My college professors often told me and my fellow communications majors how attractive we would be in the job market we were about to enter. Apparently, employers really didn't wish to hire potential employees who had swallowed a steady diet of courses from the business college but were looking for well-read, well-rounded liberal arts-types who could then be taught what was necessary to succeed in business. Sounded great to those of us who had spent our undergrad years learning how to speak publicly, argue scientifically, and theorize rhetorically. Good times were near.
When we matriculated and graduated, we found out the business world really didn't want that at all so we became bartenders and servers and proto-baristas, before that was a common word or job even, and learned we didn't have to give up our garage bands after all. Young, poor, over-educated and underemployed--that was us. Worse
than that, our birth years placed us squarely in Generation X and we
were dubbed 'slackers', a sobriquet that we embraced and rejected,
simultaneously, while sporting flannel shirts in mosh pits and making Soundgarden
successful. Ultimately we came around to the idea that without the safety net of college, we had paid too much for school to merely man the copiers at Kinko's. Quelle dommage! The characters in Joe Meno's new novel find themselves at similar loose ends.
Office Girl, (or Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things)
is set during the Chicago blizzard of 1999 and Meno uses this as a
metaphor for a number of things: the hard slog toward adulthood, the
cold, cruel world out there, the need to dig oneself out, to find
oneself under the snow drifts and emerge as someone different. Perhaps there are more but you
can read it for yourself and tell me about it later.
Jack and Odile want to
be artists and fancy themselves as such but they can't seem to commit
to the work though they certainly embrace what they perceive as the
lifestyle. They meet at a crappy call-center job. She is a few credits shy of her BFA, promiscuous and flighty but she is such a winsome character, that like Jack, you can forgive her almost
anything. (Some readers will disagree with me and simply find her to be a giant pain in the ass and will shout "Curse you, Reed Next! You have steered me wrong!" If so, my apologies but come back soon. I'm likely to post again by August. Maybe.) Jack's youthful marriage has just ended in divorce. He needs to get on with himself and tries, halfheartedly, but can't quite summon the necessary
backbone. Instead, he stays in Odile's orbit and hopes.
Regular
readers of Reed Next know how much I admire Meno's work. I think he
has a deep sense of compassion for his characters and his ability to
portray buoyant happiness alongside aching sadness make me respect him more with each novel. He succeeds here, especially with Odile. Back in
the day, I knew Odile. I chased Odile. I dated Odile. I slept with
her, too. Odile made me crazy in every sense but you just couldn't live
with Odile because Odile couldn't live with herself. She had one more
thing she had to do, one more class to take, one more bad boyfriend and then she could be happy. She never could as long as I knew her and, much like Jack, that made me sad and sorry for something I thought might be. Joe Meno
manages to capture her essence perfectly if a bit painfully for me as
the reader.
Office Girl lacks the emotional heft of Hairstyles of the Damned and the black humor of The Boy Detective Fails but I believe it is lighter by design and intent. Where this could be just a hapless, tortured slacker novel, a Coupland throwback, in Meno's savvy hands, it isn't. It is charming and engaging, infuriating and doomed. It is a love story that never gets the love part of the relationship right.
Coming of age.
The best and worst of times, though only in hindsight. Pure Id: everything is the happiest or saddest or most fun or most boring thing ever. Carbonated glands and nowhere to go with them, in my case, at least.
Though some might question my level of maturity--puckishness, my dears, and an irrepressible boyish charm!--I’m fairly certain I came of age years ago. Years and years ago. So why am I still reading about it? Is there a point when I’ll be too old to read and relate to coming of age novels? Is it a timeless genre or is it telling the same story over and over AND OVER again, in different hands with a slightly different perspective? Holden and Huck, Scout and Siddartha. The eventual outcome--isn’t it the same? Losing the child for the adult. The lifelong look back. Loneliness, lewdness (if you’re lucky), liberty.
To wit, two books--one fiction, one non-- that have me thinking about all this. Neither is great, but both are pretty good.
First, Cardboard G-ds: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker. Snapshot: small urban 70's family, artsy Mom, ineffectual Dad, beloved older brother. Mom takes on a boyfriend who moves in with the family. Family moves to Vermont to get 'back to the land' and then finds it neither easy nor very rewarding. Big brother tries to grow up, parents and boyfriend fall apart, kid clings to his baseball cards as the only constant in his life.
This is a very sentimental memoir and had I not grown up at the same time collecting the very same cards, I would never have gotten through the book but there was something I could appreciate despite the fact that my own circumstances were nothing like his. My family never divorced, my mother never took on a boyfriend, etc. At the time, I did find a certain sanctity in baseball cards. I traded and flipped with friends. We lusted after cards we needed to complete our teams and speculated how our teams would do and we memorized stats and recited them as we shagged fly balls and played catch for hours in the side yard.
Then something happened. Cards were less important and were replaced by music. Baseball, which had been our social currency, took a backseat to rock, especially punk rock. The Grand Old Game versus Young, Loud and Snotty.
Which brings us to Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned. I was just crazy about Meno’s novel, The Boy Detective Fails about which I gushed in a horrible run-on sentence of a post (http://reednext.blogspot.com/2007/01/boy-detective-fails-by-joe-meno.html). Hairstyles is actually the book before Boy Detective. Truth is, it's a pretty stock coming-of-age tale: Brian, an unremarkable adolescent boy, 'in love' with his best friend, a punk chick who fistfights other girls and parents whose marriage is falling apart around him. Punk rock becomes his life preserver.
However, it succeeds because Meno has a tremendous sense of what, in Yiddish, is called rachmones. (It’s pronounced rachMOness. It doesn’t rhyme with Ramones.) While it defies a literal definition, I’ve always thought of it as where empathy and sympathy meet. Meno gets the sadness inside his characters, the scars they have and their inability to verbalize them despite wanting to scream, “help me! I hurt!” For that alone, I love his work.
I graduated from baseball cards to punk rock, too, so these works struck me between the ears.
