Hate to say goodbye because I'm not ready to start missing you.

A Literary Review

The Way Things Are is a master work of life-affirming fiction. It is a novel that reveals elements of humanity which have many times been considered but never with these words in this particular order. So in that way, it is mostly unique. It is an experience which is both familiar and new, mundane and exciting, worthless and profound. Over the course of 600 pages we are exposed to a world much like ours featuring made up characters who do things that we would also sometimes do but in a more interesting way. A car crash does not lead to a simple court settlement, but a whirlwind romance and pages of lying and backstabbing. The people in this novel are simply incapable of making intelligent decisions, and you'll love them all the more for it!

The never-ending stream of words will pull you deeper into chaotic events all of which leads to a final culminating scene, that I must say, was a great pay off, especially when considering how long it took me to read those six hundred pages as the typeface is quite small and the writing quite dense. After all, it's only Monday and I still have two dozen more books to read and review. I barely even get to see my kids with all these blasted books that come out every week! Must everyone be a writer!?

But rest assured, the writer in question has put their talents on display in a way that promises us a fulfilling career lined with similarly themed, slightly less successful novels, each filled with equally improbable, word-spewing characters who pontificate on life and strain to explain what it means to be human. (Not spending my time reading these books would be my guess.) So if you read one novel this year, make sure it is this novel, and also be sure to read the novel we'll be reviewing next week, The Way Things Were, and the one next week, and the one after that; for they are all very important, mostly entertaining, and filled with people who are like us but somehow more stupid.

What the Fuck is this Shit?

This better be good, is the first thing anyone thinks when reading a story, and I can assure you, this is not a good story. It starts in a coffee shop, which is not well described, because it is a boring, everyday coffee shop, where two people, who are equally boring, sit and talk. They have had an argument – you just missed it – and they are now both sitting without speaking, trying to think how they got to this point. So the story starts at a denouement. Awful. This must be the work of an MFA student, you think. It seems awfully experimental. Why aren't there any wizards?


Which is the problem you see, aside from the fact they’re not wizards, is that they never even existed before this point, before the first words at the top of this page. They're not even real. I could tell – er, show – that they are real. Describing them adeptly, various little nuances you might not have thought of before, the way the man wipes at a cut on his chin he gave himself when shaving this morning in a hurry to see the woman who now sits across from him.


Ideally, there’d be some action soon.


The man – shaggy hair, his eyes a bit uneven, but good looking all the same, strong square jaw, chin, nose, whatever floats your boat – looks at the woman – who is, in his estimation, smokin' hot – says, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I yelled.”


She takes his hand and presses his knuckles. Smiling her buttery lips, she says, “I'm sorry, too.”


Buttery? Well, she's eating a scone, not coated, but literally drenched in butter. There is so much, it puddles on the plate. Delicious.


The scone is actually not that good. She thinks it must have been just de-thawed. What kind of place freezes their scones?


Well, they made up. That's great. Now there's really no story.


Wait. Someone is screaming. Oh, it's just the barista and his coffee maker, who is making a latte while thinking about how much longer he has until his shift is over and he can go home to his new girlfriend and fuck her. She has a big round ass and a soft, pale face; her porcelain features cradle large eyes that sparkle like emeralds. A real-life doll. He met her in his film studies class, sitting together in the back, in the dark, trying not to laugh at the crying woman in Battleship Potemkin. They just started dating. It's going well. Their sex is good and unlike his last girlfriend she eats with her mouth closed.

Anyway, that's not the point.


The couple, they're still fine. No screaming. Almost had a moment of excitement there. This cannot go on much longer. TV is pretty exciting these days and you are contemplating whether you should watch it. I hear there are new shows on Netflix. Twitter beckons. You consider closing this and tweeting about that thing you saw at the bus stop the other day. No, I should call my mom, you (the agitated reader) think. When did you last do that?


Ugh. I need a shower, I think, not you, me, the writer. It's already 12, and I'm disgusting, but it’s also my day off, so whatever. Fuck you.


I'm sorry. I should not have said that. You have to respect your reader.


This is definitely an MFA project, you think. (I'm not in an MFA program or anything. I do have a BFA, however, but in Art, not Writing.) Well, you think, that explains it! I hate your type, you think. Why can’t you just write a nice story about wizards?


Let's get back to it. The man, who is an idiot – well, you can't just say he's an idiot. Have to show that. Ugh... This is exhausting. This is why they film movies.


Okay, trying again. The man says, “I am right, though, you know. About what I said.”


There. He's an idiot.


His wife – no, mistress slash lover, girlfriend, sex slave, object of desire, female plot device – is upset by this. She scoffs, spits out some scone crumbs, then says, “I can't believe you! I cannot!”


She cannot believe him.


When she scoffs, her face reminds him of their last tryst; face muscles melting into relaxation, mouth pouring forth such sweet moans of euphoria, lips of circular symmetry, a repeated expression marking the passage of time with every meaningful thrust. And make no mistake, he did mean them.


An old man sitting at a nearby table who has no bearing on this story other than background decoration, shushes them. He is trying to enjoy a game of checkers with his grandson, who keeps glancing at the woman of the story, checking her breasts out, which push against the fabric of a tight fitting t-shirt.


In the checkers match, the old man is dominating his grandson, taking great pleasure in crushing the little shit. The grandson, still staring at the woman, trying to imagine her nipples, at a mere 12 years of age has seen more naked women than his grandfather has seen in 80 years, but not in person, on the screen of his iPhone, which he stares at constantly, especially at night, under the covers, his eyes consuming various acts of fornication, the light washing out his cherubic features, the painted women obliterating his brief innocence with fake cries of passion; an approximation of what men want, a facsimile of love. The little shit has already seen over fifty gang bangs and two hundred deep throats and, having grown bored of that, has started searching for rape.


He has not read a book in his life.


He will never read a book, ever, and consider his lack of reading an accomplishment, which he will announce to people at strange and off-putting moments, such as during a disastrous first date or during his English class where upon announcing this the Korean exchange student sitting across the room will roll her eyes and wonder why she can’t meet a man who loves to read, imagining how they could read together in bed between violent fuck sessions; her being a budding S and M enthusiast, she’d like nothing more than to be slapped around a bit, but also intellectually stimulated, she's never sure which she needs more of on any given day.


Not only will the grandson miss out on this young woman, (not that he ever had a chance) but he will also miss out on novels like Germinal, 1984, Tess of d’Urbervilles, Egan’s Goon Squad, David Sedaris, In Cold Blood, and so many other stories. His life will be completely hollow and devoid of meaning other than how many kills he gets in his video games, which are more murder simulators, but don’t call them that, because the internet nerds will get up in arms and bombard your Twitter with obnoxious screaming


At the age of 35, he will scream at the television while he plays Call of Duty and scratch himself between slurps from his Mountain Dew and do fuck all with his life, eventually dying in a terrible car accident, he drunk, the other driver, not drunk, sober, a graduate student with great potential studying a rare disease, tragically taken from her parents, who will wonder if there is a novel that will be able to soothe the pain they cannot get rid of, and lucky for them, there are many, and they will read them, and feel somewhat better, but not much better, because that kind of tragedy is never really resolved outside of digging up the fucker’s grave who killed your daughter, reviving him and blowing his brains out.


That last sentence was 132 words too long. And you're bored.


“Fuck your grandson!” shouts the man with the shaving injury, who as you can now see is definitely an idiot.


The woman sitting across from him pulls her hand away from his, gasps and says, “Don’t talk that way to the poor pervert child!”


The grandson guffaws, finding the exchange to be quite unexpected and hilarious. He is not offended at all. Nothing offends him. His mind is already cracked. On the internet, he’s seen a young woman’s face torn off and laughed. The result of a terrible car accident. What difference does it make to him? None of these people are real.


In the car crash that kills him, he’ll be decapitated, photographed, and then passed around the darker parts of the internet as a macabre punch-line. They will laugh at him. They being angry white males on message boards dedicated to wasting time who complain about women and minorities while they stew in their body's unwashed filth. They who see themselves as victims of a society who has turned against them, not accepting their way of life, which is to not live, to not love, to certainly not exercise, and to basically wait until they are dead. These men also do not read, but they are full of ideas, which are verified by others just like them, who similarly do not read and have never had an original thought of their own, and stew in their bodily fluids, spilled lattes, flatulence, body hair, and shit-stained undergarments. In a world without wisdom, empathy, or pause for self-contemplation, only the most shocking ideas gain traction, and these men are full of them.


Years later, the grandson, sometime between dominating the Call of Duty leader boards and killing a promising grad student with his car, will find himself under the covers of his fouled bed, frantically jerking off, desperately trying to make himself feel something. For material, he will think back to the Korean girl in his English class, which will make the coming easier. However, when he goes to sleep, she will have her revenge in a terrifying nightmare in which she cuts his dick off, and he will wake up with a start, and then, checking to see if it were a dream or not, find that in the place of his dick is a bloody stump.


He will scream, and the light will come on, and standing above him will be that same Korean girl, who will be laughing, knife in one hand, bloody severed dick in the other.


Naturally, he’ll wake up from this dream too, though that’s up to you.


The smokin’ hot woman with the tight t-shirt, in a moment of clarity, agency, and self-actualization, flees; after four pages finally understanding that this has all been a terrible mistake, and she wants no part of it.


I – and you – agree, and so move on, both deciding to take a shower if only to take a break from all this shit around us. Whatever the fuck it is.