zachary german's debut novel eat when you feel sad has apparently been extremely polarizing. as portland's emerging arbiter of taste, i felt obligated to weigh in. plus, i loved the book. german -- a sort of protege of tao lin -- admittedly owes lin a weighty stylistic debt. regardless, and though his simple prose is unarguably intentional (a choice of style), german's writing is compelling and sympathetic because it's ultimately natural. eat when you feel sad is so expressive of the zeitgeist of our/german's generation because german narrates his characters as we've come to narrate ourselves for most of any given day: briefly, resignedly, online. what's more, far from bathos or just a description of contemporary pastiche (the real measure of mundanity), the intentionality of german's writing lends it a -- dare i say(!) -- unique poesy.
and dare i also say that maybe oriana's reaction to eat when you feel sad was mostly a result of her seeing so much of herself in the book? whatever, lady. it's time to come out of the closet. we're hipsters (i.e. happened to be in our twenties and interested in culture at the beginning of the 21st century). and that aside, aren't we past deifying canonical authors and "good" prose? we've all wallowed in nostalgia for the literary greats of other generations. and, undeniably, those greats had their same moments. i'm not (yet?) saying that zachary german is a literary great. but i think it's great to be given a real opportunity to take literature down from that lofty pedestal.
anyway. if you've got time for another thousand words, here's a recommendation of eat when you feel sad i wrote at about the time that oriana was reading it. let the burning begin.
Although I’ve never considered myself especially timely, that hasn’t anything to do with punctuality. In fact, I’m terrified of being late. Rather, it’s to say that I've never considered myself to be very “now.” That is, until now. It took me until after college to start independently exploring contemporary fiction, and until the last year or so to start regularly reading a specific roll of blogs. Though, maybe (I think to myself on my more heroic days) it just took my slowing down a little to let a generation settle into itself and catch up to me. At least that's how it felt to read Zachary German's pathetically but (and I say this with only a little embarrassment) sympathetically titled novel, Eat When You Feel Sad.
I came across German's book at a blog written by fellow Melville House author Tao Lin, who has himself been called the voice of a generation, and, as such, whose blog I had started reading on a mostly “because a person like me should probably read this” sort of basis. At any rate, German's title was immediately appealing: I'd just returned from a kick-off-the-new-year road trip through sunny Arizona and California (on which I'd been very lucky in love) to cold, rainy Portland, Oregon and an empty bed. I read the first twenty-five or so pages of EWYFS online. I may have been eating; if not, I'm sure I was thinking about it. I was probably at work. I was certainly sad.
German is eight years my junior, and – still in my twenties – I won't lie and say that gap doesn't feel huge. So it's tough to admit how close an affinity I felt with his protagonist, Robert, who, we can only guess from the timeline of EWYFS, is an autobiographical extension of the author. But Robert rides his bicycle. Robert goes to parties. Robert reads and listens to music. Robert drinks beer. Robert tries to eat healthy and tries not to smoke cigarettes. Robert wants someone to sleep next to but doesn't want to give people the wrong idea. (Robert also has a job in there somewhere.) All things that Christopher does, too. And, you might say (still unimpressed, I'm sure), things that a pretty wide slice of American urbanity does on a regularly unremarkable basis. But for the first time, I might have been there. And, yes, in a situation decidedly less sexy than in, say, Fitzgerald or Selby Jr., but there I was. At last that was my ennui, and this was in print.
The allure of EWYFS is, though, less in Robert himself than in the sincerity of his telling. German doesn't mince words. His pared down, matter-of-fact descriptions of Robert and his thoughts are what make Robert a perfect reflection of reluctant hipsterdom's everyman. And not for what Robert actually does and thinks (although those things certainly place him in a comically recognizable “Stuff White People Like” kind of milieu), but because in each of German's remarks on the unremarkable you can hear a keyboard clicking away to the rhythm of his/Robert's/your own distraction at Gchat/Facebook/Twitter. German writes Robert in sentences that might have been pieced together from an online social networking feed. But, this isn't just a cleverly crafted series of real-life Twitter posts (I think Tao Lin has helped publish one of those) or an annotated photo blog compilation. Taken sentence by sentence, the book wouldn't strike as at all special – let alone recommendable. But transposed from the chat room to the page, our mundane web-going day-to-days are taken by German and made into a book. It's okay, Robert. That's just the way things are. This can be poetry, too. I won't feel bad if have another cookie.
And that's important, because in 2010, it's harder and harder to read like we used to. I spent most of my life browsing physical shelves, turning actual pages, taking notes in notebooks. And while I continue to do all of those things, at the same time I find myself reading or buying more and more online, hopping from one link to next. At work when I write, I prioritize headlines and subject headings, because I'm trained by experience to know that my readers won't get much further. Not that any of that is fundamentally bad. But I do sometimes feel a certain something slipping away from me that would be dangerous to let completely pass. And I won't let it. I found EWYFS on the internet and started reading it – in a quickly palatable, distraction friendly format – on the internet. I sent passages to friends via email with short messages: “haha this guy totally owes us royalties for plagiarizing our lives.” But Zachary German wrote EWYFS as a book. And it was in ink on paper that I was excited to purchase it as soon as it was on the shelf at Powell's bookstore. And when I read it (it's on the short side and only took one evening), I might have been sad, I was probably hungry and walking in and out of the kitchen, but I wasn't on the internet.
Although EWYFS was, for me, born online of a rote blog read and is inseparable in its essence from the way we've learned to read and communicate over the internet, what's important is that it makes its case as a piece of literature. Even though its narrative form is derived from a distracted and abbreviated web-speak, its author hasn't just written a web serial in shorthand. Rather, German writes so convincingly about the characteristic malaise of our digital generation because he knows its language well enough to show us for who we are. . .and conspires with us to go ahead and eat if we're feeling sad.
Whether it's me finally giving in to the blogosphere and catching on to the back end of a trend, or a generation finally finding itself and catching up to me, EWYFS is encouraging. At the very least, it's good to know that at the end of the day the new literati of the web will continue to get us off the computer and into a book. And, also, it's nice to feel included.
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