*not this photo quality, honey....
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Okay, let's address the elephant in the room...PKD was not a good person. He is a member of the small but elite group of white male writers who, um, TRIED TO MURDER THEIR WIVES. Like, we can't forget that Norman Mailer literally stabbed his wife with a pen-knife (not once but twice), nearly taking her life. And then of course there's William S. Burroughs who actually did murder his wife when he literally shot. her. in. the. face. So yeah, based on Wikipedia, PKD was giving off the same toxic energy in 1963 when he attempted to push Anne Williams Rubinstein, his wife at the time, off a cliff! Later, he claimed she was trying to kill him and literally had her institutionalized, not knowing that 50+ years later the Chicks would release "Gaslighter" and absolutely come for his neck.
All this to say that I actually really liked this book (lol). As someone whose childhood was all things Harry Potter, I'm still trying to figure out where the author ends and the book begins, and how much of this we should take into account when reading. There's some guy named Roland Barthes who argues against the method of literary criticism based on an author's identity or politics, instead citing the importance of a close reading of a text that's been liberated from tyrannical structures of meaning-making. Ultimately, a text is an object with multiple layers of meaning that, once sent out into the world, becomes independent of the person who created it. I mean that's cool and all, but Rolan Barthes died before he could witness a beloved author completely decimate her writing career in 140 characters or less. It's complicated and I'm dumb, so let's leave it at this: I'm learning to really like science fiction and, as it happens, Philip K. Dick writes really good sci-fi.
So, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch takes place on a version of Earth that's been ravaged by climate change, forcing an uber-powerful United Nations to "draft" citizens into becoming colonists on Mars which is all well and good except, um, it's Mars and there's literally nothing fun to do. Like, apparently in the future there's no civic planning, no desire to build a strip mall on the moon, etc. Due to the bleakness of Mars living, many colonists have turned towards Can-D, a hallucinogenic drug that transports the user into the world of Perky Pat, the sci-fi equivalent of Barbie. At the center of the novel, of course, is a large corporation that supplies both Perky Pat's layout (basically Barbie's Dream House that facilitates the Can-D hallucinogenic trip) AND the drug itself. But when Palmer Eldritch, an Elon Musk-adjacent character, returns from a distant star system and introduces Chew-Z, a new, more potent drug, the real fun begins. And by "real fun" I mean absolutely bonkers plotlines that'll make you feel like you just took a huge hit of acid before going to the planetarium. If you're expecting typical sci-fi fare, think again. This book is way more interested in asking big, pseudo-spiritual questions about the nature of reality, the existence of God, etc., often at the expense of character depth or meaningful dialogue. Still, I thought a lot about this book even after I had finished it, and that's saying something because I don't do a lot of critical thinking these days.
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
I'm kinda obsessed with this book and the absolute audacity it has to distill what's terrible about 21st century living into a slim, 229-paged novel. This book needs a warning label on the cover that says "DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU FEEL LIKE THE PLANET IS ONE BIG BALL OF TRASH THAT'S BEEN DROPPED INTO A BUCKET OF GASOLINE AND SET ON FIRE". Needless to say, I love this book! No actually, I really love this book!
Dorothy is feeling aimless these days. She's an adjunct professor living in New York, offsetting the fear of never escaping "adjunct hell" by seeing two therapists, one to helps Dorothy work through her problems in life and the other to work through her problems that result from her first therapist's attempts to work through her problems in life. Oh, and she's just suffered a miscarriage. And, to be perfectly honest, that's about all that happens in the novel. Sure there's a work trip to Las Vegas that occurs about halfway through, as well as a perfectly detailed dinner party that devolves (or evolves, depending on how fun you are) into a drunken karaoke night, but the real magic of The Life of the Mind is the writing. And damn, can Christine Smallwood write a sentence. She takes the smallest, most innocuous moments and turns them into high-minded reflections on life and art. In one standout passage, Dorothy encounters a homeless man on the subway who she compares, in a brilliantly pretentious manner, to the Mariner in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (never read, probably never will). It's Christine Smallwood's uncanny ability to slightly recalculate life, to take an average moment (a trip on the subway, a work conference, an ultrasound) and make it seem unfamiliar, almost ridiculous. It's the same type of destabilization that the Strange Planet comics perform, only Dorothy is way more cynical, way more disenfranchised, and way, way funnier.
The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender
I bought this book because the cover is literally everything to me, and also because one of my favorite sub-genres is "woman goes through trauma and slowly disconnects with reality". And as a cis-male, I would like to say that yes, I should probably unpack why I'm so fascinated with women losing their goddamn minds, but we don't have time for that right now, okay?? Maybe I'll talk later about how Mulholland Drive, Suspiria, and Black Swan are, like, pique cinema for me, and then we can address whatever patriarchal bug has been implanted in my brain that makes it so easy for me to scream "yaaaasssss" while Naomi Watts, ahem, LOSES HER GODDAMN MIND.
So The Butterfly Lampshade is a beautifully written novel about a woman named Francie who, at an early age, was forced to move in with her aunt and uncle after her mother experienced a psychotic episode. Much like The Life of the Mind, the plot is hardly the driving force of the story because, ahem, not much happens. Like, almost nothing. The entire novel is basically one big recollection as adult-Francie attempts to make sense of childhood-Francie's memories, particularly three incidents in which something unreal (a butterfly on a lampshade, a beetle on a homework assignment, a rose on a curtain) became real (an actual butterfly, an actual beetle, an actual rose, oh my!). And let me tell you, I turned it out for these moments of weird, almost supernatural shenanigans that form the foundation for the novel's exploration of memory and trauma. And I say "exploration" for a reason, because there are very few answers to be found within the pages of this novel. Aimee Bender is not interested in spoon-feeding you succinct conclusions on what it means to be pulled away from your mother as a child, or how it's possible to move on from that site of trauma in a meaningful way, and that's probably because there are no succinct answers to questions like that. Life is hard and it sucks a lot of the time, but it's also filled with rare moments of magic that Aimee Bender seems to know like the back of her hand. When I tell you I was sobbing at the end of this novel, I mean I was S-O-B-B-I-N-G. And did I mention the book's cover is soooooo hot?
And because I'm literally obsessed.com with lists/rankings, I decided to list all the books I've read in March from least to most favorite! Buzzfeed is literally shaking.
(meh vibes)
7. wow, no thank you by Samantha Irby
6. Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor
5. How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright
4. McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh
3. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
2. The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender
1. The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
(everything to me vibes)
Okay, bye!
xoxoxoxo,
March, you won't be missed, mama!
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