Sex, Drugs and Socialism
YANG, WESLEY
Sex, Drugs and Socialism Indecision By Benjamin Kunkel Random. 241pp. $21.95. Reviewed by Wesley Yang Contributor, Boston "Globe,' New York "Observer" "You're living a cliché," the...
...How ironic that in the very act of trying to redeem this predicament as literature Kunkel produced a fantasy of wish fulfillment...
...As evocations of pain and privation, these scenes are inadequate and the least convincing passages in the book...
...We live the good life...
...Who knew socialism could be this much fun...
...In one scene before his conversion, Dwight chops roots in the jungle: "I couldn't help thinking how unpleasant it would be to do this work for subsistence pay, as some casualized agricultural laborer, for eight or more hours a day...
...Beginning as a satire of middle-class insularity, it becomes an example ofthat insularity...
...He is afflicted by the least compelling of commercially concocted psychological conditions, "the quarterlife crisis"—a chronic inability to act decisively...
...He is attracted to women, and attracts them in spite of—or maybe because of— his basking in his own solipsistic reveries...
...Her image of Leftist men is surely a stereotype, dating back to Mary McCarthy's observation in "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," that they are not as clean and polished as the children of the white upper middle class...
...There remain the realities of capitalism in the Third World...
...Then, in one of the novel's many hilarious mock philosophical dialogues, the father calls the son a "a kind of nonperforming loan,' and begins throwing things at him...
...The suspense gathers...
...But the facetiousness so well-suited to the depiction of underachieving New Yorkers founders during the second half...
...Apparently, ethical commitments are bound to conflict with tastes shaped by aprivileged upbringing...
...and the ensuing quest narrative from 19th-century romance...
...In a book that treats so much else satirically, Kunkel is dead serious on this point...
...First Natasha, his high school crush, mysteriously disappears...
...I don't know why this is, an anthropologist should study it...
...Vaneetha is the daughter of an Indian diplomat who works in FX—an abbreviation for "Foreign Exchange," as Dwight learns, and a sign that globalization may weigh heavier on the author's mind than romance...
...Both,"' Brigid says...
...In the Epilogue, we discover that Wilmerding has been telling the "story of the growth of my mind" from Cochalbama, Bolivia, where he now works as a Marxist publicist for an NGO called Bolivian Action Node...
...It was the look of a dog awaiting a treat...
...More specifically, he is the realization of the middle class' deep-seated anxiety that affluence will cause it to go soft...
...Ducking, Dwight sees a photograph of himself in cap and gown with his "head cocked to one side in this curious expectant way I recognized from somewhere...
...He borrows mockery of aHeidegger-like philosopher from Walter Abish (How German Is It...
...In the first half of Indecision, he balances the witty and the laughable, the absurdist and the absurd...
...His med student roommate promises the drug will help him make choices...
...At her graduation from Yale he had made his would-be radical daughter cry: "Come on Alice show some spine...
...Dwight confesses that he is "only kind of good-looking" and has little "to be proud of beyond not having gone bald," though he is disappointed when no one contradicts him...
...His very likability is part of his problem...
...A friend of his confronts Brigid with the question of what they plan to do with their lives...
...It's not even a fresh cliché," she adds...
...You can have it all: conspiracies to make you happy, wild plot contrivances designed to reconcile opposites, a beautiful heiress to sexually initiate you into virtuous politics...
...For most of the world, work means sacrificing a part of yourself...
...He acknowledges that with his avowal of Democratic Socialism he "inherits problems that have been piling up for some time...
...In Ecuador, Wilmerding encounters the hidden underside of his aimless existence...
...If you don't kill me, who are you going to kill...
...Brigid, it further develops, is Alice's former student and shares both her politics and her anhedonic response to the world...
...AtDwight's 10-year high school reunion he delivers an impassioned Socialist call to arms that is greeted with a flung tomato...
...I was filled with horror and sprang up onto my knees in an agony of comprehension...
...Dwight's journey from silly manchild to committed Socialist is less than credible...
...From a generation whose lives have been mediated by popular culture since birth, that oxymoron may be deemed the best we can hope for...
...Kunkel, who sets about answering the question, creates a very authentic—and fresh—literary voice, but in the process meanders into a political muddle...
...He is taking an experimental drug called "Abulinix" for a newly invented mental affliction termed "abulia" that dovetails with Dwight's chronic indecision...
...And many men who are Leftist, really they are not quite good-looking...
...The half-serious pastiche is the ideal vehicle for bright aperçus, capers, riffs, and dreamy ruminations...
...Later, Dwight, Brigid and their native guide Edwin visit an oil well, where Dwight gets a glimpse of environmental devastation...
...Next, Dwight travels through the jungle with her friend Brigid, a Belgian PhD candidate in anthropology, who lectures him on the damage global capitalism has done in the Third World...
...Kunkel borrows the conceit of a drug that treats an existential condition from Don DeLillo (White Noise) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), who were borrowing from Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly...
...He has left behind his First World cocoon, but not by coming into contact with a transforming otherness...
...The trip to Ecuador is revealed to be an elaborate blind date—a "friendly conspiracy" launched by Alice to give him what he wants (carnal fulfillment with a beautiful woman) and what he needs (political consciousness...
...After September 11 (which he witnesses while coming down from an Ecstasy high), she serves as his psychotherapist...
...I'm a dog!'" As Dwight embarks for Ecuador, he is also embarking into the pseudoreality that pharmaceutical corporations are busily producing for the wealthy...
...He is practiced at winning the indulgence of women and family that is an obstacle to his maturation...
...Using literary tropes as the ingredients for a fictional recipe is an effective way to write about relentlessly mediated lives...
...The recently divorced and nominally bankrupt Rockefeller Republican can be wryly cruel to his children...
...As the cliché has it, you can't have your cake and eat it too...
...I'm a commodities trader...
...That very notion is a mark of Dwight's sense of ruling-class entitlement...
...Dwight's initial concern is that a "special something" in himself is not being realized in his job and his life in New York...
...We have just learned that Brigid is the heir to a pharmaceutical fortune: "Brigid shrugged...
...Although Indecision begins as a critique of a spoiled narcissist's inability to choose, it winds up asserting that in the end you need not choose...
...But you—you are almost like Alice would say.' She looked truly happy about whatever this meant...
...Will the pill lead Dwight to Utopia, or will his canine epiphany spur him to act on his own...
...Ever the clever chef, Kunkel reduces the sprawling, indigestible postmodern novel to an amiable pop confection that goes down like amilkshake...
...Dwight himself sometimes feels like "a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world...
...But what do Socialists do for a living?' "'Not that good life," [Dwight] said, 'the other one...
...The author treats this shapeless predicament humorously while declining to dignify it...
...She says they share "the same basic feeling tone of all anxious young white over-slashundereducated people who happen to live in First World cities...
...Rather, he finds in Brigid a surrogate for his elder sister Alice...
...Reviewed by Wesley Yang Contributor, Boston "Globe,' New York "Observer" "You're living a cliché," the beautifulVaneethatellsherboyfriend, 28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, the narrator of Benjamin Kunkel's first novel...
...Staring into the eyes of his father's dog, he thinks: "That look, in the picture of me...
...It is a problem Indecision shares...
...They can, as Dwight puts it, "exact a pretty serious revenge" on your ability to enjoy the things that have been given to you...
...The novel argues for a reconciliation...
...Dwight comically exhibits an incestuous crush on his sister Alice, a Leftist NYU sociology instructor...
...In this instance, he hands over a check that will tide Dwight over through a spell of unemployment (he was recently "pfired") and finance a trip to Ecuador, where he plans to reunite with a high school crush...
...How is a young writer to make literature out of such lives...
...The more like ethical one.' Still, that was a good question Ford had asked—one that had been weighing on my mind...
...We do not come away convinced that Dwight will be anything more than a dilettante turning the class struggle into a venue for his own self-realization...
...Wilmerding, a prep school-educated slacker, holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a dead-end job at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals...
...Just before their inevitable sexual communion, Brigid confesses to Dwight that she has had few romantic experiences: "? don't like those other men...
...The two have been in cahoots...
...Soon Vaneetha is unceremoniously dumped via e-mail...
...The two fall in love, and Dwight undergoes a conversion: He literally wakes up to find himself a "Democratic Socialist...
...The result is a stylistic triumph of sorts...
...He has haplessly adopted "as the best ofbad options, a pragmatist view whereby what most people said was true probably actually was true, or close enough...
...The traditional Socialist vision of class struggle is not about the rich remaking the world, it is about the workers (who are conspicuous by their absence from this putatively Socialist novel) expropriating it from their exploiters—and it is seldom as pleasant as Dwight Wilmerding would hope...
...At the close of Part One, Dwight visits his father in Connecticut...
Vol. 88 • September 2005 • No. 5
