bobos in ikea
August 21, 2021 6:47 AM Subscribe
I want to say that I enjoyed this but it seems like my lack of an English degree was detrimental to my understanding of it.
posted by misterpatrick at 8:38 AM on August 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
posted by misterpatrick at 8:38 AM on August 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
I have an entire MFA and I was not aware of some of what he was talking about. I shouldn't have skipped AWP this year, I guess.
This idea that by removing what one considers bourgeois set-design from the novel, one is moving the novel toward some more superior moral evolution. That by taking away description of furniture or by not leaning heavily into the conventions of character arc or the evolution of a person, they are making an argument about the true nature of life under capitalist systems, which is to say, that life in such a context is alienating and repetitive, that none of the specificity truly matters because it all just bourgeois noise.
I once studied with a writer who proudly noted that none of her characters have last names. Now she's really good, and I respect that, but at that moment I realized how profoundly different we were as writers. Do my characters have last names? Hell, they have family trees. I know how sociopolitical conditions affected their upbringing, and I'll write about it if I'm allowed. But generally I'm not allowed. I don't mean to sound reactionary; I just have a hard time with stark realism, even when writing about things that are pretty stark.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:49 AM on August 21, 2021 [8 favorites]
This idea that by removing what one considers bourgeois set-design from the novel, one is moving the novel toward some more superior moral evolution. That by taking away description of furniture or by not leaning heavily into the conventions of character arc or the evolution of a person, they are making an argument about the true nature of life under capitalist systems, which is to say, that life in such a context is alienating and repetitive, that none of the specificity truly matters because it all just bourgeois noise.
I once studied with a writer who proudly noted that none of her characters have last names. Now she's really good, and I respect that, but at that moment I realized how profoundly different we were as writers. Do my characters have last names? Hell, they have family trees. I know how sociopolitical conditions affected their upbringing, and I'll write about it if I'm allowed. But generally I'm not allowed. I don't mean to sound reactionary; I just have a hard time with stark realism, even when writing about things that are pretty stark.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:49 AM on August 21, 2021 [8 favorites]
Word salad, word etouffee with word clafoutis to follow. Maybe Substack should hire some editors.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:24 AM on August 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 9:24 AM on August 21, 2021 [12 favorites]
I just have a hard time with stark realism, even when writing about things that are pretty stark.
I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that unless your characters consist entirely of members of the British Royal Family, there's nothing especially realistic about not having a last name.
posted by belarius at 9:26 AM on August 21, 2021 [11 favorites]
I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that unless your characters consist entirely of members of the British Royal Family, there's nothing especially realistic about not having a last name.
posted by belarius at 9:26 AM on August 21, 2021 [11 favorites]
I think an essay on how IKEA catalogs or showrooms and Instagram/Pinterest affect our culture and aspirations, and how objects and spaces act as cultural signifiers or influence the construction of our identities would benefit from consideration of, eg., Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements. But I also am unfamiliar with most of the more modern authors and literary trends or movements or such referenced, and am pretty sure that the author using a bunch of words I recognize in other, technical meanings that I don’t have the relevant academic background for understanding, so am not sure if that is this essay or not.
posted by eviemath at 9:29 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 9:29 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I enjoyed the essay as a waterslide, and I appreciate that he helped me understand why I haven't much enjoyed any of these IKEA novels.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:53 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by PhineasGage at 9:53 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
The last line is the best, and the one that grounds the whole essay: Or maybe—and this is more likely the case—we’re all doing everything all the time and the only thing that changes is what five or ten culture writers in New York choose to call the moment. Up until that moment--and I say this as someone who subscribes to this substack!--I was getting more and more uncomfortable with this distinction between Hysterical Realism and IKEA novels, because they're entirely contemporaneous! Cusk and Knausgaard are older than Zadie Smith! But only by a few short years! And yet he's posing their modern ascetic style as a newer reaction to Smith's ancient overstuffed synesthesia! This must not stand! Then I felt better.
posted by mittens at 10:22 AM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by mittens at 10:22 AM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
create a fiction that is ascetic and distilled, pure consciousness and only those few artifacts necessary to conjure the staid, stiff backdrop of contemporary life and its problems
This reminded me of a ?criticism? of The Golden Bowl that you could make a stage play of it with no more than four actors and a bowl, despite the novel having lots of other characters and settings. And of those four two are fairly resistant to arc, and I can see a case that what they use for character is actually capital.
posted by clew at 10:54 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
This reminded me of a ?criticism? of The Golden Bowl that you could make a stage play of it with no more than four actors and a bowl, despite the novel having lots of other characters and settings. And of those four two are fairly resistant to arc, and I can see a case that what they use for character is actually capital.
posted by clew at 10:54 AM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
Do people not visit each other’s actual dwellings any more? Well, of course not, but had they stopped in 2019? Because I sure found that a useful counterweight to the catalogs and the Instagrams and the ~aesthetics~.
I mean, the Nora Ephron movie type show dinners require lavish cash, but what about pizza on the couch because everyone is too broke for a restaurant? What about sex?
posted by clew at 11:01 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I mean, the Nora Ephron movie type show dinners require lavish cash, but what about pizza on the couch because everyone is too broke for a restaurant? What about sex?
posted by clew at 11:01 AM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm obsessed with looking at interiors on Instagram, but my feed is very different from what is described in the essay. If my feed were anything to go by, the Victorian shop of curiosity novels will definitely be making a comeback.
I wish the author much joy in furnishing his new home.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:15 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I wish the author much joy in furnishing his new home.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:15 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
Interesting. I'm tempted to argue that Ikea (and, design. . . and the world) is also very much about physical things and those can be really interesting too.
I'm also now intrigued by the idea of a guerilla campaign to create more complicated stories by modifying Ikea store displays.
posted by eotvos at 12:24 PM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
I'm also now intrigued by the idea of a guerilla campaign to create more complicated stories by modifying Ikea store displays.
posted by eotvos at 12:24 PM on August 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
I'm also now intrigued by the idea of a guerilla campaign to create more complicated stories by modifying Ikea store displays.
Ooh. You could add a lot of FINAL NOTICE OVERDUE fake bills to the desks. A child's failing report card on the fridge. A handmade tinfoil hat on a shelf.
posted by emjaybee at 1:44 PM on August 21, 2021 [13 favorites]
I loved all of Cusk’s work. I think that the author here is missing the content for the form.
This is ironic to me as when I have read Cusk much of her work to me has been about the contradictions of motherhood - which to me is “stripped down” or “gut-renovated” only insofar as society often turns mothers and women into invisible supports. It seems to me that a true novel that is at least a little about motherhood should be an interior novel - outside society chooses to ignore and take advantage of most of it!
Reading Coventry really made me think about that stuff in a way I hadn’t before. If it’s an “ikea novel” it’s still really f-ing good.
posted by The Ted at 1:54 PM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
This is ironic to me as when I have read Cusk much of her work to me has been about the contradictions of motherhood - which to me is “stripped down” or “gut-renovated” only insofar as society often turns mothers and women into invisible supports. It seems to me that a true novel that is at least a little about motherhood should be an interior novel - outside society chooses to ignore and take advantage of most of it!
Reading Coventry really made me think about that stuff in a way I hadn’t before. If it’s an “ikea novel” it’s still really f-ing good.
posted by The Ted at 1:54 PM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
Incidentally I have read a very good IKEA novel, which is headed for a movie (or at least development hell). It's on sale today. I recommend it, but it is the opposite of "stripped down for parts."
posted by Countess Elena at 1:59 PM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 1:59 PM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
I thought Fake Accounts was good, but I wasn’t particularly struck by the onlineness. I took it as an essay in Unlikeable Female Protagonist. Not quite bad, she isn’t a spotty-handed villainess, but right down there with a lot of petty male jerk voices of the last thirty years.
posted by clew at 3:07 PM on August 21, 2021
posted by clew at 3:07 PM on August 21, 2021
I have a Master's degree in English and I didn't understand a word of this essay, which I have put down to having officially become an Old. None of this chimed with my recent experience of reading; the last books I loved (the way I loved books when I was younger) were Piranesi and The Glass Hotel, neither of which fit into this rubric... This seems an analysis of a very narrow stream in the flow of publishing, and I understand that people like to locate movements and significance and groupings in literary culture, but calling on the "bourgeois bohemians/bobos"? I remember that as a brief and silly marketing trend from a while ago aimed at the people who read Dwell magazine but couldn't afford to buy the stuff in its pages.
posted by jokeefe at 6:37 PM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by jokeefe at 6:37 PM on August 21, 2021 [5 favorites]
None of this chimed with my recent experience of reading; the last books I loved (the way I loved books when I was younger) were Piranesi and The Glass Hotel, neither of which fit into this rubric..
I often think that the trends and movements of the High Literary Novel are in this rarefied place that isn't necessarily relevant to the rest of us, who are happily devouring books that do all the things novels supposedly aren't allowed to do anymore.
I had a similar experience with Piranesi. First book in a long time I couldn't put down. I loved the world-building. My only complaint, if it is one, is to wonder why Clark writes about men so much.
posted by Orlop at 6:58 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I often think that the trends and movements of the High Literary Novel are in this rarefied place that isn't necessarily relevant to the rest of us, who are happily devouring books that do all the things novels supposedly aren't allowed to do anymore.
I had a similar experience with Piranesi. First book in a long time I couldn't put down. I loved the world-building. My only complaint, if it is one, is to wonder why Clark writes about men so much.
posted by Orlop at 6:58 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's quite strange to find David Brooks cited for cultural criticism in a piece like this, I must say.
While I do have a soft spot for the Severe Aesthetic Experiment, in the end I find that cutting elements from art in the name of a higher Realism usually just obscures important aspects of the human experience. I didn't dislike Outline, but I didn't find it tremendously memorable. I'm not even sure I'd call it a SAE.
posted by praemunire at 10:03 PM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
While I do have a soft spot for the Severe Aesthetic Experiment, in the end I find that cutting elements from art in the name of a higher Realism usually just obscures important aspects of the human experience. I didn't dislike Outline, but I didn't find it tremendously memorable. I'm not even sure I'd call it a SAE.
posted by praemunire at 10:03 PM on August 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
The last line is the best, and the one that grounds the whole essay: Or maybe—and this is more likely the case—we’re all doing everything all the time and the only thing that changes is what five or ten culture writers in New York choose to call the moment.
Huh, for me, that's where the piece sorta felt like it copped out in light self deprecating irony around his move to New York and attempt to capture some of the themes and methods of novels in the, perhaps, just passed moment and how they responded to some of the themes and methods of novels at the turn of the last century, as described by Wood in the essay linked in the piece.
There's no question that there are always writers approaching their work from a wide variety of perspectives, so talking about the themes of a given moment is really to select from a subsection of that vast array and highlight the commonalities and what they suggest, but the choice of those works, when the piece is effective, comes from those books that somehow seem especially relevant to the moment or to have found significant response from a readership that other works haven't or which don't seem to suggest as much about the moment as being part of a longer continuity of writing.
The Wood essay, for example, was linking recent works by Pynchon, Delillo, Rushdie, Wallace, and Smith, these authors did define something of the zeitgeist of the time for how their work felt like it was doing something importantly "different" from the general continuity of writing. That some few writers in New York may have helped spread their influence still can't deny the influence was felt widely and notably by the reading public, and for some of those books, it surely wasn't just some few writers in New York influencing that public given the broader base of notice they found.
The piece references the "hysterical realism", fictions saturated with cultural excess, to set the point of contrast to the depletion or exhaustion of cultural reference to the point of minimizing or removing description of all surroundings as much as possible. This is contrasted to the Ikea-ization of space as a response to the excesses of life under capitalism and novels went from send ups of excess to attempts at erasure for its emptiness. The recent novels mentioned are appreciated but somehow inert and that leads to a quandary for Taylor that the piece tries to address.
I haven't read many of the recent authors mentioned in the piece, so I can't speak to the accuracy of Taylor's claim, so maybe that makes the argument he's making feel easier to grasp for that as I understand where the larger concern is coming from regarding the response to Ikea-like conceptual/capitalist spaces, real and virtual, as that is evident elsewhere, but I can't obviously judge whether that is a useful way to see the books or whether those given authors are alike enough and do constitute a significant moment in the same way those mentioned by Wood did. (That authors or books may share a timeline, is less the point than when their work is seen as most resonant with the moment, but there is, perhaps, some question about whether novels today find the same kind of wider resonance as they did pre-internet, which may also has some connection to the broader concerns over capitalism.)
posted by gusottertrout at 11:42 PM on August 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
Huh, for me, that's where the piece sorta felt like it copped out in light self deprecating irony around his move to New York and attempt to capture some of the themes and methods of novels in the, perhaps, just passed moment and how they responded to some of the themes and methods of novels at the turn of the last century, as described by Wood in the essay linked in the piece.
There's no question that there are always writers approaching their work from a wide variety of perspectives, so talking about the themes of a given moment is really to select from a subsection of that vast array and highlight the commonalities and what they suggest, but the choice of those works, when the piece is effective, comes from those books that somehow seem especially relevant to the moment or to have found significant response from a readership that other works haven't or which don't seem to suggest as much about the moment as being part of a longer continuity of writing.
The Wood essay, for example, was linking recent works by Pynchon, Delillo, Rushdie, Wallace, and Smith, these authors did define something of the zeitgeist of the time for how their work felt like it was doing something importantly "different" from the general continuity of writing. That some few writers in New York may have helped spread their influence still can't deny the influence was felt widely and notably by the reading public, and for some of those books, it surely wasn't just some few writers in New York influencing that public given the broader base of notice they found.
The piece references the "hysterical realism", fictions saturated with cultural excess, to set the point of contrast to the depletion or exhaustion of cultural reference to the point of minimizing or removing description of all surroundings as much as possible. This is contrasted to the Ikea-ization of space as a response to the excesses of life under capitalism and novels went from send ups of excess to attempts at erasure for its emptiness. The recent novels mentioned are appreciated but somehow inert and that leads to a quandary for Taylor that the piece tries to address.
I haven't read many of the recent authors mentioned in the piece, so I can't speak to the accuracy of Taylor's claim, so maybe that makes the argument he's making feel easier to grasp for that as I understand where the larger concern is coming from regarding the response to Ikea-like conceptual/capitalist spaces, real and virtual, as that is evident elsewhere, but I can't obviously judge whether that is a useful way to see the books or whether those given authors are alike enough and do constitute a significant moment in the same way those mentioned by Wood did. (That authors or books may share a timeline, is less the point than when their work is seen as most resonant with the moment, but there is, perhaps, some question about whether novels today find the same kind of wider resonance as they did pre-internet, which may also has some connection to the broader concerns over capitalism.)
posted by gusottertrout at 11:42 PM on August 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
Casually scanning MeFi this morning; read the headline as "boobs in ikea."
Immediately clicked the link; was bitterly disappointed.
Need more coffee.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:58 AM on August 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
Immediately clicked the link; was bitterly disappointed.
Need more coffee.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:58 AM on August 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
They were there, ZenMasterThis. You just have to assemble them yourself.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:14 AM on August 22, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:14 AM on August 22, 2021 [7 favorites]
Word salad, word etouffee with word clafoutis to follow.
Well now I'm just hungry.
posted by ikahime at 10:11 AM on August 23, 2021
Well now I'm just hungry.
posted by ikahime at 10:11 AM on August 23, 2021
Word étouffée is a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing absolutely smothered in a carefully balanced, astonishingly delicious mélange of sweet, spicy, salty, adjective sauce. I'll take an order to go, please, extra spicy.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:49 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:49 AM on August 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
There is this slowly congealing idea that it is morally and aesthetically sufficient [for the novel] to merely recreate the alienating torpor of having one’s life organized ruthlessly and brutally by capitalism. Yeah... I've read enough Paul Auster, thanks. I find his characters spookily vaporous ciphers pinging gently (or violently) around upper middle class lifestyles, and I emerge from reading his work feeling more disconnected from my own identity than usual. Reading anyone who writes with even less attention to objects and spaces than Auster does would just be masochistic on my part. Objects and spaces are sort of what I'm in it for, in the grand scheme of things. Characters as an assemblage of objects and their uses, characters as spaces with unpredictable, non-Euclidean dimensions that interact weirdly with other character-spaces.
A good friend of mine (a woman) frequently complains about books suffering from "female author disease": too many adjectives, too much description, too much emotional context, no one actually does anything! I don't share her disdain, and I appreciate these books' texture as consciously or subconsciously flipping ol' Papa Hemingway
and contemporary fashionable minimalist authors the bird. I would much rather eat word étouffée every meal for the rest of my life than dine on the uncooked, unseasoned ramen moodles Taylor describes.
I honestly thought the article was going to have a lot more to do with actual interiors, but it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these are exactly the kinds of novels that are going to get produced when you're writing in AirSpace.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 4:48 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]
A good friend of mine (a woman) frequently complains about books suffering from "female author disease": too many adjectives, too much description, too much emotional context, no one actually does anything! I don't share her disdain, and I appreciate these books' texture as consciously or subconsciously flipping ol' Papa Hemingway
and contemporary fashionable minimalist authors the bird. I would much rather eat word étouffée every meal for the rest of my life than dine on the uncooked, unseasoned ramen moodles Taylor describes.
I honestly thought the article was going to have a lot more to do with actual interiors, but it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these are exactly the kinds of novels that are going to get produced when you're writing in AirSpace.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 4:48 PM on August 23, 2021 [3 favorites]
The bookend to the FPP's essay is Taylor's review of Sally Rooney's new book.
Says Taylor, "With its sleek, minimalist aesthetic and perfect, gleaming dialogue, the contemporary novel points toward the restlessness of existing today while allowing none of those problems into actual consideration. As I was reading this one, I kept asking myself: 'Is that it? Is that enough?'"
posted by mittens at 1:08 PM on September 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
Says Taylor, "With its sleek, minimalist aesthetic and perfect, gleaming dialogue, the contemporary novel points toward the restlessness of existing today while allowing none of those problems into actual consideration. As I was reading this one, I kept asking myself: 'Is that it? Is that enough?'"
posted by mittens at 1:08 PM on September 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
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