George Orwell - Our Man in Boston

New Finds • Shop ‘Til You Bop

My temptation to refer to Lee Eisenberg’s (The Number) career as “storied” was tempered by a sudden echo of George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language,” in which he proscribed, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

At any rate he was editor-in-chief of Esquire, was one of the founders of Chris Whittle’s dubious Edison Project, worked at Time Inc., and was for a time creative director at Lands’ End. All of which, I gather qualifies him to pen (sorry, George) Shoptimism (Free Press), “an entertaining guided tour through the parallel worlds of selling and buying.”

OK, it’s a smart book with lots of nifty information that purports to straddle a microscopic line between anti-consumerism and shopping enthusiast with the currently fashionable citations and references to neuroscience and social networking. Of course, a defense of shopping that argues it’s a form of self- expression (so is arson and any number of felonies)—blah, blah, blah—is, to me, unconvincing and, well, silly.

But as you might have guessed, I am mightily vexed by the decline of civilization that I attribute to consumerism. I prefer my commentators on the matter to take a more skeptical view:

No ordinary person could ever have withstood such a colonization of human consciousness as the American people have seen. Consciousness being simply awareness, there was no surviving the onslaught. The tsunami of false possibilities and pseudo choices constituted entire constellations in the psyche, of goods, and images of goods large and small: hair dryers, iPods, anti-bacterial wipes, cable television, ammunition, plastic siding, gourmet foods, this HP notebook computer in my lap, the Prius and the Porsche, even words such as Google, Microsoft, China Mobile, Vodafone, Marlboro… They all have psychological and social meaning in our commoditized consciousness, that battlefield where each commodity vies for preeminence with every other commodity in the shifting exposition of stuff we are permitted to labor to pay for.

Amen. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 1, 2010

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Current Reads • Straight to the Heart

No doubt my fondness for the geography of my youth (Chicago and neighboring Big 10 states) has contributed to my sensitivity to regional chauvinism—who coined the phrase “flyover zone” anyway? Anyway, that fondness extends to the bountiful literature that pours out of that region from the pens of Kent Harouf, Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Mark Spragg, Elmore Leonard, Mark Winegarder, Karl Iagnemma, and such. Kent Meyers (The Work of Wolves) hails from those parts, living in Spearfish, S.D. (not far from Deadwood) and mentoring at Black Hills State University.

His new novel Twisted Tree (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), set in the fictional town that names the book, is fabricated around the central act of teenager Hayley Jo Zimmerman’s abduction and murder, and the 16 stories of the various people who were acquainted with her. George Orwell mused that everyone’s life is different from the inside, and that notion is echoed in the harrowing first chapter by Hayley’s sociopath serial-killing abductor, “Everyone has a life that no one else knows.”

The killer ruminates:

It reminded him… of the smears of color on his fingertips when as a child he caught butterflies, such patient, almost breathless stalking, all of summer suspended waiting for his finger and thumb to close and clasp, and then the faraway, membranous struggle, the feeble legs disjointed in the air. When he rolled his thumb and finger together the tissue wings turned to colored dust. He dropped the crippled things, watched their stick legs pump mechanically as they crawled away. Up and down the legs went stupidly over the grass, dragging the shreds of wings. They were very small. He rubbed the dust stains on his fingers off onto his pants, then wiped his pants with his palms and his palms on the grass until he didn’t know whether the stain was gone or had permeated everything…

Meyer has created a rich and varied array of inhabitants in Twisted Tree, and their lives in aggregate produce a complex, compelling, and wonderfully readable narrative of lives rippling through each other. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 6, 2010

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Back Matter • Reading v. Kindling

If it were possible to embarrass corporations such as Amazon, the recent snafu over Amazon’s recall (that would be the kind word for it) of Kindle versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm should be at least an embarrassment—though litigation would seem a more appropriate remedy. The short of it is that Amazon sold something it didn’t have the rights to and then took it back. Though after much hue and cry they promised not to do it again. Nice, huh?

Which reminds me that Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays and All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both by Orwell and compiled by George Packer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), were published earlier this year, and neither is available in a Kindle version, so happily one can still purchase some essential Orwell, worry-free. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 22, 2009

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Saturday, March 20, 2010