Tune in today, November 30th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

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https://amzn.to/3E8zvAr

This book did not get universally good reviews. And that’s significant, because its author, Sally Rooney, is the latest literary phenom.

Oh, you know her, even if you didn’t read her two previous books. She’s the one behind “Normal People,” on Hulu, which everybody was raving about last year. I tried, but once again the images did not square with the ones in my head, because so much of what Rooney writes is internal, not external, and visual entertainment is inherently external, which is another reason why some of the greatest books have never been made into movies or TV shows.

So, Rooney wrote about young life. Adolescence. College. Now what?

It’s hard to grow up, especially in the public eye, with so many expectations. And people believe they know who you are, they’re invested in your work, and reviewers, who usually are writers themselves, are out to get you, because they wish they’d gotten the acclaim you did.

So at first I’m reading “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” and I’m wondering what the blowback is all about, I’m really digging it, it’s great. But then…it becomes a bit repetitive, and the paragraphs are long, and I was getting sleepy, but then the second half of the book picked up and I finished it in one marathon jaunt Saturday afternoon.

So, what you’ve got here is two college friends, who profess nerdiness, who grew up without many friends and now have each other, even though in many ways they’re different.

Alice is a writer. She graduated, wrote a book and had instant success. She’s a millionaire, even though she’s barely thirty. Eileen is only making 20,000 a year at a literary magazine. So they’re living in two completely different economic strata, and that makes a difference. Although they’re both looking for love.

So Alice had her success and then had a nervous breakdown. She’s decamped for the west coast of Ireland, the other side of the country from Eileen’s Dublin, and she’s trying to start her life again and recover. And she goes on a Tinder date…

Yes, the book is very up to date. And it assumes you’re familiar with the experience. Rooney is not here to educate the reader, get up to speed on your own. As a matter of fact, the book is endless navel-gazing, which means many people will pick it up and be offended, talk about first world problems and move on. But although there’s nothing worse than having no money, no food and shelter, the truth is we’re all human beings and we’re all struggling, otherwise why would Christina Onassis commit suicide?

And most of the book is e-mail correspondence between Alice and Eileen, and it reads almost like a Greta Thunberg screed. The old fat cats, mostly men, may be in charge of the world, but it’s the youngsters who are gonna have to live in it. And they’re fiercely aware of global warming and the inane political situation, and Alice and Eileen write about this and debate how to live in modern society.

I mean it’s really frustrating. Do you read the news? Watching it is not the same. Bottom line, the world is insane, and America is one of the worst offenders. We now have a new Covid variant yet people are still refusing vaccination. The odds of dying are 11x higher if you’re unvaxxed, but if you get the vax you’ve surrendered, amongst your group your character is at stake. Never mind voting laws and… Nothing is gonna change, you can’t convince anybody to change their mind, you’ve just got to deal with the consequences. I mean I’m old and I live in California, but if you’re young and live elsewhere, it’s even more depressing,.

And the truth is what Alice and Eileen talk about…is what I talked about in college.

Today nobody wants to debate the issues, they’re too busy getting rich, or trying to. Subtleties are irrelevant, and if it doesn’t produce cash it’s off the table. So, you can be a college professor and analyze issues all day yet have no power in the real world, or you can be a businessman and focus on acquisition and lifestyle.

I used to think it was a west coast/east coast thing, but now that the nouveau riche financial sector dominates in NYC it’s all about money there too. And I want to have a deeper conversation and where can I turn? Certainly not the music business. But the musicians? They can debate this stuff all day long, they’re detached from society, they know the game is rigged, they’re inherently outsiders and they recognize this. But I’m not a musician, so it’s not my everyday life experience and…

I certainly don’t want to be part of the intelligentsia, self-righteous sans power.

So I’m left in between, with more questions than answers, like Alice and Eileen.

Alice is into a guy who is not into her. How do you behave? Retreat or lean in?

Eileen was dumped by a musician who is featured everywhere online and can’t get over the relationship even though all her friends put her ex down and say he wasn’t right for her, none of that that sways Eileen.

And then you’ve got the guy in love with Eileen who can’t get out of his own way. Everybody’s on their own life trip, and other than Alice, nobody is going anywhere fast, and Alice has got her status and money, her fame…but then she riffs how bogus fame is, that most of the people are doing it for the fame, and then people admire them and want to be them and how screwed up that is.

You can put your head down and ignore the world around you, but if you look up at all, you’re gonna have an existential crisis. Hell, we can’t even build anything in America anymore. That’s in today’s paper. All this money for infrastructure…all our projects go over budget and sometimes they’re not even completed!

And then you’ve got the Dems wanting to prop up local newspapers. Uh, no. Haven’t they seen twenty years of digital disruption? You don’t prop up the past, you look for a solution that will work tomorrow!

And then you’ve got the insane Afghanistan situation. The “Wall Street Journal” did a story today how the Taliban had infiltrated every aspect of the government and business, over years, so that’s why the coup was instant and to a great degree bloodless. But somehow it’s Biden’s fault, when he was living up to Trump’s timetable, intelligence officers were removed and… If you dig deep, thank god we got out of there, and Biden didn’t do such a bad job at all. But even Democrats think he was at fault, because they don’t read the facts, never mind them being in the right wing paper of record!

Feel powerless yet?

I certainly do.

Alice and Eileen are struggling to put one foot in front of the other. They’ve got the weight of the world on their shoulders and like me feel powerless to enact change. Should they just punt their futures as a result?

So I don’t recommend you read “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” Not unless my foregoing screed appeals to you. And most of my male readers only want to read nonfiction, when they’ll learn much more from this book and yes, the girls are whiners by today’s standards, but if you’re not whining, you’re an automaton.

So Sally Rooney is trying to grow up. And it’s a struggle. Obviously Alice is based on her own experience. I mean the best writing is from what you know.

And Rooney herself is not lovable. As for her stance on not allowing this book to be translated into Hebrew… If I hear one more person excoriating the Israelis and defending the Palestinians… Yes, they both have positives and negatives, but the Palestinians believe that Israel SHOULD NOT EXIST! How would you like living in a country like that? Put that in your book Sally Rooney.

But it’s not there. But so many issues are.

I found it stimulating.

Trailer: https://bit.ly/3D8mdm5

Thanksgiving used to be for movies. This is the weekend the serious ones launched. Of course there were family flicks, and stuff in between, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” it’s just that I remember going to the movies over the Thanksgiving holiday but that tradition petered out a decade or so ago. I think the last movie I saw over the Thanksgiving holiday was “Slumdog Millionaire,” since then there hasn’t been anything I’ve wanted to see.

Now if we want to talk the movie business, it’s been permanently hobbled by Covid-19. Yes, there are tons of oldsters too scared to go to the theatre, but the truth is over the last eighteen months everybody has subscribed to multiple services and has become entranced by what streams on the flat screen. Furthermore, these shows are points of discussion. Seemingly everybody saw “Tiger King” and “Squid Game,” so you could discuss and fawn over and argue about them. You can’t do that with movies, because no one goes. Yes, the older boomers go to art films and the youngsters go to Marvel extravaganzas, but the art movies don’t get much mindshare, they sink into oblivion, and there’s not much to say about Marvel movies. I wish all these art films just launched on a streaming service, or maybe there could be a new service for all of them, because I read about them and forget about them unless I stumble upon them on a streaming service homepage months, or even years, later, and so many are great. Like “The Donut King,” now on Hulu. We were talking about visual entertainment last night and when it turned out everybody in attendance had not seen it Felice and I started testifying, there’s plenty to say about it. I used to testify about “House of Games,” before Mamet became further embedded in the public consciousness, but I don’t have enough movies to rave about anymore, “Donut King” is one of them.

But in truth I’m pretty burned out on movies. They’re too short, I love more detail, and that’s what you get in streaming series, the movies of today.

And it is well known that the Danes and the Israelis make the best television, and “The Chestnut Man” is Danish, it’s not the best series I’ve ever seen, but it’s far superior to the American dreck being hyped in today’s media. I laughed at the L.A. “Times” streaming recommendations, domestic and lowbrow, what the nitwits like, when the truth is exposed to something better they’d like that even more. Then again, I can’t understand why people hate subtitles. You can watch “The Chestnut Man” dubbed, but it’s not the same. But better to watch it dubbed than not at all.

So ultimately “The Chestnut Man” is a murder mystery. But in Danish and Israeli productions the plot, the story, the dialogue, is superior to the design. American directors are the reverse, they focus on the look first, and that’s a mistake. Not that the look of “The Chestnut Man” is not good, it just doesn’t dominate, there are no holds on vistas, cinematography to impress us. The series is shot in the late fall, and it’s dark and dreary at times and it matches the plot, enhances the tone.

You see there are murders. What is the motivation? Are they connected?

And the daughter of a government official is a victim, and her interactions with her sidekick are like Kasper’s with Birgitte in “Borgen.”

But there are so many issues. How does a couple handle the death of a child. Usually differently, usually the marriage doesn’t survive.

And how important is your work? What do you sacrifice to be good at it, great. Relationships? Children?

And hurt… How long does it last. Forever?

People keep dying. The police feel they’re not doing their job, never mind what outsiders think. And the story keeps unfolding and you’re not sure where it’s going and you’re guessing all along who you think is the perpetrator, and even when the person is revealed the series is not over, there’s more to play out.

So I highly recommend “The Chestnut Man.” We were watching an episode before I planned on hiking on Friday night and then I punted my hike, not only because I wanted to finish the series that night, but because I was enjoying the experience, it was so visceral, like being at a movie.

And I love that feeling.

https://amzn.to/3lk2YA0

Every baby boomer should read this book.

Getting old is weird, in ways they never told you about. Sure, you regret the time you wasted. And you know so much more but nobody wants to listen to you. But the most revelatory thing is you just don’t care. It happens almost overnight. Suddenly you realize all those games people play, the so-called winners and losers, they no longer give you a shot of adrenaline, you’re no longer invested, you know at the end of the day they’re irrelevant and…on one hand you feel empty, because the secret of life has been exposed to you and no one cares, and on the other you feel liberated. And the truth is you can fight this feeling, but you can never beat it. It’s something in the bones, in the DNA, you hit a certain point and your perspective changes no matter what you did previously. The funniest thing is seeing people try to hold on to what they had, fearful of looking bad, not knowing that nobody is really paying attention anymore.

Not that you can’t achieve in your old age. Elizabeth Strout published her first book, “Amy and Isabelle,” in 1998, when she was 42. Her age, her experience, have given her wisdom, and she writes so well about the odd, the disenfranchised, the different, which so many of us are, even though we might try to hide it.

So the truth is almost all baby boomers have been divorced. We were sold a bill of goods in the sixties and seventies, telling us we could meet our soulmate and have it all when that is patently untrue. As a matter of fact, if you meet someone who utters this garbage ignore them, two people getting along is incredibly difficult, and if the couple professes endless love with no disagreements that just means one partner has the power and the other accedes to his or her wishes. If you’re not fighting, you’re not in a good relationship.

Now today the educated marry the educated and stay together while the uneducated often don’t get married at all, they have babies out of wedlock, oftentimes with multiple partners, and they do their best to ensure they stay members of the underclass. I’m quoting statistics, not feelings, but you can argue with me anyway. And there are exceptions to every rule, not that anything can be gray anymore.

So it was Strout’s third book, “Olive Kitteridge,” that was her monumental breakthrough. It was shot into the stratosphere when it became an HBO miniseries, starring the incredible Frances McDormand, but I couldn’t watch it, because it didn’t square with the vision I had in my head, and Strout’s books are personal, for the reader only, and when depicted on screen they inherently lose something, small stories become well known and this isn’t the way life works.

But every Strout book is good, she’s the Pixar of novels. And she gets her due, but I’m surprised even more people don’t read her books, because they’re so fulfilling, you don’t want them to end.

Not that they’re a huge commitment. In a few pages you’re hooked and you don’t need to read with a dictionary and although there’s tons of plot, there is tons of wisdom too, Strout’s books are what the graduate writing schools should hold up as their model, instead they produce self-conscious turgid works where the words supersede the plot and the only people who read them are the cognoscenti who keep this system alive.

They can’t study Strout, they believe she’s beneath them, she makes it seem effortless. But the best work is not always highbrow.

So what you’ve got here is a divorced couple. With two adult children. And the wife’s second spouse dies and the husband ends up single again and they interact.

Now in a conventional romance book they’d get back together, all lovey-dovey, but that’s not how the world works. William still bugs Lucy, but they share so much history, they were married all those years, never mind having those kids, so…

They’re on the downhill side of life and end up interacting again.

William continues to work. But is his self-worth and identity caught up in his work? And how good was he at it really?

As for Lucy…she comes from nothing and can never get over it. She always feels she’s out of the loop, doesn’t know something, and in truth she’s never felt fully comfortable in a love relationship, she’s made them work, her second husband was nice, but to say they were soulmates would be a stretch. As for William, can he ever open up, can he ever be known? This is common amongst men. They can talk all day yet reveal nothing. You hear their truth in stolen moments if you hear it at all. And they get to the end of their lives and they wonder if they missed it, played it wrong.

Also, so many are putting up a front. They may look together, but they grew up poor and isolated. And every family has secrets, things they don’t want people to know, that they sometimes keep from other family members. And…

I don’t want to tell you any more.

But you’ll learn more about life reading “Oh William!” than watching the Beatles miniseries. Not that they should be equated. Well, let’s just say that reading “Oh William!” is like listening to a late period Beatles album, maybe the White Album. It’s a personal experience, it sets your mind free, you’re in a private space, thinking about life. That’s what great art does, and that’s what people are looking for. Which is why Strout is so successful, why her every book is a best seller, because people hunger for this feeling and fulfillment. Facts are interesting, feelings are life.

Every boomer will dig this book, and many others too. If you’re willing to reflect, question your behavior and desires, you’ll be stimulated by reading “Oh William!”

Not that reading a book is as easy as watching TV or listening to a record, but when done right it’s a unique experience, that you cannot get anywhere else, that resonates so. Check out “Oh William!”