to Henry Miller’s compulsive use of the c-word, to Ken Kesey’s demonization of queerness—can be a disconcerting experience.
Early in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrator Raoul Duke and his lawyer Doctor Gonzo are doing 110 in the desert at the beginning of an epic drug bender, when they pick up a hitchhiker. After ranting in his direction for several pages, Duke tries to reassure this wide-eyed stand-in for the reader:
The boy’s face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment.
I blundered on: “I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney! He’s not just some dingbat I found on the Strip. Shit, look at him. He doesn’t look like you or me, right? That’s because he’s a foreigner. I think he’s probably Samoan. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Are you prejudiced?”
“Oh, hell no!” he blurted.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “Because in spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me.”
Later, Duke reflects on whether they can trust the hitchhiker:
[Our trip] was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country—but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.
My attorney understood this concept, despite his racial handicap, but our hitchhiker was not an easy person to reach. He said he understood, but I could see in his eyes that he didn’t.
Apparently the real-life inspiration for Doctor Gonzo, the Mexican American lawyer and political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, never forgave Thompson for stealing his best lines and turning him into a “300-pound Samoan.” In this scene, Thompson’s quasi-fictional avatar Duke trades on his deep bond with his exoticized friend to claim for himself a seemingly superhuman degree of freedom, coolness, higher consciousness and savvy. Whereas the “Okie” hitchhiker has to prove his lack of prejudice with a protestation whose credibility is undermined by its very vehemence, Duke apparently is sufficiently in with black and brown people that he can query their driving companion’s racial bona fides.
Duke is just playing, but that’s the point. He’s tacitly claiming to be so much higher in the scale of human enlightenment than the hitchhiker that he can get away with mock-racist quips. He can even make the very act of questioning whether a person is prejudiced into a joke, part of a larger game that supplants the division between the racist and the non-racist or between white and brown with what Thompson casts as the more fundamental division between the hip and the square, between those who are spontaneous, freethinking, in the know, well-traveled, gritty and dangerous, and those who are boring, cautious, earnest, provincial, repressed and ignorant.
Thompson’s ever-slashing ironies makes the reader wonder. Is it just a joke when he trumpets the truth and decency of his drug binge? Does he want us to think of Duke as improbably heroic underneath it all or as thoroughly risible? When Duke refers to Gonzo’s “racial handicap,” is this a parody of xenophobia, or something else? Opting not to hedge against less charitable readings is risky, but it’s what allows Thompson to seem edgy, ready to get himself dirty in order to unearth his country’s dark secrets. It’s odd to suggest, even in jest, that Gonzo’s race might hinder his ability to recognize their journey as a last-ditch realization of the American dream, insofar as their cross-racial partnership is essential to the national fantasy that Duke claims to be enacting. But it also assigns Gonzo his place. As merely a symbol or sidekick, he is there to license Duke’s liberties, his racial otherness fuel for Thompson’s reckless, high-speed rhetoric.
●
What, then, are we to do with these authors and their assorted tricks and transgressions? How should we remember them, if at all? At this point, they’re probably not visible enough, outside their steadily diminishing cult following, to merit concerted outrage. We aren’t passing them onto our kids and students the way the baby boomers did. That said, it’s worth considering the extraordinary influence they exerted over several generations of readers during the second half of the twentieth century. How do you measure the importance of a set of books that almost everyone within a certain demographic read at one point, but hardly anyone talks about anymore? What kind of judgment can do justice to a literary work that helps foster the very critical acumen that ultimately turns on the work itself and finds it deeply wanting?
At the very least, the answers to my survey suggest, the gateway books served as an introduction to serious literature and thus led many readers to other authors whom they continue to value today. But some are reluctant to cast these books as simply a means to a better end. Even as they recognize the gateway books’ many flaws, sins and limitations, respondents are emphatic in asserting the value the latter had for them: “They helped me out. I don’t read them anymore because I’m chasing other questions, but I don’t reject what they gave me.”
Several respondents describe the effect the gateway books had on them as dialectical, with two using the term explicitly. They were influential, observes one, “only in a dialectical way. They were the antithesis to the thesis of my upbringing and were part of the development of the fully synthesized young adult I came to be.” Others describe a similar process wherein the gateway books promoted a rejection of traditional values and an aggressive embrace of radical individualism, followed eventually by a commitment to socialist ideals enabled by the initial revolt that they helped facilitate. Focusing on their gender politics, one female respondent notes, “Looking back, I still feel traumatized sexually when I remember reading their books; I realize they wounded me profoundly at a vulnerable age, violently shaming and objectifying my body as I read. Yet I read them anyway, because I knew it was even more important for my future liberation to absorb the openness about sexuality from them that I was not getting in other places.” All of these readers describe a necessary passage through what they now regard as an error, one that either sustained them during difficult times or dislodged internalized impediments, thereby leading them to their present set of mature preferences and commitments.
But the gateway books, of course, never wanted to be merely a phase in the lives of unhappy adolescents. They wanted more. And even as I contemplate returning them to their boxes, putting them in their place, I have to pause to consider my motives. In using my grown-up intellectual powers to read them, am I just avoiding the question of how they might read me? What, after all, have I done with myself since parting ways with them? I’ve read a fair amount. I’ve thought a lot. But have I escaped leading the conventional, predictable life the gateway books taught me to question? Have I and my fellow serious-thinking friends made a new world together? Have we even tried? If we are honest with ourselves, we probably have to admit that the life of the intellectual today is marked more by caution than courage. My cultural training has taught me to talk in the right ways, to hold the right views, to like the right works of art. But it has not proved a gateway to some unimaginably rich, radical or liberated way of being.
Many in my generation have not, of course, surrendered their hopes. Utopian desire, a speculative questing after a different world, remains a defining tendency of the left intelligentsia. What they once found in the gateway books, readers now find in theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Mark Fisher to Lauren Berlant to Fred Moten, namely the belief that behind the current state of affairs lurks a glimmering alternate reality, one that flashes out in brief exhilarating bursts of social turbulence or joyful nonconformity, and promises to emerge as our new, beautiful future. This is another version of what one respondent calls the gateway books’ “burn it all down mentality.” Indeed the latter arguably helped prime many of us for the leftist theory we would eventually come to embrace, for the esoteric visions of radical transformation that we continue to entertain while we lead our predictable lives. Once we sat in our suburban bedrooms imagining that Hesse might offer the key to our liberation. Now we sit in our department cubicles, less sanguine about what books can do, but still hoping that Fredric Jameson will help us discern the faint outline of a different world.
●
But what if you never sought a gateway to somewhere else? What if you found literature neither tempting nor titillating? Like many older lifelong readers, I am concerned that young people today will not seek out literature the way people in my generation did. In raising this issue, I can’t deny the power of the new distractions—the ones that make every attempt to get my fourteen-year-old to put down his screen and read a book feel like an intervention. But we of course were hooked on cable TV and Nintendo, and at some point we turned away. Why? What made some of us shut off our televisions and read, unbidden by our parents, I am guessing, was the intuition that the books we had discovered were dangerous, that they harbored, as one respondent puts it, “adult secrets.”
Teachers and critics anxious about literature’s future frequently underscore its power to make us better people, more thoughtful and responsible citizens. Despite their sporadically radical politics, the gateway books did not stake their appeal on their virtue. They were more likely to make you bad than good. For suburban high school nerds, they represented an alternate path to coolness, one that led past the athletic fields to the back parking lot, where the shrewd-eyed kids in trench coats smoked cigarettes. Even when teachers or parents recommended them, they still felt like contraband, something shared between fellow malcontents. Will today’s teenagers discover any equivalent entry into literature? There are, admittedly, hundreds of YA books being published every year. But these books are explicitly designed for young readers and often yoked to a social/educational mission. What made the gateway books attractive is precisely that they were not YA books. Reading them as a high schooler meant trespassing into a space that was not meant for you. Are there books that do this for teenagers today? Might it be possible to imagine a new countercultural canon that lays claim to the previous generation’s outlaw energy while letting go of the boomer baggage? What would that look like? What thrills, shocks and pleasures would such books offer? Or will my son’s generation find what we found in literature somewhere else? Will the alienated teens of today discover outlets for their rebellious impulses and solace for their loneliness in corners of the internet far creepier than any of the books we read?
In high school, I was frequently depressed. I worried that life might turn out to be meaningless, the world a random rock in a godless universe. What’s the purpose of it all, I wondered. What reason is there to be alive rather than dead? Why does anything matter? My moods fluctuated dramatically, my new adolescent hormones swirling around inside me. As my spirits rose and fell, I issued verdicts on the human condition. It’s all hopeless, I might decide, panicked by how the morning felt. Or, life is an extraordinary adventure, I would conclude, noticing how the hallway to my sixth-period chemistry class was awash in light. I wanted literature to save me, to redeem the world. Every book I read had a lot to answer for.
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle seemed to know exactly what I wanted from it. But would it give it to me? It describes a new religion, Bokononism, invented by a Tobago-born adventurer, whose sacred text declares, “all of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies,” before elaborating a cosmology that assigns everyone a destiny and a community they have to find to carry out their life’s mission. Half the time, it sounds like a joke, but the narrator, a stand-in for Vonnegut, counts himself a true believer, compelled by the “heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality.” The religion seems designed for cynics who want to be saved. A chapter in the Books of Bokonon titled “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” answers “nothing.”
And yet the narrator has faith: “Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist.” The story, which presents itself as a modern-day religious parable, keeps offering bits of wisdom, clues to suggest a larger plot, a cosmic plan. Like many of the gateway books, Cat’s Cradle invites readers to imagine themselves joining a cult of higher-order minds. Though he tells us it’s all lies, Vonnegut seems to want us to believe in his parable, or at least believe that there is a reason to believe. What was a teenager desperate for answers to do with these mixed signals? The middle-aged protagonist winks and snickers all the way to the end of the book, straight to the end of human civilization, after a scientific invention freezes all the water on earth, the apocalypse a verdict on the inhumanity of modern technological society. In the final moment, he meets Bokonon himself, who encourages him to climb a mountain and use the very book he has just written as a pillow to die on, “grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.” What the hell kind of ending was this? Screw you, God, who may or may not exist! Screw you, world! Screw you, hope for the future! Screw you, reader, for asking me for answers! But also, screw you, despair! Screw you, death! Screw you, anyone who tells me I can’t do what I want, believe what I want, live how I want, die how I want!
What did I feel when I finished it? Terror? Defiance? Sadness? Euphoria? Hope? I wasn’t sure. But I knew it would pass quickly. I knew I’d better find another book to read if I wanted to feel it again.
For Bob Cox
It has to start somewhere, this business of being an intellectual. Chances are, it doesn’t start well. Your early efforts are bound be misdirected, a source of subsequent embarrassment. Maybe Dead Poets Society made you want to be a writer or a professor. Maybe you read Lolita because of the Police song. Maybe you wrote poems about walking alone through dark valleys or drew pictures of your reflection in cracked mirrors. Maybe you quoted T.S. Eliot at Starbucks, hoping to be overheard. But of course you hadn’t measured out your life in coffee spoons, since you were still in the middle of puberty, had never encountered the utensils in question, and had only drunk your first real cup of coffee the week before.
As a teenager, I lined the cinderblock shelves in my bedroom with novels by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and George Orwell. These were my gateway books, my entry into the heady life of the intellectual I hoped I was on the brink of becoming: They raised big questions about existence. They made me laugh at the absurdity of the adult rules I was being taught to follow. And they promised to lead me somewhere else, somewhere better than the Blockbuster Video, the Danbury Fair Mall, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Windmill Diner, all the cul-de-sacs of my social life in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In high school, I read them zealously and talked about them with anyone who seemed game—seeking like-minded readers, hoping to find my people. In college, where I hoped such people would be in great abundance, I discovered my mistake. Quizzical looks and sarcastic quips from peers and professors made me question whether these authors merited my reverence. Though I held out for a little while, I eventually replaced them with a different set of names: Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, etc. I’m not sure I could have said what made these new authors better. Had I been asked, I probably would have talked about maturity or complexity or impersonality. I doubt I could have passed a blind taste test, but at least I knew which names I was supposed to drop in conversation. Now, as an English professor, I find myself teaching my students the same preferences that I learned in college. Indeed, I have assigned almost none of the books I loved when I was an aspiring intellectual.
Though I’ve mostly put them out of my mind, I haven’t, it turns out, put these books out of my mother’s basement, which is where they are, crammed into boxes, taking up too much space. “Can you please do something about them?” she has asked me on several occasions. But what exactly should I do? I don’t want to give them away, but I also don’t want to display them on my shelves, a tension which suggests something about the weird place they occupy in my life. Recently I’ve begun to wonder whether pretending these authors never played a formative role in my intellectual development has actually succeeded in erasing their influence over me. And what about all the other nerdy kids like me? Did they read the same books, and do they now have the same ambivalent feelings about them? How might these books, even after being boxed away, have continued to shape their thoughts, commitments and desires?
In search of answers, I posted a tweet asking people if they had once been fans of what I called “the white male middlebrow canon (Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Hesse, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, Tolkien, Wolfe, etc.).” My post elicited a thousand likes and hundreds of comments. Some people were offended by what they read as my snobbery. Many more, however, happily informed me I had identified their early tastes with perfect precision. Some suggested edits, like removing Tolkien, and adding names I hadn’t thought to include, such as Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Robert Anton Wilson, Tom Robbins, Aldous Huxley and Harlan Ellison. Whether or not they agreed with me about the particular authors I had listed, they all seemed to recognize the subculture I was talking about.
It’s not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller’s Catch-22, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse’s novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, “literary gateway drugs” and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher.
●
Following up on my tweet, I sent out a survey consisting of thirteen questions, including:
I received 38 responses, the majority from men. One of the first things that struck me in the answers was how serendipitous the discovery of these books seemed to be. While one respondent suggests they were “in the air,” others credit happenstance: an eccentric teacher, a desire to impress a crush, a random thrift-store find. “It started with a bio of Jim Morrison that said Kerouac was an influence.” Kerouac led to others. In my case, I remember my older sister mentioning that her high school English teacher had told a student in her class that his fiction read like Kurt Vonnegut’s. This was the highest praise I could imagine: being compared to an author with a peculiar name whom I’d never heard of! It wasn’t long before I tracked down Slaughterhouse-Five.
It’s worth noting that most of us were reading these books in the pre-internet era. This made finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, more chancy. That’s why one survey respondent describes the books I listed as part of “the same sort of secret canon that weird music and midnight movies were,” and observes that he found them through the “punk rock community, zines, etc.” Finding interesting books that spoke to your particular needs often meant following a breadcrumb trail of seemingly haphazard allusions. When your hunt was successful, it didn’t feel like a foregone conclusion. Even if you were discovering exactly the same books as thousands of other teenagers across the county, participating in a youth trend precisely indexed to your demographic, you might not know it.
For many of us, the initial encounter with the gateway books was a lonely one. This wasn’t just because nobody we knew seemed to be reading them, but also because loneliness was what motivated the search in the first place. I was told I was a loser with no friends on what felt like a daily basis during middle school, which made me desperate for anything that could recast my social ineptitude as courageous nonconformity. When you are surrounded by effortlessly popular kids who smirk at your every misstep, it’s hard to overstate how intensely validating it can be to read The Catcher in the Rye and think: at least I am not a phony. Writes one survey respondent, “Teendom is terrible. Made more terrible by a sense of alienation, social isolation. These books were a quiet counterculture for me, accessible on a shelf.” Remarks another, “Being nerdy/unpopular as a girl meant being a loner. Books supplied me with the conversations, exchange of ideas and secrets, interpersonal experiences, approval I couldn’t get elsewhere.” Many of the gateway books offer reassurance to their misfit readers by celebrating antisocial behavior, whether it’s Yossarian’s flouting of military protocols in Catch-22, Dean Moriarty’s unthinking neglect of his wife and kids in On the Road or Hunter Thompson’s inability to feign sobriety long enough to check into a hotel room in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don’t think many of us aspired to be misanthropes at this level, but when you find yourself unable to adhere to the myriad rules that govern social existence, you will likely thrill to the suggestion that it’s the rules, not you, that are the problem.
These books didn’t just soothe our loneliness; they promised to bring us into some as-yet vaguely conceived, glamorous avant-garde community, a higher echelon of thought and feeling. This is why it was easy to transition from fantasy novels such as The Lord of the Rings to the gateway books. Both invite the socially awkward teenager to imagine that he will one day be called away from the pedestrian world of his unimaginative peers and invited into some cadre of visionary companions who experience life at a higher pitch. Hesse’s Demian makes this promise explicitly. Its protagonist Emil Sinclair, from an unremarkable middle-class German family, spends his childhood reeling between worldly temptations and glimpses of a higher wisdom before being initiated by his enigmatic friend Demian into “the mystery of those who bore ‘the sign.’” The eclectic community of mystics, artists and thinkers he joins, overseen by Mother Eve (Demian’s mother), a woman with both maternal and erotic allure, is, Emil explains, “probably justly considered by the world as peculiar—yes, mad even, and dangerous. For we were awake, or were waking, and our endeavor was to be more and more completely awake, whereas the others strove to be happy, attaching themselves to the herd.” Though Kerouac called Hesse an “old fart” and “old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late,” Emil’s declaration anticipates the more famous one made by On the Road’s Sal Paradise several decades later: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
That Demian’s Emil lusts after Mother Eve is telling. The typical reader of the gateway books is, after all, likely a sexually frustrated male adolescent. If he is like several respondents to my survey, he hopes that his newfound literary tastes will make him cool, with coolness connoting sexual attractiveness. And yet these books do not posit traditional romantic love as the key to happiness, celebrating instead the joys of male camaraderie. On the Road, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas all redirect libidinal urges toward a utopia centered around male bonding, with women functioning either as a distraction or threat. Perhaps this adolescent reader, bitter over his failures with girls, feels consoled, even affirmed. Or perhaps, like a couple survey respondents, he is emboldened by the discovery in books of a desire that he has been afraid to acknowledge. While others may regard Yossarian’s profession of love for the chaplain in the opening sentence of Catch-22 as merely a bizarre joke, to him it is a private revelation. Even Hesse foregrounds the intimacy between Emil and Demian, while characterizing the quasi-Oedipal desire Mother Eve elicits as secondary, a means of inspiring the protagonist’s participation in her cult’s project of remaking the world.
●
But what kind of world do these books point readers toward? While the objects of their satire are often specific—the military, the mental health industry, the nuclear family, the U.S. government—their irreverence is easy to repurpose as a contempt for institutions in general and the “school to college to career mindset” in particular. One survey respondent who wanted “freedom to move, to travel, to live off very little,” observes that she used the books she read as a “road map,” and ended up “squatting in an abandoned building in NYC,” a lifestyle, she wryly notes, she thought “terribly romantic.” Most, however, suggest results less concrete. Kerouac made one reader “want to see more, feel more, try more.” Another respondent was inspired by his reading to “be boldly against the grain; imaginative, embrace and pursue passions.” A third reports he “was influenced to SEE the world. Not just in travel but in simply seeing and being a part of IT, whatever it was.” The latter’s inability to specify the thing that he wanted to be a part of is telling. Where, after all, can a typical American high schooler go to find the freedom, the late-night orgy of people and possibilities, of sensations, visions and intimacies, that he knows must exist somewhere?
Imagine a Gen X teenager. He gets up every day at dawn, his clock radio waking him with the smarmy voices of unhappy, middle-aged DJs playing the same classic rock hits they always play. He goes to a big ugly concrete building that looks like a prison made of life-size gray Lego blocks and tries to stay awake while his teachers lecture about topics that don’t interest him. He moves from one fluorescent lit room to another when directed by the sound of bells. After school, he works a shift at the supermarket deli, trying not to look at his watch every three minutes. He goes home, maybe does his homework or puts it off. Over dinner he deflects questions from his mother about his day. He calls a friend to complain about school, then studies until bedtime. Just before falling asleep, he reads a novel that tells him another life is possible. The next day, he wakes up and does it all again.
The problem isn’t just high school. He considers the lives of his parents, teachers and friends’ parents, fearing the boring empty future that awaits him: a series of tasks that start over as soon as they are completed, of rooms with different arrangements of furniture, of conversations about other conversations. After finishing On the Road, he vows to be more daring, to experience things more intensely. But he doesn’t know how. Maybe he gets drunk or tries drugs. But this provides only a temporary escape from the routine that seems to stretch endlessly into the future. The books he’s reading give him hope not because they open a doorway he can walk through but because they make him believe that a door might open at any moment, or at least one day in the future. Somehow this makes everything bearable.
The gateway books work by means of their contradictions. The reckless behavior they depict serves, ironically, as a comfort food for unhappy adolescents. Their authors exude apparently grown-up modes of cynicism that appeal to young readers who want to feel sophisticated. They romanticize alienation while offering imaginary companionship. They beckon readers to join a community of like-minded intellectuals by appealing to their sense of apartness. They envision a different world from the one their readers were likely to inhabit, but offer no concrete means of creating that world. Sometimes they present dissatisfaction as existential, a tragic feature of the human condition, other times as the result of particular social arrangements. But the individual, stylistic revolt against the current order they champion yields no blueprint for remaking that order. The first readers who encountered them during the 1960s, intoxicated by the dream of impending revolution, may not have noticed this limitation. But for the next generation—my generation—reading the literary remnants of a bygone era, handed to us by our wistfully subdued parents and teachers, meant feeding off political hopes that had already expired, taking whatever sustenance we could from an unfulfilled promise.
The gateway books work until they stop working. Youthful resistance to the demands of adult life frequently turns out to be short-lived. What follows in the wake of adolescent nonconformity may seem like surrender, or it may seem like maturity. Part of this process, for me and others, was confronting and accepting the critical establishment’s judgment of the books we once loved as sophomoric rather than truly artful. At some point, the very qualities that we had found so tantalizing—the romanticization of excess, the default cynicism toward all accepted values and notions of decency, the rage, the celebration of irresponsible behavior, the dogmatic defense of individual freedom, the indecorous stylistic hijinks, the gleeful irreverence, and the breathlessly rhapsodic, free-associative prose—all become tiresome, untenable as a model for how to be a human in the world. “When I first encountered [these books],” remarks one survey respondent, “they felt very adult. I now think they perhaps belong to a category of books for adults that you have to first encounter when you’re young or you will never fully appreciate them.” Notes another, “You can only have your coming-of-age experience once, and maybe they aren’t as magical as they once were … Salinger and the Beats are both best read at a certain ‘young person moving into the absurd adult world’ phase of life.”
●
Several respondents to my survey offer political grounds for their disenchantment with the gateway books. Some now find their libertarian, individualistic values objectionable. Others point to their misogyny and racism, while expressing amazement that so many of the authors they read in high school were white men. According to one, “They have a special appeal for guys who like to use women for sex, or who wish they could.” Notes a female respondent, “The majority of these writers are angry white guys and the people who tend to recommend them are angry white guys.” Observes another, “Sexism, racism, cultural appropriation seem very glaring in many of these writers now.” Returning to the gateway books as an adult and encountering the sheer ubiquity of racist stereotypes, misogynistic images and homophobic tropes—from the Beats’ fetishization of black culture, to Henry Miller’s compulsive use of the c-word, to Ken Kesey’s demonization of queerness—can be a disconcerting experience.
Early in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrator Raoul Duke and his lawyer Doctor Gonzo are doing 110 in the desert at the beginning of an epic drug bender, when they pick up a hitchhiker. After ranting in his direction for several pages, Duke tries to reassure this wide-eyed stand-in for the reader:
Later, Duke reflects on whether they can trust the hitchhiker:
Apparently the real-life inspiration for Doctor Gonzo, the Mexican American lawyer and political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, never forgave Thompson for stealing his best lines and turning him into a “300-pound Samoan.” In this scene, Thompson’s quasi-fictional avatar Duke trades on his deep bond with his exoticized friend to claim for himself a seemingly superhuman degree of freedom, coolness, higher consciousness and savvy. Whereas the “Okie” hitchhiker has to prove his lack of prejudice with a protestation whose credibility is undermined by its very vehemence, Duke apparently is sufficiently in with black and brown people that he can query their driving companion’s racial bona fides.
Duke is just playing, but that’s the point. He’s tacitly claiming to be so much higher in the scale of human enlightenment than the hitchhiker that he can get away with mock-racist quips. He can even make the very act of questioning whether a person is prejudiced into a joke, part of a larger game that supplants the division between the racist and the non-racist or between white and brown with what Thompson casts as the more fundamental division between the hip and the square, between those who are spontaneous, freethinking, in the know, well-traveled, gritty and dangerous, and those who are boring, cautious, earnest, provincial, repressed and ignorant.
Thompson’s ever-slashing ironies makes the reader wonder. Is it just a joke when he trumpets the truth and decency of his drug binge? Does he want us to think of Duke as improbably heroic underneath it all or as thoroughly risible? When Duke refers to Gonzo’s “racial handicap,” is this a parody of xenophobia, or something else? Opting not to hedge against less charitable readings is risky, but it’s what allows Thompson to seem edgy, ready to get himself dirty in order to unearth his country’s dark secrets. It’s odd to suggest, even in jest, that Gonzo’s race might hinder his ability to recognize their journey as a last-ditch realization of the American dream, insofar as their cross-racial partnership is essential to the national fantasy that Duke claims to be enacting. But it also assigns Gonzo his place. As merely a symbol or sidekick, he is there to license Duke’s liberties, his racial otherness fuel for Thompson’s reckless, high-speed rhetoric.
●
What, then, are we to do with these authors and their assorted tricks and transgressions? How should we remember them, if at all? At this point, they’re probably not visible enough, outside their steadily diminishing cult following, to merit concerted outrage. We aren’t passing them onto our kids and students the way the baby boomers did. That said, it’s worth considering the extraordinary influence they exerted over several generations of readers during the second half of the twentieth century. How do you measure the importance of a set of books that almost everyone within a certain demographic read at one point, but hardly anyone talks about anymore? What kind of judgment can do justice to a literary work that helps foster the very critical acumen that ultimately turns on the work itself and finds it deeply wanting?
At the very least, the answers to my survey suggest, the gateway books served as an introduction to serious literature and thus led many readers to other authors whom they continue to value today. But some are reluctant to cast these books as simply a means to a better end. Even as they recognize the gateway books’ many flaws, sins and limitations, respondents are emphatic in asserting the value the latter had for them: “They helped me out. I don’t read them anymore because I’m chasing other questions, but I don’t reject what they gave me.”
Several respondents describe the effect the gateway books had on them as dialectical, with two using the term explicitly. They were influential, observes one, “only in a dialectical way. They were the antithesis to the thesis of my upbringing and were part of the development of the fully synthesized young adult I came to be.” Others describe a similar process wherein the gateway books promoted a rejection of traditional values and an aggressive embrace of radical individualism, followed eventually by a commitment to socialist ideals enabled by the initial revolt that they helped facilitate. Focusing on their gender politics, one female respondent notes, “Looking back, I still feel traumatized sexually when I remember reading their books; I realize they wounded me profoundly at a vulnerable age, violently shaming and objectifying my body as I read. Yet I read them anyway, because I knew it was even more important for my future liberation to absorb the openness about sexuality from them that I was not getting in other places.” All of these readers describe a necessary passage through what they now regard as an error, one that either sustained them during difficult times or dislodged internalized impediments, thereby leading them to their present set of mature preferences and commitments.
But the gateway books, of course, never wanted to be merely a phase in the lives of unhappy adolescents. They wanted more. And even as I contemplate returning them to their boxes, putting them in their place, I have to pause to consider my motives. In using my grown-up intellectual powers to read them, am I just avoiding the question of how they might read me? What, after all, have I done with myself since parting ways with them? I’ve read a fair amount. I’ve thought a lot. But have I escaped leading the conventional, predictable life the gateway books taught me to question? Have I and my fellow serious-thinking friends made a new world together? Have we even tried? If we are honest with ourselves, we probably have to admit that the life of the intellectual today is marked more by caution than courage. My cultural training has taught me to talk in the right ways, to hold the right views, to like the right works of art. But it has not proved a gateway to some unimaginably rich, radical or liberated way of being.
Many in my generation have not, of course, surrendered their hopes. Utopian desire, a speculative questing after a different world, remains a defining tendency of the left intelligentsia. What they once found in the gateway books, readers now find in theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Mark Fisher to Lauren Berlant to Fred Moten, namely the belief that behind the current state of affairs lurks a glimmering alternate reality, one that flashes out in brief exhilarating bursts of social turbulence or joyful nonconformity, and promises to emerge as our new, beautiful future. This is another version of what one respondent calls the gateway books’ “burn it all down mentality.” Indeed the latter arguably helped prime many of us for the leftist theory we would eventually come to embrace, for the esoteric visions of radical transformation that we continue to entertain while we lead our predictable lives. Once we sat in our suburban bedrooms imagining that Hesse might offer the key to our liberation. Now we sit in our department cubicles, less sanguine about what books can do, but still hoping that Fredric Jameson will help us discern the faint outline of a different world.
●
But what if you never sought a gateway to somewhere else? What if you found literature neither tempting nor titillating? Like many older lifelong readers, I am concerned that young people today will not seek out literature the way people in my generation did. In raising this issue, I can’t deny the power of the new distractions—the ones that make every attempt to get my fourteen-year-old to put down his screen and read a book feel like an intervention. But we of course were hooked on cable TV and Nintendo, and at some point we turned away. Why? What made some of us shut off our televisions and read, unbidden by our parents, I am guessing, was the intuition that the books we had discovered were dangerous, that they harbored, as one respondent puts it, “adult secrets.”
Teachers and critics anxious about literature’s future frequently underscore its power to make us better people, more thoughtful and responsible citizens. Despite their sporadically radical politics, the gateway books did not stake their appeal on their virtue. They were more likely to make you bad than good. For suburban high school nerds, they represented an alternate path to coolness, one that led past the athletic fields to the back parking lot, where the shrewd-eyed kids in trench coats smoked cigarettes. Even when teachers or parents recommended them, they still felt like contraband, something shared between fellow malcontents. Will today’s teenagers discover any equivalent entry into literature? There are, admittedly, hundreds of YA books being published every year. But these books are explicitly designed for young readers and often yoked to a social/educational mission. What made the gateway books attractive is precisely that they were not YA books. Reading them as a high schooler meant trespassing into a space that was not meant for you. Are there books that do this for teenagers today? Might it be possible to imagine a new countercultural canon that lays claim to the previous generation’s outlaw energy while letting go of the boomer baggage? What would that look like? What thrills, shocks and pleasures would such books offer? Or will my son’s generation find what we found in literature somewhere else? Will the alienated teens of today discover outlets for their rebellious impulses and solace for their loneliness in corners of the internet far creepier than any of the books we read?
In high school, I was frequently depressed. I worried that life might turn out to be meaningless, the world a random rock in a godless universe. What’s the purpose of it all, I wondered. What reason is there to be alive rather than dead? Why does anything matter? My moods fluctuated dramatically, my new adolescent hormones swirling around inside me. As my spirits rose and fell, I issued verdicts on the human condition. It’s all hopeless, I might decide, panicked by how the morning felt. Or, life is an extraordinary adventure, I would conclude, noticing how the hallway to my sixth-period chemistry class was awash in light. I wanted literature to save me, to redeem the world. Every book I read had a lot to answer for.
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle seemed to know exactly what I wanted from it. But would it give it to me? It describes a new religion, Bokononism, invented by a Tobago-born adventurer, whose sacred text declares, “all of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies,” before elaborating a cosmology that assigns everyone a destiny and a community they have to find to carry out their life’s mission. Half the time, it sounds like a joke, but the narrator, a stand-in for Vonnegut, counts himself a true believer, compelled by the “heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality.” The religion seems designed for cynics who want to be saved. A chapter in the Books of Bokonon titled “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” answers “nothing.”
And yet the narrator has faith: “Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist.” The story, which presents itself as a modern-day religious parable, keeps offering bits of wisdom, clues to suggest a larger plot, a cosmic plan. Like many of the gateway books, Cat’s Cradle invites readers to imagine themselves joining a cult of higher-order minds. Though he tells us it’s all lies, Vonnegut seems to want us to believe in his parable, or at least believe that there is a reason to believe. What was a teenager desperate for answers to do with these mixed signals? The middle-aged protagonist winks and snickers all the way to the end of the book, straight to the end of human civilization, after a scientific invention freezes all the water on earth, the apocalypse a verdict on the inhumanity of modern technological society. In the final moment, he meets Bokonon himself, who encourages him to climb a mountain and use the very book he has just written as a pillow to die on, “grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.” What the hell kind of ending was this? Screw you, God, who may or may not exist! Screw you, world! Screw you, hope for the future! Screw you, reader, for asking me for answers! But also, screw you, despair! Screw you, death! Screw you, anyone who tells me I can’t do what I want, believe what I want, live how I want, die how I want!
What did I feel when I finished it? Terror? Defiance? Sadness? Euphoria? Hope? I wasn’t sure. But I knew it would pass quickly. I knew I’d better find another book to read if I wanted to feel it again.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.