"because this some end-times shit too, what we're doing" a thread for jonathan dee's THE PRIVLEGES

cant seem 2 shake this book outta my head wonderin & hopin sum1 else on ilx has read it~~~

read it for the 2nd time again 2day & the part where april comes home drunk from a party & sees the light of the tv reflected "like off a swimming pool" & had sum thoughts that im sort of at the tip of but im really curious how other ppl have read this book

i think its amazing - a lot of the praise calls it stuff like "cunning" or "incisive" or "shrewd" but i think its best quality is how unrelenting & angry a book it is. like its def psychologically acute & its blithely amoral protagonists are way more terrifying than like BEE's savage & empty yuppie clowns but its more than just an aloof psychoanthropological novel abt the deadening reach of capital. its bigger than that both less real & more felt.

also lol @ me but whenever i read/watch smthn with music nerd characters obsessed with rock authenticity & a h8rd for pop fakery i cant help but smh & think of them posting to ilm

ugh i totally misspelled the title didnt i just

ok just saw this thnx to yr link + first of all this is hilarious - 'also lol @ me but whenever i read/watch smthn with music nerd characters obsessed with rock authenticity & a h8rd for pop fakery i cant help but smh & think of them posting to ilm' cuz so true + then i hate myself for it

but anyway yeah man this book is so interesting! like it's crazy the crit response it got like a lot of ppl saying the characters are sympathetic, then james wood saying ha ha yr dumb they're evil you dont GET IT, and i'm def on wood's side but still feelin for them y'know? kind of? which i guess is overall the point + the most boring opinion.

so yeah other ppl shld read this + give thoughts

(also im only half way through)

did you finish this? if so what did you think?

fwiw i think the funniest/dummest critical tic wrt to the novel is every damn reviewer needing to play word games with the family's surname: "its like money and moral and morey (eel) &c &c"

yeah man i finished it + it was fucking great, loved a lot of the individual set piece type things near the end, esp the part where the daughter is staying up all night + gets in that car crash. also loved how the characters never really got any comeuppance at all even tho thru out the whole book there's ppl saying 'everything just came so EASY to you'

have you read anything else by this dude? had never heard of him till this book

+ do you have any links to ppl writing (well) abt this

this is sort of stunningly good

yup

so good it is kind of hard to say anything about it, even (i have finished it now)

actually, that's a really dumb thing to say. the whole thing raised about authenticity and outsiderness in art ... i was too busy being amused by how the kid gets into it by being a muso to start thinking about what bearing it could have on the novel

the ending - where jonas has some kind of experience with the real and decides immediately to go back to living behind money - feels like it ought to be just a kind of mean joke. it isn't, though; though i'm not entirely sure why i think that. i think maybe just because of how good i think the last paragraph is.

i read that as a sort of indictment iirc? - all the moreys spend a huge amount of time concerned with surfaces both metaphorical and actual (cf. my swimming pool nod itt!) that it feels like an admission that jonas is only comfortable/capable dealing with the surface of the canvas &c. the entire last bit of the novel is vicious in laying bare how limited and thoughtless they are & how much they lack a fundamental humanity. the stuff w/cynthia @ the hospice in particular was unrelenting imo.

cynthia is kinda this incredible character really - they way she treats her half-sister is both horrendous and strangely insightful? - but i think she may be the most 'connected' of all the four

kinda want to re-read this again already

i don't know, to me it felt as though jonas is presented to the reader as having some kind of hope of becoming a person, until that last. -- the whole authenticity thing is introduced in a sort of detached and schematic way (though maybe i just feel that way because i'm more familiar with alan lomax than i am insider trading) that makes it seem like there's something of a thesis being advanced. when i read it again i'll try and explain what i mean maybe

also:

- more flaubertian than anything i have ever read not by flaubert
- didn't understand why he dropped the present tense
- favourite deployment of a word in a while: when april is being surrounded by the chinese workers and sees them as 'jabbering'

i think that jonas's search for authenticity is supposed to come across as at least sort of fraudulent but that cld be bias on my part. still think he routinely confuses the appearance of authenticity w/ the actually 'real' a lot of the time. & his relationship w/ art is constantly mediated by how other ppl see it, rather than his own 'authentic connection' iirc even to the point where a poorly-dressed stranger on a crosstown bus can make him abandon his favorite song

has anyone read Palladio? i'm almost finished with it, and i'm finding myself kind of... mesmerized by it. there certain things about it that i don't completely buy - i'm not totally convinced by the character of molly, for one thing - but there is something about his writing... when i'm reading it, i'm totally absorbed.

like it's crazy the crit response it got like a lot of ppl saying the characters are sympathetic, then james wood saying ha ha yr dumb they're evil you dont GET IT, and i'm def on wood's side but still feelin for them y'know? kind of? which i guess is overall the point + the most boring opinion.

hmm i think the characters are all totally sympathetic - there isn't one of them who is really morally perfect or whatever, but i liked that, for me it really showed up my own tendency to look at ppl as only 'good' or 'bad', to totally judge a whole person's life and personality by one single act (e.g. when i deal with rotten customer). the whole family was presented as this sort of cliche but their story reveals ~why~ it's a cliche.

it feels like an admission that jonas is only comfortable/capable dealing with the surface of the canvas &c. the entire last bit of the novel is vicious in laying bare how limited and thoughtless they are & how much they lack a fundamental humanity.

bc there is nothing more after this, it gives this scene this huge sense of finality, but i feel (i hope) that dee is actually trying to break some kind of writerly convention, and force the reader beyond that kind of thinking??? i mean, i was fuckin furious when i turned the page and realised that there was only a single paragraph remaining. i felt like i ~needed~ to know more, like what happened with april??? what about adam's body obsession?? how is cynthia now after her father's death?? but i woke up thinking about it this morning (finished it last night), i was thinking how jonas is only 20 or so and he's had this big scary experience that he was totally unprepared for and sheltered from, and his immediate rxn is to freak out and go back to the security of his moneyed family, but there doesn't have to be any finality in that. like, it's final to us as the reader bc that how the book ends, but i want to think that jonas wasn't forever stunted by the experience.

i felt like it was the counter experience to april's - after that night (trying to avoid spoilers), there is the sense that maybe she's woken up to this shitty life she's leading, but then she admits that she really hasn't - nothing has really changed for her, despite the hugeness of that experience.

i want to say more about this whole book, and also about palladio which i also loved but was infuriated by (probably not rightfully so, but still), but i can't really articulate any of it (lol thank you english lit degree, you have obv served me well).

I was impressed by all those kind of tricks that he pulls off over the course of the novel - the deferred or denied narrative satisfactions. It's a funny sort of irony that seems to depend on giving the reader the scent of a cliché plot movement(house of cards will collapse because of insider trading, cynthia will have affair with stranger, family blow-up with less succesful brother, daughter descends into drug hell, etc etc, the novel more or less consists of these things) and then saying 'no, that didn't happen, nothing especially bad happened really'. I guess it's sort of related to the suspension of judgement that he manages exrtraordinarily well - doesn't break tone over the novel. Rare that I read reviews where people seem to have read completely different novels.

I don't think there's a reason to think anything will significantly change after the end of the novel. Things will carry on. They will be rich, they will be quite selfish but quite charitable, they will make minor accommodations to time and reality, but they will be able to stay mostly in the bubble world.

Work leaving time, should say maybe say more, maybe later.

hmm i think the characters are all totally sympathetic - there isn't one of them who is really morally perfect or whatever, but i liked that, for me it really showed up my own tendency to look at ppl as only 'good' or 'bad', to totally judge a whole person's life and personality by one single act

i dont really think any of the characters are bad but they approach a sort of 'evil'. cynthia in particular (who, again, i think is just such an amazing character) the way she mistakes cruelty for strength and selfishness for fortitude her capacity for making virtues of her vices is not unsympathetic but is ~terrible~.

one of the things that i found really interesting about 'freedomland' having read this novel first is that something franzen puts so much value on & makes seems near impossible - a relationship were each partner is essentially good to the other - is the bedrock of this book. but where for the characters in franzen's novel that kind of close, intimate goodness is tied to an exterior more principled goodness for dee's characters the insular love adam & cynthia share chokes off any real love or even kindness for those outside their family

did i mention the last paragraph is fantastic? oh, i did. i want to read this again already

kinda want to re-read this again already

― just sayin, Thursday, October 28, 2010 8:32 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark

haha i ended up reading it twice in two months, iirc

y'all are making this book sound very appealing. might have 2 check it out