on over-privileged over-hyped male novelists OR a review of benjamin kunkel's Indecision

okay, i'm really trying to read this fucking book, guys. i really am. i like the journal kunkel helps edit, n + 1, a lot and i like the short fiction and essays of his included in it and the ny times
told me it was supposed to be all awesome and stuff, which we all know
must make it so (if it was 1948). but i'm having a hard time getting
over how reading it feels exactly the same way it did when i read
Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity...by
the trail of dead. it's amusing enough to move along, to even
keep you reading (if you're bored and don't feel like watching netflix
or buffy) but it's completely devoid of true substance. there are,
however, lots of moments where i know i'm supposed to feel some weighty
issues coming to the forefront of my mind and get all philosophical or
whatever but mostly it just feels like i'm reading the inner monologue
from some guy i don't identify with at all.



i'm only half-way through but here's what the premise is so far...

upper upper-middle class guy from connecticut living in new york city
gets a pill still under review from his doctor roommate that's supposed
to treat indecision. he then gets a loan from his commodities broker
father and takes off to ecuador to go visit an old school friend and
ends up travelling around with her roommate.

what's supposed to make it all different is that instead of laying out
the horrors of those scary third world nations and taking advantage of
some locals in order to have a stellar(!) trip kunkel's protagonist
takes the same narrative but apparently tries to make it ironic under
the guise of the character being too clueless to really understand what
he's experiencing.

total bullshit if you ask me. not that you did, but it's a blog after all.



which brings me to my real point. sort of...

my co-worker, katie, and i often play nerdy literary games to entertain
ourselves at work. one time we used advanced book exchange to try and
pin down what author's signed first edition was the most valuabe
(Tolkien, by the way, with Pynchon in a close second). one day i came
in with this question: there's all these hyped, contemporary, young,
male, american novelists (safran foer, kunkel, eggers, etc) but are
there any american female novelists that are just as hyped.

after a couple of hours, and a long list of female novelists from other
countries (zadie smith, divakaruni, danticat, yadda) we couldn't come
up with a single name that could equal the hype and acclaim of those
guys.

we did, gratefully, come to the conclusion that contemporary, young,
american, female short story writers have far surpassed their male
peers. well, kind of.

ultimately, i found the whole thing to be incredibly depressing and had
one of those moments where i actually believed that i was chosen to
write the "definitive american novel."

i ended up just going outside to smoke a cigarette with my peppermint tea.